Autism as an insult online

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Okay, has anybody noticed that recently, especially in Facebook discussions on large pages, people have been using Autism frequently as an insult to imply that a person is acting dumb? Lately I've seen it cropping up quite a bit, and it really makes me mad! Is it just me or is this becoming worse? Does anybody have any ideas for what we as a community can do to let people know this kind of language is not going to be accepted without publicly identifying ourselves as on the spectrum if we so choose?

Last edited by Writergirl53 on 15 Nov 2015, 7:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hmm...Maybe you could post some facts about Autism to prove the insensitive people wrong?

I joke about autism with my family all the time.

I wrote in depth about the quirks and aspects of my personality that I humorously twist into jokes in another thread.

Self-irony is healthy. If I were to get triggered over things people write on internet that aren't even directed at me, I'd be exhausted.

Seriously.

Just stop getting worked up over it. There's no point. In Norway, someone joked on the radio that people with Downs Syndrome are horny all the time. Most people laughed, but some humorless thought police guy made a big scene because he had a daughter with Downs. If a person with Downs called in, it would be a different story, but this guy just wanted to use his daughters diagnosis for attention. And he got attention alright. The hosts apologized and he could prance around all high and mighty with another "bigot trophy" on his list.

I don't want an uptight society where everybody have their shoulders up and walk on eggshells all the time. It's already exhausting as it is with all the social norms. No need to make humor even more complex than it already is.

Just lighten up and pretend the pixels form a different pattern on the screen, because that's all it is: pixels in a pattern on a screen. Then, you'll realize that getting worked up over it is absolutely absurd.

Self-irony is a world apart from inflicted name calling, though. Mostly, it's a matter of who has power or control. People who would do such a thing (call someone any sort of difference as a slight) have learned that they can gain power by pushing others down & by putting someone into a group that they consider "less than", their ego gets a bullying two-fer.

It used to be okay for Ableists to do that. Racists will do it, too. And over the years I've watched this happen with LGBT people & homophobes/transphobes. But there was a turning point where it was clearly no longer tolerated as an attempt to harm someone. All it took was other people calling them out on it.

Call the idiots out on it every chance you get.

Yes it can be really annoying. More the fact that people display their ignorance all the time and that they clearly don't understand/know what autism is.

One mildly annoying example from real life:

My older sister and I were watching the cat and the cat was...well you know, doing cat things and I commented and said "he's an idiot" and my sister said "yes, all cats are idiots, they're autistic".

I still dont know if she was trying to illicit a reaction from me or really has no clue what autism is. I expected better from her tbh, considering she works in the health industry and likes to brag how well read she is.

Well said my friend. I make a point of calling people out on this garbage now. Not strangers so much but family members who think it's okay to step on me and try to crush my self esteem further to boost their own lacking self esteem or to strengthen their fragile egos.

I've experienced racism and put downs due to my autism and ethnic background. People are hypocritical about it too.

I heard the word autist being used negatively online. I looked it up on Urban Dictionary and it said it usually refers to people who play sandbox games like Minecraft rather than actual autistic people.

I think they should stop that.

Just prepare for the rush of trolls and haters.

I hate minecraft....

I've seen this happen a lot on YouTube and it makes my blood boil. I even recently reported a person whose channel was made primarily to bully autistic people and I've warned people on my own channel that I will report and block them if they say cruel things about us or people with any disability for that matter.

And if they say the usual "it's their right because it's free speech", tell them just because the government won't censor what they say doesn't mean what they post won't ever have consequences. If they say it's not hurting anyone, tell them that how do they know it hasn't? There could be people suffering anxiety, depression, or even having an anxiety attack from reading what they've just said.

Of course, telling them anything is unlikely going to get the message into their thick skulls, so it's best to just report them, block them, and not "feed the trolls".

^Good for you! Feed the trolls? What?

I do autism jokes but it's no way meant to be insulting. I mean if people are going to be doing things that are listed as autism, I will say people have gone autistic such as if they can't handle change and they make a big fuss like they do over when an area code gets added because they don't like having to dial three extra numbers and to me that is no big deal. I heard that did actually happen here in Oregon when they added the 971 area code. I wonder if anyone made a fuss in Vancouver, WA when they added the 360 area code and were no longer 206 or when Black Friday happens and people get so impatient they trample over each other and I go "have they gone autistic?" because they are so impatient.

Of course on another forum I wrote how too many people have gone autistic and I got a PM from the forum admin saying he had changed the word from autistic to stupid because he thought it was offensive to autistic members. What? I am on the spectrum, did he forget or was he implying I didn't have it? Unless people on the spectrum objected to the humor, then that would be another story.

Or the time I joked about Cruella De Vil having it because she has poor manners and walks into the Dearly home without even knocking first and the way she treats Roger and her co workers and henchmen, where are her social skills? Also where is her filter? And she is so obsessed about spots and fur and has a whole collection of them. But autistic people flew off a handle for it too on the IMDB board and I had let them get to me so much I deleted my humor but yet my own online friends with autism found it hilarious when I told them the joke. I was making fun of the villain and making fun of how vague the criteria is and anyone could meet it if they don't understand what it means.

I also used to joke about my cat having Asperger's or my computer and I can remember my ex boyfriend joking how the stores in downtown have it because their business was suffering when the company moved their bus lines to their street because of light rail construction so the stores couldn't even handle the change so their businesses were suffering due to riders blocking their window display while waiting for the bus. But I laughed at his joke when he said "The stores have AS." I also remember everyone in my autism group laughed when we were talking about the snow storm we had and I said how everyone had gone autistic and we were the NTs because we handled the change better than them, we had switched places. I remember most people were panicking over a few inches of snow and the rest of us in the group didn't act that way at all.

I believe this is what we call an inside joke when we make fun of ourselves.

I don't doubt people accuse others of having it to be insulting or even use the word as an insult.

The criticism is legitimate, it isn't that.

Name calling is distasteful and stupid, and there's a reason why people do that under anonymous pseudonyms and much less under real names, although it also happens at Facebook where people use their real names.

What I'm pointing out is the emotional response. It's simply not worth getting upset over. If those people weren't having a laugh about autism, it'd be something else. Autism happens to be convenient to joke about, so that's what they're going to joke about. Tomorrow, it's something else. They probably have dedicated troll accounts for all their buly target categories.

I was bullied all throughout childhood because I have the weird autistic speech, a big head and stiff body language.

I spend my childhood and adolescence feeling like my life had no value, and until I was diagnosed I thought that I was cursed because I was different in all these ways.

But one day as an adult I simply decided to try to think of a caricature of me with those exaggerated traits that I was bullied for, and then, I laughed at it instead.

Since then it has not bothered me, and I twist things around like that whenver someone throws a snarky remark, because adults do it too except they make sure to make it covert enough that you can't call them out on it.

Learning to play their game is useful, because then you can retaliate and get away with it. That doesn't mean the retaliation has to be particularly mean spirited, just effective enough to show them how they appear in third person. If you don't take yourself seriously, but laugh at yourself, then your retaliation is also justified, because nobody can accuse you of bullying. After all, you only responded in the same manner that you were addressed.

People who get offended on the internet... they need to commit this quote to heart:

"Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die".

Anger is an emotion best reserved for the outmost necessities, because it is energetically and emotionally draining, particularly to autistics. In one way, it is a compliment to the one the anger is directed at that someone would expend energy and get angry, because it is an energetic investment. So in one way they put value into it by spending energy on it.

The worst thing you can do is spend no energy at it. That means the effort they put in is wasted and has zero value to you.

I try to approach the internet with this perspective in mind. The OP is justified in the argument itself. It's just that the actual anger is a waste of energy.

I've really only seen it used as an insult once or twice. Just recently, one of my favorite people on Youtube had two people arguing in his comment section (which despite Youtube's reputation for horrible comments is usually a pretty decent place with nice people) that ended with one person calling the other autistic and the other person saying it back. Really stupid, but it fizzled out pretty quickly and no one else got involved in the mess.

[quote="League_Girl"I got a PM from the forum admin saying he had changed the word from autistic to stupid because he thought it was offensive to autistic members. [/quote]

Because, you know...'stupid' people don't even have enough intelligence to complain about the substitute word???

Etymology; it matters. Imagine how nice the world could be if people a) understood, thought & cared about the word choices they make and, b) simply chose to not use words that are based on someone else's perceived deficiency. We really are a bunch of hierarchical apes, aren't we?

i have seen so many of those. i call it the "that's so..." line of 'insults'.

"that's so gay" was a pretty infamous one for a long time. mostly used by homophobic teenagers.


they all sound pretty stupid if you break them down to their definitions:
"that's so person who is attracted to the same gender"
"that's so person who has a mental handicap and has a hard time doing everyday things"
"that's so person who prefers not to associate with others"
"that's so girl wearing a skirt as a top" (not a real one. was actually in an anti-"that's so gay" commercial directed at people who genuinely use the 'insult' in an attempt to teach them what they were actually saying)