Female Aspies? Social behavior?

Post Reply New Topic

i find that 1:6 ratio ridiculous. i think it's more like 60% male, 40% female. about as same ratio as world of warcraft.

I am very gender neutural. I don't care about clothing (have to get friends to help me shop in fact I am so out of the loop RE style), I don't watch TV and only a select few movies so no knowledge of who the latest heart throb is. No makeup and otherwise no interest in my "sexuality" (AKA how I appear to men) and no interest in pursuing a man though I like sex and have had several relationships with men. (can't keep them around though as I don't have enough empathy for their tastes)

Do not like women as a whole (they are very complicated beasts to me) and hang out almost exclusively with men friends. The select women friends I do have are either engineers (like me) or older women who have put away all the silly woman behaviour of their youth. Actually, now that I think about it... most of the women friends I have are wives to my guy friends. HA!

Outside of that, I am somehow the "life" of parties and social events. (this has always boggled my mind) I attribute this to being a women versus a man. The things I say at parties (the social mistakes that I make) are viewed as "cute" by my friends and other party goers. People tend to see the goodness and gentleness that I have underneath the social retardation and so I generally feel "love" by the world. I never felt "accepted" as part of the world but always have felt love and that makes a HUGE difference IMHO in how I have grown up.

Interesting observation. Perhaps a trend? I remember my first experience with bullying when I (a boy) joined a new school in 4th grade. Even some of the girls were picking fights with me! Every boy either hated me or ignored me, but there were certain cliques of girls who treated me well. In the few cases when I wasn't sticking to myself, I associated with girls exclusively while in the school building that year, and that was the age before it's cool to hang out with girls (the whole "girls have cooties" phase many little boys have).

I'm definitely not good at hiding my social issues.
And I did not have a phase of female socialization either. (Can't describe it in better words, so I hope you understand what I mean.)
So I'm getting accustomed to make-up, hair styling and such now. Slowly and only because I like dressing up with old-fashioned clothing, especially like in the 1920s era.
I don't think of shopping as a hobby now and I think I never will.

I was mainly described as shy when I was a teenager.

My parents wished to get a boy when my mom was pregnant with me and I sometimes wondered whether that was the reason why I took some "male" properties when I grew up. There are photographs showing me at the age of 2 (?) driving a small car in our flat. My sister never played with that car but was the first to play with dolls.
Only a few years later I spent many time with a computer my mom brought to our house. I was already at school, so I could read - and then I was learning the names of all countries and their capitals by heart quite before that knowledge was needed at school. (I forgot these data at about 14 years.) Of course my sister did not have a great interest in that computer either.

That. Actually I've been treated a lot worse by females (including my sister) than males and in my experience, conformism is more important amongst women.

I'm really glad Malisha, LostAlien and hopefully others had a different experience.

I've been bullied when I was in Secondary as well and some of my female family has been difficult as well, there were also nice girls (but the guys seemed more tolarant of me).

At the moment I'm a bit afraid of people I don't know well because of fear of being hurt, I'm going to try fix that though.

Malisha, I like Bones too but I can't see it regularly.

I should add that although I've never had a relationship with a woman willing to explain or help with social interactions I've met a few who just accepted or even appreciated my eccentricities. But strictly based on my own experience, I tend to be more wary/cautious with women.

I've been bullied a good deal in elementary/middle school; high school is less obvious but it's still there. I have female friends but they think I'm very weird in my unemotionalness and whatnot--I haven't actually told them about anything to do with Aspergers, etc. (I'm not diagnosed but I have my strong suspicions.) My parents don't understand it at all either. Ah well.

I'm not particularly interested in following the norms of appearance, but I do like to control how I appear. For example, I like to have short hair and I prefer how I look with short hair, but I think it's based more on my comfort level than specifically on looks. I wear eye makeup because I have trouble with seeing my face in mirrors, so wearing darker colors helps me pick myself out. Other than that, I am not particularly feminine and have little/no interest in becoming so.

(btw, first post. Hi.)

Malisha: If you're just looking for language fun and don't need German for a practical purpose, you might want to look into one of the Slavic languages instead, or get out of Indoeuropean altogether. German and English are close cousins. There are technical differences in the nominal and verbal systems, a little bit of word order, but the basic structure is exceedingly similar. Get out of Europe, and you start to see some really cool stuff -- tenses, modals, moods that don't remotely exist in English; totally different ways of dividing up time; alien mechanisms for signifying veracity and agency, hair-raising gender systems. Very mind bending.

Good luck, Malisha!

I've met many female Aspies...some I consider myself friends with and I even serve as a mentor to three of them. As well, I technically am one myself. None of them are alike or even remotely similar, but I have noticed some commonalities between some of them:

* Generally more socially skilled than the boys/men I've encountered.

* Either gender-neutral or disinterest in appearance OR obsession with appearance (one girl I mentor has a special interest in makeup, whereas a friend of mine seems to be disinterested in age-appropriate styles altogether). One even identifies herself as a boy in both appearance and behavior.

* Tendency towards interests that are childlike (a few of them have special interests in media meant for younger audiences...the girls I am thinking of are all in their late teens/twenties and yet still watch children's shows)

* Some are attracted to facets of anime culture/fanfiction/role playing/that sort of thing. (I guess that's true with some of the boys I've encountered too, though.)

I was reading this morning that Aspie girls tend to analyze social situations more than boys. The insight they gain from these observances often helps them to camouflage their differences much longer. I also read that they are more likely to discuss social conventions with others, thus gaining valuable advice from NT's about what is and is not socially acceptable.

I would say that in my case, this is definitely true. I spent a great deal of time in my late teens and early 20's talking to others about social norms that I did not understand or behaviors that seemed out of place so that I could better assimilate.

What the person said about gender-neutral... I am very nongendered. By which I mean, I don't have an internal gender at all. Not male, not female, not in between, not something else entirely, not both. What I do and how I act isn't done along the lines of gender. And much like a friend of mine, I didn't realize how fundamental gender was to most people until I met some transgender people, some of whom had attempted suicide due to being assigned a different gender at birth than they were inside. And that made me realize that gender was something real for them and for most people. (Since most cisgender people seem to regard the idea of waking up as having been permanently changed to the other gender as something horrible, like it would wreck their identity or something too.)

And for me... I mean I know how real it is for people. I know it matters for them. But for me, it's as if it's just not there. I can't perceive it. Can't. Not won't. I have trouble even imagining it. It's like it must be this strange construct in people's minds that guides their actions in so many ways that I can hardly even find related to each other. I'm probably not making much sense here, I'm sleep deprived and just got through writing something so long that my brain keeps fizzling out and I'll find that I've ... well it feels like I've fallen asleep, only I'll realize my fingers were typing while I was "asleep" and were making some kind of sense while I was "asleep", so I have no clue what is going on.

Okay so the thing is that it's like to most people gender is a thing that determines a bunch of different actions and appearances and interests and ways of looking at the world. And to me, that's just not there. There's no weird construct that determines all that stuff. All that stuff is just all that stuff. Some of it may look masculine or feminine or androgynous or whatever, but none of it is determined by gender so it isn't masculine or feminine or androgynous or whatever when I do it. This greatly confuses people, it even sometimes makes them think I'm confused about my identity because I might look "butch" one day and "femme" another except I'm neither one (and nor am I andro), I'm just me, there's no gender of any kind. (A lot of people think "no gender" would look somewhere in between, but I'm not somewhere in between, I'm just me. Hard to explain because both most other people always think in terms of gender, and I never think in terms of my own gender, and that makes a huge communication gap.)

Malisha, your brief "biography" was fascinating. Thanks for sharing



In contrast, my best social coaches were my kids! Even from a very young age, they would patiently explain things to me. They grew up doing this, and thought nothing out of the ordinary about it.



Very insightful observation. I think what you said applies to me also. People have always seen me as "different", but not in a threatening sort of way. I think that makes a big difference.

For me, I think people think I'm fine socially. I have taught myself to be more social by drinking alcohol. As a teen I wasn't social at all and got called a hermit by my own family. Drinking really helps. It also allows the folks I'm drinking with to laugh at the quirky things I do and say. They know I am like that naturally- not just because I am drinking- but they don't seem to care, as they are drunk themselves.

So I would say most folks find me friendly and funny and charismatic (though definitely a bit weird too).

But deep down I have serious issues forming good relationships with people. I've never been in any kind of romantic relationship, I have like 4 close friends, and I don't make an effort to keep friends. So I lose them a lot.

Strong woman accept that Im weird, all other women are afraid I dont like them and have a problem with me.

I am not sure what the differences are. I know that I'm often described as cold, weird, aloof, or even as a cerebral narcissist. I would think it would be more conspicuous with a female.

We're supposed to be the "kinkeepers" of the species, and with most Aspie females, this ability is fundamentally broken. I just do not have the desire to reach out and keep social structures and families together. I also really lack the nurturing ability. I can be quite caring, but it only lasts so long. It's as if I forget what I'm doing or just lose interest.