Autism, An Extreme Male Brain?

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I read recently that autism, is an extreme male brain. I am fascinated by this idea because I am an NT and I have had a lot of experience with men who exhibit an apparent lack of empathy, who are socially awkward, become defensive in the face of every single difficult conversation, need a lot of space, and don't seem to be able to communicate. and I am trying to understand the autistic mind because I want to get along better with men.

NT men always seem to get up my a**. Honestly I enjoy the space you get while dating men who might be autistic (none of the guys I dated have been diagnosed). I'm just trying to figure out how I can be more loving to the seemingly emotionally distant man, who might just be autistic and need a different kind of love.

Any thoughts on this? Autism and the male mind?

Pretty much a bunch of hooey, to me.

Yeah, I agree that the whole extreme male brain thing is nonsense. I think that the main reason it is so popular is that gives a scientific gloss to what people already believe about gender.

The best resource I've found on why the whole thing is bunk is this essay. There's also an interesting Nature article that contains scientists' criticisms of this theory, that is based on insufficient evidence and that the scientist behind it tends to publicize his theories before he proves them.

As to figuring out how to more loving to possibly autistic men, you could do a lot worse than checking out the Love and Dating forum of this site. While it is far from the happiest place on Earth, it'll show you that autistic men tend to feel frustrated and confused about the whole thing. At least I am.

More recent studies with better methodology, and statistical analysis indicate that autistic men and women tend toward the middle on a scale of masculine-feminine including both social roles (ie social gender) & physical characteristics compared to NT people. But it's a patterned scattershot statistically. Some attributes seem affected in aggregate while others do not.

Good, I'm glad it's bunk. I read the article, and I will probably cite it now, quite often. Now we can hold all NT men to a healthy standard, and not underestimate their abilities to learn how to be a true team player in a relationship. Women are being taught to accept, and operate around men's childish, uncommunicative, non-committal, behavior. A lot of dating and relationship advice is sexist. For example the Man from Mars Women from Venus (or whatever) should talk about respecting boundaries and learning how to communicate. Not caves. Women are supposed to let men retreat to their caves so they can figure it out. There are also tons of articles about communicating to men specifically. Reducing your words because that's the way men like it. Honestly, everyone could learn how to communicate more precisely and succinctly. Then there is advice on the idea that men don't want commitment...so act a certain way. Like you don't care. Then he'll come around. That's codependency!

I'd like to argue it's just best to teach each gender how to respect boundaries and communicate. The women in my family are terribly prideful, strong, and independent. We all like our alone time and space. Hell, it takes me two days to cool off after a fight sometimes. Women need caves too! Lots, and lots of women don't know how to communicate. I have met men who are better at communicating their needs than my mother can.

So I love this article. Autism is autism, and men who cannot communicate are simply childish, prideful fools.

Just to say, this is a personal choice, not form of social impairment.


I'm not surprise it's been debunk but at the same time I kind of felt I like could believe it. I have a much narrower range of personality types I can successfully hold a conversation with to females then males. It is odd because I have read that women are supposed to be naturally more empathetic then men.

https://autismandempathyblog.wordpress. ... of-autism/

Yeah I don't know. Plenty of women murder their children. Plenty of clique-y girls who pick on other girls. Cattiness and gossip, two behaviors associated with women, are very unemphatic.

As implied in the links above the theory should be renamed the stereotype geek male theory. They are hardly describing the fraternity brother, Wolf of Wall Street, alpha male brain. I do believe the proponents of this theory are making the same mistake of not acknowledging the spectrum that those who describe Autism as only intellectually disabled, head banging pants soiling type people make. As the very severe are a subset of autistics the nerdy are probably another subset.

I hope the current backlash against Simon Baron Cohen does not preclude us from noticing what we see on Wrong Planet, autism blogs and autistic autobiographies etc. What the two exhaustive histories if autism written in the last year have shown us is that many of the most important figures in autism have done both great harm and good. Leo Kanner described most traits that we describe as Autistic and gave them a name while inventing the refrigerator mother theory, Bruno Bettelheim popularized blaming mothers for autism setting knowledge of autism back dacades, but his clinics emphasized the positive totally different from the institutions most Autistics were sent to at the time, Bernard Rimland debunked the refrigerator mother theory and was a supporter of Lovaas and quack "cures" , and now Hans Asperger while saying autistics can be benificial to society has been reported to describe autistics as clowns talking to themselves in the street and to have sent disabled children to death. I hope in time we will view Cohen and his work in the same light.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 27 Feb 2016, 1:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

Exactly. I think we have to always remember human beings are human.

I don't think that future academics specialising in the field will look back very favourably on SBC - in the past he has been an ardent self-promoter, and promoted his theories at a time when the general public were so ignorant that they had no means of reference for evaluating his grossly inflated claims, which he used to fill a vacuum and as a career building vehicle. A continuous characteristic of his work is that he focuses on 'trees' while being blind to the forest, the overall picture. He simply can't or won't see it. Personally I am inclined to think that is not a wilful blindness on his part; it may be that he has this aspergers trait ingrained so deeply in his own personal makeup, and the irony of that (if it is so) continues to escape him. For these and other reasons I think SBC is a closet Asp, though I am undecided as to whether he is knowingly so.

Can you explain what you mean by this in a little more detail?

In other words, the research methodology sucked.

That's how I would interpret it.

I'm AS, i'm a woman.

What do you understand by "male brain"?

It means that for both men and women on the spectrum, some attributes measured (both behavioral and physical) in aggregate clearly trend strongly toward neutral. Other sex-dimorphic or gendered attributes just as clearly do not trend toward neutral. And the attributes that do (again, in aggregate) are not the same sets for men and women.

This actually fits very nicely with the (now substantial) body of knowledge that has built up over the last decade or so regarding the biological and chemical underpinnings of the development of sex-dimorphic sites and attributes in animals. However, it's crucial to remember that it is a correlation; no cause and effect of the two is implied.

For instance, we now know how sex-dimorphic attributes such as bone ratios are triggered to develop in utero on the male or female end of a scale (which itself is just developed by gathering measurements and labelling; it's not determinative, only probabilistic). We know the genes involved, and the complex dance between them that must take place to develop in one direction or the other. And we know most of the genes that further moderate that process once triggered. We also know how the local chemical environment can alter how they are expressed, and how the slightest variation at just the right moment can alter the process. So it's fairly likely that if a "male" with a certain gender-neutral physical attribute that correlates with autism is indeed autistic, both variations in development had a common trigger or influence - or chain of influences, one step of which affected the physical trait measured as neutral, and another step which influenced the brain to develop in a way (or ways) that it was later labelled as being on the autism spectrum.

Thanks for the explanation. Quite interesting. Would love to read more if you have the links to relevant research articles.