Eye contact in other cultures

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We are often berated about not making eye contact. It is often used as an excuse to exclude us from social interactions or dismiss us in job interviews.

When I lived in Libya, eye contact had a very different meaning. It was extremely inappropriate between men and women, and between two men it often carried the meaning of challenge and aggression. This prompted me to further research the meanings of eye contact in different cultures. And this is what I found:

In the Western world, eye contact signifies trust and respect. But in most other parts of the world, it has a very different meaning. In Asia, Africa, and Latin America, it is considered a challenge and a sign of aggression and is extremely impolite. Basically, if you hold eye contact with another person, you're looking for a fight.

This proves beyond any doubt that this whole eye contact nonsense, which is often NT society's primary tool of hldong us back, is %100 arbitrarily made-up bullsh!t.

Why is the Western World, in my opinion backwards in regard to eye contact? I have believed very strongly for many years that consistent eye contact during conversations is unnatural. It always has been for me. You hit on another thing that I've always thought as well: I think eye contact between two males has different instinctual connotations than between females or between male and female. Being male, I absolutely feel the instinctual feeling of being "on guard" or even an underlying instinctual feeling of aggression if another male maintains an unusual amount of eye contact with me.

well going as far as saying, that this issue was invented by allistics to mess with us, is a bit emmm, overstatement. IMHO ofc. the meanings, on sub-conscious level, of things like that, can indeed change from culture to culture, and people with a "wrong" preset will not even realise what is going wrong. there are good articles about that somehwere around, im not retyping them. while the problem itself is more about "they dont really care about us". like somebody here had wrote, "communication is a 2-way street", and they want us to do all the works and accomodate them, in whatever way. we have so much on about "how to deal with allistics". and how many articles are there, written by allistics, on "how to deal with autistics"? thats it.

We no longer live in a world where it is necessary to war with one another for scraps. In the modern world of science and technology, the more logical Autistic brains are the most capable. There is no reason why we should be struggling in this modern world, other than the made-up arbitrary neurotypical rules of dress and body language. The Neanderthals instinctively realize that their evolutionary replacement has arrived, and they're doing everything they can to make our lives impossible.

I wish a meteor would hurry up and wipe out these dinosaurs. But who am I kidding? We'll probably end doing all the work to save their throwback @SSes, as is so often the case, while they're busy chest pounding over an inflated pigskin. And then they'll thank us for saving them from extinction by treating us like sh!t some more. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I'm trying to define how it is in my culture... I don't do much eye contact. My mother had lots and lots of issues with my "bad manners" but none of them was about my lack of eye contact. I learned it's a pain for autistic people from texts by English speakers.
I had a friend who made excessive eye contact when she talked to you... it was weird. Uncomfortable. But in general, turning your head or whole body in the direction of the person you speak to is sufficient to signal "I'm with you". Looking down is not impolite.

I guess here it is Western in interpretation that excessive eye contact is a sign of an outgoing extrovert - but being introverted is accepted, too.

ED: As you spoke of Libya - when my father was in Egypt, he felt extremely uncomfortable when other men (doing business with him) were touching him and patting, invading his personal space.
Is it similar in Libya? Do Arabs, as a culture, avoid eye contact interpreting it as agression but are much more comfortable with physical contact?

again they didnt, per se, make it up. making it up would mean that they take notice and take action. while in reality they just remain oblivious, that a certain fraction of people are different. a person with literal moving disability is quite likely to get compassion and be catered to. while a deaf person is often perceived as well, emm,,,,, just not being able to understand things (while in actuality they cant hear, having their cognition fully intact). but in the eyes of uncaring people they appear like that. and for us its even worse. how many a time, telling people "dont say this (specific, considered as polite) thing to me, its a trigger, i get it back right then and there? they dont care. they think its a joke. they dont wrap their head around a fact, that somebody needs to NOT hear that polite phrase (or incert anything else. not see fluorescent light, not smell certain scent etc). they just dont give a flying frag. and its much more horrible, in fact, than intentionally excluding people. because fighting a written rule is possible with a win, while fighting disregard is doomed to fail. they just still wont care. i've tried so many times. it just needs to be trully systemic. while kids at school are told about religions and needs of people. following a certain holy book, while non-binary genders are slowly coming in the light, we are still in the land of nox. and before allistic children are taught things about us on a systemic, school or even pre-school level, it will never change. sorry for crampled and possibly not entirely on-topic post.

Nope...that wouldn't work. The family would think you're nuts LOL

I wonder if some anthropologist or social historian could trace the history of customs and attitudes regarding eye contact in Western culture. These customs and attitudes have apparently changed, to some extent at least, within my lifetime.

When I was little, eye contact was not quite the big deal that it later became. I remember my mother often telling me, "look at me," when she was talking to me, but she wasn't fussy about what part of her face I looked at or for how long. It was enough just to look in her general direction and then to show, by my subsequent words and actions, that I was indeed paying attention. I don't recall any of my teachers bugging me about eye contact either.

The first time I remember hearing about eye contact being an issue was in the early-to-mid 1980's, when one of my friends informed me that I had weird body language, including the way my eyes moved when I talked to people.

Also, my boyfriend informs me that, in his experience, eye contact is a much bigger deal on the West Coast than it is here in NYC.

Luckily we now live in a highly multicultural neighborhood, so it's not a huge deal here.

I recently had occasion to search the web for a bunch of tutorials on "assertiveness" and "active listening." Many of these tutorials emphasized eye contact and body language. But I don't recall eye contact and body language being emphasized, or even mentioned, in the popular magazine articles I read on assertiveness back in the early 1980's, nor in the online articles I read on active listening even as recently as the 1990's.

So it does seem to me that, in various parts of the U.S.A. at least, social expectations regarding eye contact have been ratcheting upward over the past several decades.

I'm not sure why this has been happening. Influence from movies and TV shows, perhaps?

i guess what i write is not being read. nobody DEVELOPED it. they just have it, because it suits them. same as people TALK with voice without consideration for deaf people, who cant hear (and how many hearing people, who are not relative to deaf people, know sighn language? gulty as caught, i dont. tried to learn but never got it done). there is no conspirancy, there is just pure outright lack of care.

I don't think there was a conspiracy to oppress any particular category of people either, but, as I said, it would be very interesting if some anthropologist or social historian could research how it did develop.

I would also say that this is one of the many reasons we need to build an autistic-friendly subculture.