Because you can only have one difference at once! (Liek duh.) And you can’t be autistic and transgendered either, or autistic and anything else.

A lot of autistics are asexual, but when they discuss sexuality at all in autistics, most ‘experts’ seem to assume that every autistic has a normal sexuality – often they don’t even acknowledge homosexuality, probably the most common sexual difference.

I didn’t go out socialising on Saturday nights (or other nights) when I was a teenager. But in my early twenties, when I had left my parents’ home and was living alone, for a few weeks I went by myself to a pub (or pubs) where there was folk singing on Saturday nights. I didn’t speak to anyone there, I was very shy, and always left there feeling unhappy. I hoped that I would meet a hippy like young woman there and romance would follow. That didn’t happen.

One thing we’ve always wondered: Do some autistic people get depressed over not having a “normal” social life because they *want* a “normal” social life, or is it just as likely that some of us get depressed over lack of it because we’re *told* that we want and need one, see “normal teenage social life” and “romance” glorified constantly in the media, and have our own attempts to relate to others criticized as “not real friendships” and told that we will never have emotionally satisfying relationships with others unless we can do it in a “normal way”?

I mean– we basically live in a society that tells us, from day one, what we want. That’s pretty much the basis of the whole consumerist ethic. Tell people that they need things and they’ll want them, whether or not they actually do need them. The whole way that “romance” is marketed, and the idea that your teenage years are the “best years of your life” and that if you don’t have a “great time” during those years and make lots of social connections, you’ll never again be able to have as good a time as you would have had as a supposedly carefree teenager, etc, etc… well, it’s a bunch of crap. But it was a bunch of crap that we, at one point, for a while, bought into.

Someone in the comments on this blog a while back posted an article in the New York Times about autistic girls and women. I don’t remember the exact quote or study, but there was some mention of autistic women being more likely to become depressed over inability to form social relationships and of course there’s the inevitable question of whether this is an innate gender difference, etc etc. I think it’s probably true that women are *taught,* growing up, that their ability to form relationships with others, particularly men, is part of their worth and self-definition, in a way that it isn’t part of male self-definition. Up till a certain point, too, the article’s description of the supposedly typical autistic teenage girl whose biggest dream is to have a “normal social life” could have fit us very well.

But– we think nowadays, looking back on it, that a lot of that desire was something imposed on us from outside, and we thought we wanted it only because we didn’t know there were alternatives, that there was a way to make and have friends besides the “standard” one we were constantly being told we needed to learn. If we had ever seen any kind of model, in media or in person, for the kind of friendship that we could handle– that could have made a huge difference. All I know is that we don’t think about wanting a “normal social life” any more, or think every time we walk past chattering groups of girls that we should be like them, or feel that what social life we have doesn’t count as a “real” social life because it doesn’t look like that. We do have a desire for a certain amount of connection with others, and we definitely spent most of our life with that desire being frustrated, but we know a little more now about what terms we actually want it to be on. It’s similar to how a lot of women think they can’t be attractive unless they’re tall skinny supermodels with disproportionately sized breasts– because that ideal floods the media and is nearly impossible to get away from. (Although, random side fact, a majority of models have their photographs computer edited in some way nowadays, before they appear in advertisements or whatever.) So we think most of it was artificial to begin with.

All we knew, when we were a teenager, was that we were miserable and nothing we did seemed to be able to change that, and therapy wasn’t helping it either. We thought that maybe happiness would come from being “normal,” or what we saw at the time as being “normal,” which was kind of a weird, distorted parody of the stereotypical teenage social life (which we saw at the time as involving nonstop parties, drinking and sex). Would we actually have wanted anything like that if we hadn’t seen that the media glorified it and been exposed, for a few years, to an environment where some people actually did talk about parties, drinking and sex like these were the highlights of their life? I don’t think we would have to the same degree, at least. We were *curious* about some of these things, but without the outside influence, I think we would have been *just* curious and maybe even had an idea of how we might want to explore any of it on our own terms– rather than feeling as though doing those things would complete our life, and that without them, we could never experience the happiness that people who did them supposedly had.

If we had actually thought about it on a practical level, we would have realized that we didn’t enjoy ourselves even at family parties and quickly went into sensory overload, didn’t like the taste of alcohol, and were afraid of most men. We had as much of a fantasy about actually wanting those things as we did about having them. But we weren’t really thinking about it; we were just going along believing that what everyone else said was a good life would make us happy, even though almost all of our attempts to get into things like that, and we did make attempts at various things, ended in a wide variety of bad ways. It was hard to keep our priorities straight when surrounded by people who constantly bragged about indiscriminate sex, drinking and drug use and similar things.

So, we did have more than one therapist who got us to agree that “to have a social life and a boyfriend” was a goal for us, because they had never questioned the assumption either that the natural goal of any teenage girl’s life was to have those things, and *they* also thought that any teenage girl who didn’t have that and who spent Saturday nights alone at home instead of out at a party or on a date must be very lonely and unhappy. Which, yeah, was definitely projection on their part, one of them in particular, but by that projection, they encouraged us to believe *more* that we would be unhappy without those things. And there were a couple who got us to agree that part of the goal of therapy for us would be to “reduce social anxiety” and “learn normal social skills” and to “feel better about yourself.” For some reason there seemed to be this assumption that as soon as we could be made to “feel good about ourselves,” then “normal” social skills would just magically follow or something. Which never hapened, of course.

That particular shrink (who remained my shrink, except for a brief period in which I was taken out of his main care for insurance reasons, until his recent retirement) was not a social butterfly to my knowledge. He’d grown up painfully shy and with some kind of learning disabilities, and part of his reason for working in the system was to help people who were now where he’d been in the past. Still doesn’t mean his empathy was always spot-on for an autistic person, though.

He’s a really good example of someone who had good intentions and got mixed results with them (some of them very good, some of them terrible). One good thing about him was that when he did find out he’d made a mistake, he often admitted it. He’s the one who saw that my PTSD as an adult was primarily due to “treatments” he had either prescribed or at least been in an ostensibly supervisory role on. How many shrinks would admit that they’d made mistakes of that magnitude? (He also I think at one point sued the institution he worked at.)

Don’t think so David. I’m becoming fonder of the notion as times passes that very few people have any capacity whatsoever for empathy with autists.

Look – folks get conditioned into the forms of socialisation that elevate the socialising night of the week, Saturday, to the top of the calendar from the age of 4. How can they deal with people who have not been so conditioned? Kathleen’s made a point of the kinds of people attracted to psychology and psychiatry – generally social butterflies, which is why the professions have gotten precisely nowhere with autism. They can’t get out of their own envelope.