Body language is a stupid language!! !

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and cool! Mazel Tov.

Because of my Ashkenazi background, I gesture a lot. I try to use legit sign language signs often because I would be able to understand those.

And what I heard about playing with your hair is that it actually means that you want to be left alone.

Neither do mine. I manage to feed, clothe and shelter myself, and passed along my DNA to three new people, while being completely illiterate in body language. Now, other aspsects of life in an NT world...not so much.

~Kate

I actually think I read body language pretty well, I just have no clue how to respond.

Humans are very weird. I understand my cat's body language better. Especially when she expresses anything with her whiskers or pupils. And most especially her ears.

That's very good! Me too. But these are simply our anecdotes, and not data. And none of this speaks to my point, which is simply that employing multiple channels for the communication of information regarding sexual availability would be, in many cases, a trait that would likely be selected for, all other things being equal. This doesn't mean there aren't other modalities that can be employed to reach the same end, as several of us have amply demonstrated.

Some of us have to do that. No choice. Body language is impenetrable to me. I always stand the same way -- arms crossed, one hip cocked. I'm pretty sure the crossed arms say "pissed-off b***h" and the cocked hip says "come hither" so it's got to be confusing for people I'm talking to. I try to stand in different ways and the minute I stop thinking about, it's back to my usual stance. I have to use verbal language to communicate everything because I cannot use body language to do so. Yes, it takes longer, especially when I have to make certain the person is not reading things into what I'm saying (I can't do the multiple-meanings, nuanced language thing either), but it's the way I have to do things. I suppose it would be nice to have a choice, and I know it would be nice to know what other people are really saying and feeling (body language is supposedly very revealing), but I make do with what I've got. Luckily, verbal language has never been a barrier to me.

I suspect that people who think they don't use any body language would be surprised to find that they do. Not typical or overt kinds necessarily, although there's probably some human commonality when it comes to simpler emotions like anger, etc. But I would be shocked to find a single person on earth, who isn't a vegetable, that doesn't use at least some aspects of body language.

You could also call foreign languages stupid if you're not fluent in them. Oh, and before anyone starts coming back with a smart a** response about how body language and spoken languages are different, my point is that calling body language stupid just because you don't understand it goes by the same logic as calling a foreign language stupid for the same reason.

We do get a lot of s**t about our traits, but it doesn't help when you're not making an effort to understand either.

I think it's fascinating. It's such a quick way of information travel. I'm not always good at it though. Although I think I'm better than many on here, because in a way it's a special interest.

I cannot agree that body language is a "stupid" language.

Certainly it is a form of communication that I often fail to realize is being used--but my lack of comprehension doesn't make it stupid. Neither do I understand Farsi, but that doesn't make Farsi a stupid language, nor does it make me stupid for not understanding it.

What is stupid is the degree to which people fail to realize that not everyone understands their body language.

Let's face it--if I am too clueless to understand your body language, then continuing to send me signals in that idiom is no different than the tourist who repeats himself (gender exclusive chosen deliberately) in ever louder and ever more precise English, in the vain attempt to make himself understood.

I once read in a mens magazine that if a woman flares her nostrils, she's horny. What a load of tosh.

I flare my nostrils when I'm angry, so there! (And so do most of my former bosses).

I can read the body language of certain autistic people and the ones I can read can usually read me. It's a bit alarming after going through most of our lives with the "shield" over our emotions because people couldn't read our body language. But when we read each others, it's down to a level like... what our real emotions are, what we are focused on, what we wish people saw our emotions and focus as, etc. And to have that all readable feels very raw and exposed since normally nobody can see.

I can read certain aspects of the body language of people outside that group of people too. Much of it is self-protection: I usually see through sociopaths faster than nonautistic people do. I suspect I read different signals than nonautistic people do. The sociopaths are focusing their fake acts on the areas of body language nonautistic people can see. But they don't change the part I can see. So frequently I am the first to know.

I also think I picked a lot of it up during the time when words made zero sense to me. I relied hugely on patterns of movement and tonal and other auditory patterns in people's voices. There is some evidence that autistics with receptive language delays are better at this than autistics who understand language better. That has been a big error in some studies, they like using the autistic people who can use words, and most autistic people who can use words don't have these receptive language problems. For many autistics we can do either words or body language but not both at once and many autistics end up using words all the time and body language never, and that becomes the stereotype.

If I am struggling to use and understand language (and it's always a struggle) I am not as able to deal with body language. But turn off language and I can rapidly map the pattern of a whole room. I may not be good at the parts of body language nonautistic people understand but I can be very good at parts they don't understand. Nonautistic people have asked me to read people for them when I got a reputation among staff at one agency for it. Because I see things they don't see.

As a receptive language delayed person I find some of the comments on here about people who have language trouble and have to rely on body language really obnoxious. It really is very rich and textured and I still prefer it to language because it doesn't make my brain spin the way language does. It's not stupid and people who prefer to use it aren't somehow more like monkeys than other people. I can't stand having to use language but you don't find me insulting people who use it exclusively. Good grief.

Fascinating! My daughter was fairly significantly language delayed. She has language now, but it took awhile and is still somewhat idiosyncratic (invented words, backwards pronouns). But she doesn't seem to have the problems reading body language that the doctors led me to expect. She has no idea what she's supposed to do in social situations and avoids them, but it's not because she has no idea if somebody is happy, angry, sad, confused etc. She reads those well enough. She just doesn't know the social protocol involved and that makes her very nervous. She can certainly read me well enough. When she was less language-confident, her teachers had those PECS drawings of people emoting and she would point to one to show how she was feeling. Then when she talked more and became a schoolkid, she would come home from school and describe a fellow student's face and their body labguage and I would tell her the expected social response. (Still do. She's still a schoolkid.) The problem was never body language. It has always been what to do in response to the body language.

I figured this was just because nobody ticks off all the autism-trait boxes. But I never stopped to consider why she was better at reading body language than the doctors and books would have me believe. Before she talked (or talked in more than single words), she stared intensly at people all the time. She wasn't one of those kids that stared at ceiling fans or spinning wheels. She stared at people with such an intense stare and such intense eye contact that she didn't get an autism diagnosis for a while because they were looking for zero eye contact and eyes directed at the spinning fans. I don't know why I never connected her good ability at seeing body language with her long time spent staring at people but not talking. But I didn't. Now that you connect it, it does make perfect sense!

I'm amazed that they even call it a language.

I think that there may be several different "non-verbal dialects" or body languages.

Some people could have "muted" versions of certain body languages or more limited facial expression repertoires. For instance, I've noticed that jealous gestures are absent from families and cultures that don't practice jealousy. These people wouldn't understand the need for this gesture and would therefore have difficulty interpreting ideas like jealousy. It would seem irrelavent to their lives. This is what I've noticed anyway.

If a body language element is missing from a culture, does that mean that the culture is "emotionally deficient"?

I'd say no: the culture would be qualitatively socially and emotionally different.
Coping mechisms and social structures would be different.

This is why I think it's a mistake and an oversimplification of reality to lump all body languages together and assume that everyone automatically knows everything about each one.