#NotAllNeurotypicals

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So.

Those of us that have been following the dregs of Twitter and Tumblr are familiar with the #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen hashtags. The short of it is that a bunch of (mostly) guys made a hashtag proclaiming that not all men rape, harass, discriminate, etc. The response was a hashtag proclaiming that yes all women experience harassment, rape, discrimination, etc.

Now, I was having a conversation earlier about intersectionality with some...less cerebral liberal types at uni when the above hashtags came into focus. They kept hammering me with rhetoric about "white privilege" this, "male privilege" that, so I shot back, pointing out that young people with ASDs face abysmal employment prospects and harsh social stigmas, and autistic children deal with suicidal ideation rates orders of magnitude higher than most normal people.

http://www.dps.missouri.edu/Autism/Auti ... et2011.pdf
http://news.psu.edu/story/267913/2013/0 ... d-attempts

I swear one of them was just about to blurt out "Not all neurotypicals are like that" but she must caught herself at the last second. What do you folk think? #NotAllNeurotypicals are bullies, sure...but #YesAllAutistics face discrimination from neurotypicals.

It's a relevant analogy. It's good that there was a moment of realization that it is analogous rather than her blundering ahead.

Actually, I suspect #NotAllAutistics experience negativities. More like#MostAutistics.

Ah, intersectionality. The deconstruction of identity politics. I love it.

I usually don't disclose my autism and gender identity when having such discussions. I find that people don't listen to me until I do disclose them. Maybe that will teach them something about listening to people? It's a common problem, which is why talking about privilige and complaining about things like #NotAllMen needs to stop, because they really aren't conducive to dialogue. Oh, and people need to regain a sense of agency. That goes for everyone - Black, Gay, Women, Trans, Autistic, Working Class... if someone is attacking you, then the first thing you need to do is to make sure you aren't hurting yourself.

That's not to say that we should ignore issues, just that we should be very careful when discussing them, lest we alienate people who really haven't done anything wrong, by lumping them in with those who do need to quit messing around. So sure, try to draw peoples attention to what they are doing that's harmful, but don't lump someone who's biggest problem is being insensitive in with those who support giving autistic children electric shocks to make them behave...

I was reading the other day that 68% of Canadian adults with autism have never had a romantic relationship.

Looking into the figures a bit more, this is partially because the sample was quite young (52% under 26, 81% under 41), but would it be surprising if we had the same figures as NTs.

I'd throw in rates of mental illness as another area where there is a significant difference between autistic people and NTs. And domestic abuse and violent crime generally.

One also has to look into the TYPE of autism one has.

I would suspect that people with HFA probably have a higher prevalence of romantic relationships.

I really do not get the concept of hash tags....but then I avoid twitter so perhaps that is why.

As for the rest of the topic, I think people should just quit thinking their blanket generalizations are 100% accurate, instead of making hash tags to reflect and/or counter the generalizations.

Well something about ASD is that a quite large chunk of people with ASD may not function in a corporate environment

Many people with severe cases of aspergers and autism can have meltdowns that can be destructive and result in no work getting done. And in all honestly if i made the choice in hiring someone or not and I knew they could have these meltdowns, I probably would not hire them

Also a big part of why many of us with non-nt's get a bit of crap from people is due to misinformation. And I personally can not stand how other aspies can act sometimes

And the whole #notallmen and #yesallwomen scared away more people from feminism than it did attract

Being radical and insulting NT's is going to do the opposite of help us, we need to be moderate about it or s**t will not get done

Sounds quite reasonsonable.

Just don't forget, while you may have the challenges associated with ASD, if you're male, you've still benefited male privilege (even if you were unaware of it) and if you're white you've still benefited from white privilege. It doesn't mean you did anything wrong, it just means you weren't subjected to the same stuff females are, and that non-whites are in our culture. Just like NTs don't choose to benefit from NT privilege, although it just as clearly exists.

The fact that not all men engage in sexist behaviour doesn't mean that sexist behaviour doesn't exist or that women shouldn't be upset by it. If you're not part of the solution you are part of the problem in this case.

Rejecting sexism requires not just not doing it yourself but calling people out on it and working to ensure it's not considered acceptable. Men who get butthurt because women point out 'yes, sexism occurs, even if you don't personally act sexist' are really just being whiners.

I don't know about you guys, but hashtags and blanket generalizations are two pet peeves of mine. First of all why can't people just say something? Second of all why are they so lazy with the way they address everything that without fail the first thing they are compelled to do is lump everything together? God, I couldn't stand it when I was in college and I had to suffer those types. They would put in basically none of the work but all of the pride that could be involved in forming an opinion.

What's the basic truth here?

1. The vast majority of men are not rapists. Also most of them restrain themselves and operate within what their culture deems appropriate as it pertains to etiquette.

2. Men who are rapists target many different women. Men who are too forward and licentious target many different women.

3. Women then experience a small segment of the male population quite a bit, as that small segment is very eager and shameless. They get profane material flooding in on the internet and they are approached by men without inhibition or shame often before they are approached by someone else, for obvious reasons.

4. Many NT's are hopelessly ignorant about the ASD experience. They have standards and expectations for people in general and most problematic is that they are zealous not to accept anything that is dissonant towards their little model of the world.

5. Some NT's are very antagonistic and they derive social accomplishment and pleasure from this. As opposed to the others who are merely ignorant they go out of their way to antagonize ASD people, because they not only feel compelled to as self appointed arbiters of society, but many of them get pleasure out of doing it.

Of course there are a plethora of persons in between these categories but I feel they are much more helpful than "all" or "not all".

Do remember, "male privilige" is less privilige than "NT privilige" is. On average (for we can't take individual cases by the very nature of what we're discussing) an NT woman is more "priviliged" (urgh, I hate that word... what's a better word for meaning "treated like a person"?) than an Aspie male. Similarly, an Aspie male from a middle class family is more person-treated than an Aspie of either gender from a lower class background. Indeed, the most important determinant as to whether you will be person-treated is probably your class, then your neurotype, then followed by everything which gets much more attention. Perhaps because a lot of middle class NT feminists don't want to accept that they are person-treated more than the white, cis, hetero, male Aspies on the sink estate a few miles away...

It's debatable whether NT privilege is 'more' or 'less' than male privilege or white privilege (or whatever other x privilege you wish to compare it to), it's undeniable that a middle class, white, cis, hetero, NT female and a middle class, white, cis, hetero, Aspie male are differently privileged.

I think you're overall correct, although it's difficult objectively measure the effects of different categories of privilege and their impacts.

Dropping the term privilige would be a very good start...

If you want to measure it, try using data such as income, employment, education levels, health quality, suicide rates, mental illness, drug use... though be aware that the first two don't distinguish between choosing to have lower income or employment (say, a stay-at-home mother) and not being able to get a better paying job (due to sexism on the part of the employers), and mental illnesses that are co-morbid with autism are of course going to be more common in Aspies. Your metrics may vary. Also, I don't know how well the data will be distinguished, so you might have a hard time distinguishing between, say, unemployed-because-black from unemployed-because-background from unemployed-because-autistic.

But until someone controls for confounding variables, I will treat their data with suspicion. Anecdotes are weak evidence, not strong. Give me more data.

Socioeconomic outcomes have good support for being a good measure of privilege, and autistics have terrible socioeconomic outcomes. The current evidence is unanimous in that respect. For that reason, I get a little irritated when social justice folk come harassing me about my "privileges". Tbh, it's kind of hard to benefit from "white privilege" and "male privilege" when you're treated like a pariah. An enty's "white privilege" is much greater than an autistic's "white privilege". Coming from a poor white autistic boy who's had to claw his way up from the bottom of the social ladder, I can assure you that "privileges" are not something that add and subtract in some kind of cumulative fashion. I'll admit that being black, gay, and female would have been even MORE difficult, but that's when we're talking about the difference between "very s**t" and "completely s**t".

I've underlined the most important thing you've said.

X[/ix] privilege isn't guaranteed to make your life [i]good, but things would be even worse without the benefits provided by various categories of privilege.

I'm often frustrated by 'social justice folks' who get fixated on a specific issue to the point they can't view the world except for through that lens. This will lead to them not understanding that they may well be additionally privileged in ways they haven't ever considered relative to others; causing those people to forget that there's many forms of privilege, not just the ones their professor pointed out to explain the general concept with real-life examples.

You can't really lecture someone on how 'privileged' their existence is if you haven't bothered to examine the circumstances of your own existence.

I think it's also important to consider that it's quite possible that various types of privilege are not necessarily equally distributed. That is to say, some males have more male privilege than other males.

Allow me to give an example. Being male opens a lot of opportunities, there is no question about that. However, a lot of those opportunities cannot be realistically seized by many men. For example, compare a lower class male and an upper class male. That upper class male will have far more chances to utilize his male privilege than the lower class male. This would mean that the upper class male has more male privilege than the lower class one, even after controlling for the upper class male's class privilege.