Are Autistic Men More Angry?

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Are Autistic men more angry and bitter than Autistic women in general?

I don't think they get angry any more easily then autistic women do. In the past, people used to say *I* got angry too easily, and I'm not exactly what you'd call a ray of sunshine.

I just think the men on here tend to vent more.

Men in general are more aggressive than women. The cases of committing murders are more common in men than women. I know some know-it-all here will doubt me and say "no, women murder as much as men but men get caught more" or something, but no, really, whenever I watch the news or read the newspaper and there's another stabbing or murder, it is usually a man or boy responsible.

There are certainly many more men than women in prison-----I work in the courts, so I should know.

Agree with Joe90.

I can get very angry and have done since I was little. I've been trying to mitigate it for years (since a bad incident when I was 18) and am now a lot calmer than I was in my teens but it's always a struggle. I really hate it when they say people cannot change - I'm proof that you can!

I think girls are more likely to talk about their feelings while men hold it in and perhaps lash out physically after their anger has built up for awhile.

Anger is an emotion. There may be differences between the genders in how often or in what way anger is displayed (or not), but this doesn't necessarily tell us whether there is a difference in the amount of anger which the person is experiencing.

Seeing more males in the news doesn't contradict the notion of that being the gender that's "caught more".
That said, I don't think that's the issue at all. I think it's the anticipated result of a more hostile gender, as implied.

I don't think one gender is more angry or depressed than the other, just that the genders are socialized differently in how to act on those feelings so you end up with guys more likely to act out on anger and depression and take it out on others aggressively and women who are more likely to internalize anger and depression into self-harm.

It's complicated by that, yes. All things being equal socially though, I think whichever gender has higher testosterone levels will still end up being the more aggressive.

I don't think it's fair to blame men's behaviour on hormones. We don't like it when men try to blame everything they think is wrong with the way women act on their hormones (like PMS, that sort of thing)--I don't think the answer to that is to claim men also can't help it because "hormones make them that way". Blaming the aggressiveness of men on hormones just seems biologically reductive and sexist to me.

I think it has a lot more to do with how we raise and teach boys and men to not express their feelings than biology. Culturally in the west men are severely limited in the ways they can choose to "appropriately" express their emotions and I think it is that pressure and lack of choices more than anything else that leads to aggression and violence. If we taught little boys as they grew up that there are lots of different ways to be a man and to express how you feel I think we would see a lot less violence from men.

It is the old nature vs nurture question. Are men being taught to be more macho because those teachers and influencers are brainwashed by propaganda or because the fathers and society are made up of men more generally hardwired to be more macho?

It is probably a combination of both. I think hardwired is the bigger factor because men have been generally more violent across multiple societies in multiple eras.

I do not know if Autistic men are more angry then autistic women. Both groups often have reason to be angry but the high depression rate indicates we are blaming ourselves for being "defective" rather than taking into account the disadvantages of being a small minority.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 28 Jun 2018, 6:13 am, edited 1 time in total.

As someone of the male persuasion, who was diagnosed on the spectrum (right or wrong, who knows?), who has gone through puberty, and who has observed other males, I forward this opinion. Of course it's not 100% hormonal in any case, but I'm convinced it's a factor. A not insignificant factor in the way we all function is hormonal. Chemicals ultimately have their say.

Unfortunately the testosterone factor fuels the anger to a large degree. This would cause many men to commit crimes of passion in far greater numbers than women. This is not something to brag about of course, I'm simply pointing out a fact and for those out there who believe that there are no differences between the sexes, think again.

I was about to say that women with PCOS usually have very elevated testosterone and don’t seem to have issues with anger but it does give many of us a very male libido. Then I googled PCOS and anger and they’ve done studies that showed that women with PCOS do have statistically significant issues with anger, anger control and inward and outward anger. I don’t have issues with anger myself and the women on my PCOS forum don’t really talk about it much but I guess they do experience it and talk about it elsewhere. A lot came up on google about women with PCOS talking about anger issues.