Aspergers and Sexual Harassment

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Annoying - getting in my personal space/hitting on me without my consent
Creepy - Continuing to invade my personal space/hit on me after I've told you to **** off.

Make it simple for all you blokes out there?

I just attended a Board of Directors training session dealing with anti-oppression and social justice for the housing cooperative I live at. The issue of conflicts between different forms of oppression came up and a questioner raised the issue of a male member of the co-op with Asperger's whose actions towards women made them 'feel uncomfortable'. It was great that the questioner raised this question and recognized the conflict between protecting women's subjective comfort and the issue of inclusion of people (men in particular) with Aspergers. I was disappointed in the answer she got from the facilitator. The facilitator mostly stressed the need to protect women from feelings of discomfort and was largely dismissive of the plight of men with Aspergers. In general, it seems that people concerned with diversity and social justice are obsessively preoccupied with sexual harassment but have little understanding of, or sympathy for, men with Aspergers. There main concern is with cautioning male Aspies to avoid behavior that might be construed by someone as sexual harassment, and that Asperger's is not an 'excuse' for such behavior. They seem to have little interest in helping men with Aspergers negotiate the difficult path to successfully initiating a romantic relationship or allaying women's discomfort with them. This doesn't seem right for those who claim to profess a concern for people with disabilities. Can anyone suggest any resources that I might recommend that the facilitator read to better understand issues of inclusion for people with Aspergers? Thanks.

MensLib is probably the best resource I can think of. It's not exclusively about men on the autistic spectrum, but it's the closest thing I have found.

Fortunately for me, I can read the social signals easily and shut down any harassment by going to the boss at work ok, avoiding the person etc.

^ Unfortunately, the concern is for people who feel uncomfortable. Yes, it’s subjective, but it means we just have to tread a little more carefully and take note of what we are doing around that person. You can’t force people to be comfortable around you. But you can act to encourage them that you’re not a bad person. It happens to me all the time. I’m always making people feel uncomfortable and I am not even a dude.

It’s not about looks, either. It’s about vibes.

The person who kept staring at me and creeping me the f**k out at work wasn’t “ugly”.
They were just extremely creepy based on their actions.

There is a movie called: Adam, 2009.
In that movie there is also a reference to a book called : Pretending to be normal. For women with Aspergers.

My way of dealing with it is to study personality theories and I noticed that these People who complain are of a certain group of types that will never gell with my personality. I will think they are phony and keep testing them. The more I test their phonyness the more antagonising I become to them. So for me I had to learn that I am good, they are good and I should just leave them alone as they will never understand me nor I will them. But the good news is there is always someone out there that will be able to understand, another set of personalities.

what's under this denominator, what's sexual also?

i went to 'elementary' being a year younger then the others (i reckoned it was that that made me not know, what others seemingly knew?), some days in we went playing, i was asked to come along, then in a barn, i was too scared doing this bravery- jumping off the hay-stack, but i couldn't leave, some boy insisted i had to kiss him in order to pass

kidsplay??
eh, but i was rather frightened of it,
i remember vividly, being quite scared of touching (some) other kids' skin in K, the scaly structure and feeling of their skin was weird to me,

but the kids plays learn you to take care for yourself, back then you didn't run to your parents for these things that others do to you,
once i couldn't avoid that, awkward, situation, when some girls put chewing gum in my hair, that had to be cut out

Please read the rules about cross posting. You posted this on the 22nd of October in this thread, then a day later you posted an identical opening post in a thread you created. That is cross posting, and you can't do it here.

I'm afraid it is often about looks. I was stunted looking (looked 14 at aged 21) and damn ugly when I got my first part time job in retail. Young Women not even on my department were horrible to me without provocation, all name calling and put downs about my looks and sexuality (calling me "he's so gay" even though I'm hetero). I didn't stare or ogle at them at all. Never approached any of them at all as they were not my line of work. I just kept myself to myself.

Talking about staring, which is uncomfortable yes, what about making eye contact with a female but not staring at her?

Women think your eye f*****g them just because you looked at them onetime. The more a woman rates her own attractiveness as high, the more she thinks any man that makes eye contact with her wants her. I call it an ego.

On my first year away from home living in student digs at University, after the day I moved my stuff in and a few days before the course started, a girl moved in and was going to be on the same course as me. (you don't choose who you live with on your first term). She thought I was after her even though I didn't ask her out, hit on her at all, or do anything "creepy". She wasn't even my type and I thought we could've possibly been friends. It was completely her own sh***y state of mind and paranoia of men. I was "creep shamed", bullied, belittled, and singled out simply because I lived there, not because I was after her, which I wasn't. She had no right to dump that crap on me. It was Character Assassination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_assassination



I think too many women are paranoiac and psychopathic, 'enablers' and possessing flying monkey's syndrome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_mo ... psychology)

The truth is a lot of neurotypical women pretend to feel uncomfortable just to laugh at the Aspie guy.

Maybe when they’re teenagers or in their early 20s. As you get older, behaviour like that is less and less acceptable as you cannot blame being immature for being a flat out dick forever, and only makes them look bad.

An aspie can make a neurotypical girl "feel uncomfortable" by just sitting at a lunch table all alone doing nothing.

Autistic women make people uncomfortable, too. We make people uncomfortable because we are different, it goes with the territory. This is one of the reasons why we have social difficulties. Autistic women exist, too.

Moving the goalposts.

What about people who don’t realize that they are staring inappropriately?