Were The Feminists Aspies?

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Eff You See Kay off, troll.

I recently finished reading "Simone De Beauvoir" an excellent biography by Deirdre Bair (National Book Award-Winning Author of "Samuel Beckett") and I would highly recommend this book- all 700+ pages. Excellent. But - on topic, there were so many times during my reading of this book that I had to stop and say "Wow - Simone sounds very much like an Aspie. Although I have several pages of quotes from the book that I took the time to record because I was wowed over by them, I'll just share a few with you. By the way, it was not the author's intention to link De Beauvior to Autism, this book was written well before the time when Autism and Asperger's were subjects of such intense public interest. It is simply a very thorough and intense examination of the life of a very interesting woman who has earned the title of feminist without really or consciously setting out to do so. She got a very raw deal I think, especially by the little punk she devoted her life to.

She grew use to having her way and if she did not get it, she held her breath until her face turned red, screamed and carried on, and if all else failed could make herself vomit from the intensity of her desire. She did not care where her outbursts took place and was as obstreperous in the park and on the street as she was at home. During one particularly violent tantrum in the Luxembourg Gardens, she even kicked a well-meaning matron who tried to make her stop crying. She threw tantrums with total disregard for others.

She learned when very young that precocious behavior brought attention far beyond the ordinary, but she was too young to understand where the boundary between good manners and showing off lay.

Simone had an almost religious reverence for print and at a very early age showed her literal bent of mind. She learned to read when she was four by associating the sounds made by the letters with pictorial representations in a popular French children’s primer. She had a voracious appetite for books. She showed a precocious intelligence.

Simone’s earliest memory of her younger sister was joy at having someone to teach. They didn’t engage in “simple play” but only games which had an instructive quality. Simone would not stand for undirected play, always invented the games and was always the teacher.

She sat for hours under her father’s desk in her own private dream world. The fixtures on the desk caught her imagination, so that letter opener, blotter, scissors and ink pot took on mythic status in her eyes. Staring at these wonderful objects made her forget house hold tensions and disorder.

She liked order and discipline ….relished the opportunity to measure everything carefully, account for everything in the house and find a use for the most unlikely object.

Her appetite had always been quirky

In games and exercises at school she was totally lacking in grace and athletic ability. What she could neither conquer nor change she taught herself to disregard….she ignored all sports, physical contests and exercise claiming they bored her….She was not popular with her classmates whom she irritated with her know-it-all attitude….since there was no other outlet for her compulsion for order and perfection she became obsessed with excelling in class work. She behaved so compulsively that her teachers had to ask her mother to insist that the child relax her fixation on spending every moment productively.

There were other humilitations for Simone as well: She was the last chosen for any game or athletic contest, and her efforts to join any of the playground groups were greeted with hooting laughter. She was scorned by her schoolmates for her ill-fitting clothes and general untidiness and for her self-important pronouncements. She was a gawky chatterbox, entirely friendless. She had no social or societal graces. Her ideas and role models came almost entirely from books. “Of course it bothered me that I waqs not popular, but when I compared all that to the satisfaction of reading and learning everything else was unimportant. By the time she was eight years old everything else became secondary to learning.

She threw hysterical tantrums when something happened to disrupt her self-imposed schedule.
She needed to be confined within a framework whose rigidity would justify her existence. She was afraid of changes.
“Simone thinks like a man” her father would say, and she considered it the highest compliment her father could pay her.


At wenty yrs: She hated being hugged, kissed or tickled by her friends. She was extremely naïve. She wanted friendship, affection and love but was confused about what they should be and could neither interpret nor understand those she already had. She read books o find models for how she should live her life. The only thing she had complete control over was her own mind. She found herself increasingly alienated from society and kept herself confined to home and library.

Her family saw her as self-absorbed, nervous, quirky in her own world and somehow different from the rest of them. Her father thought her so unattractive with an un feminine attitude and demeanor, and thus unlikely to marry, that her urged her to pursue a profession other than philosophy so she could provide for herself.

She showed obsessive behavior by assigning herself a task or a project for every moment of her day, compulsively checking off items on lists that contained headings such as Books to Be Read, further separated into two columns entitled “Duty” and “Pleasure” with an annotation after each title as to whether it had been worthwhile or a waste of time. She made extensive timetables, dividing the day into segments allowing shorter or longer periods for travel, depending on whether she had the money for the Metro or bus or whether she had to walk. In either case, she listed projects she could recite from memory or read during the time she was in transit.

She was indifferent to the conventional niceties, and in clunky shoes, with her loud and strident voice, she would literally stumble upon a group of her fellow students blurting into situations and interrupting conversations. Her awkwardness made her seem silly and perhaps an aggressive drone who had very little intellectually to contribute.
A friend was appalled by her appearance and instructed her on how to dress, fix her hair and wear makeup, but she resisted instruction. Her idea of social success was to be at the center of whatever was intellectually excellent. She could not see the stripes from the plaids , but did begin to wash her hair and wear a little face powder.

I know someone who's a feminist. She certainly ain't an Aspie.

Thank you very much for posting them. It was fascinating to read. You're right, she does sound extraordinarily like an aspie. Another feminist writer who I remember seems very aspie is Virginia Woolf. And perhaps not aspie, but AS of some sort, Andrea Dworkin.

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cosmiccat- Wow, that was pretty interesting about Simone de Beauvoir. Thank you for that information. I read "The Second Sex" when I was a young woman, and I remember I liked it at the time...(though I don´t remember much about it anymore).

oiunon- Thank you for your post, you expressed exactly how I feel, and what I was trying to get at with this thread! In my case, it has less to do with clothes- (I actually feel very comfortable wearing light summer dresses, and don´t like the thick texture of jeans)- but it has a LOT to do with behavior. I find that acting "feminine" in the way that people define it doesn´t always come naturally to me, most particularly in the expected flirting/mating scenarios, how to interact with a man, etc. I feel like I have to study these things- and I STILL can´t really do them right- whereas I keep reading these behaviors are supposed to be "biological". Like you, I felt more comfortable about my gender role back in the feminist era. Although I somehow do feel feminine, I realize I define femininity very differently than the rest of society. I notice I tend to throw people, because I don´t quite act the way that´s expected. I also think it´s amazing how much people categorize men and women and expect certain modes of behavior for each. I question whether this is really biological or social.

For some of you, just for the record, this is not a sudden whim I just thought up based on 1 movie. This is due to a lifetime of either being criticized, feeling uncomfortable or trying to work out what my expected "role" is supposed to be. On observation, I realize that other women don´t seem to have this same problem...(except for many women on WP who have started threads in the Women´s Forum about gender issues). I would never come to a rash conclusion, everything I do is thought out and analyzed, often for years. That movie was only another reminder of how I´ve felt for a long time. I actually used this question partly because I am interested in possible AS-ness in the feminists- (let´s face it, they were different than most women)- but partly because I was hoping to open up a discussion on gender issues. I didn´t mean to start a discussion about which sex is stronger or more suited to which job. I´m sorry that some of you think I´m f---ed up for being curious and pondering this question, but that just goes to show another thing I´ve noticed all my life; namely, that the mere word "feminism" seems to bring up strong and emotional reactions in people. One of the reasons I find it interesting actually, it seems to "press people´s buttons". Another example of our society´s extreme reactions to femininity and the threat of women acting "different"...

As for autism and activism, I guess I can´t say for sure how that works, as I´ve also never been an activist. However, I do find the idea quite interesting. For me, activism seems sort of similar to a special interest. I could understand how if someone is totally immersed in a subject, obsessed with it, etc., that that may push them to activism. It´s not above the realm of possibility, in my opinion. I once saw a movie in which I related to a female character- (and trust me, this is a very rare occurrence! Usually females in movies seem like women I know in real life, but they´re not much like me). Anyway, it was a character played by Laura Linney in the film "The Life of David Gale". She was an activist. At the time I knew nothing about AS, but I knew I had a tendency to become obsessed with one thing at a time. Her obsession in the film was trying to abolish the death sentence. Her activism and intensity reminded me of my own personality, and I realized that if I were obsessed with something political like that, maybe I would be an activist. It hasn´t happened yet, so I don´t know for sure. But I think it could.

The problem is that many of this things (bad at games, precocious reading, daydreaming, solitary, low care with appearence, etc.) are typical traits, not only of Asperger Syndrome, but also of what we can call "intelectual personality type" (for the people who believe in MBTI, basically the "Introvert iNtuitive" types; in regular English, "nerd/geek").

In other words, when you read a biography of an intelectual/writer/philosoph/scientist/composer/etc. much probably you will find many of these symptoms and you can think "perhaps [X] was an Aspie".

Quoting Morgana:

Ah, those little ankle biters, they're all over WP. Just shake them off and carry on.

I'm glad that you enjoyed the quotes from Beauvoir's biography.

Quoting Ouinon:


You're welcome, Ouinon. I got the same impression about Virginia Wolfe.

Quoting TPE2:


I agree. This is certainly true. And at the same time, certainly among those intellectuals and geniuses who have gained world recognition for their contributions to the arts, philosophy and to science, and who have lived lives interesting and unusual enough to make their biographies worth writing (would attract a large audience), many would fit the dx of Asperger's, and have been given that dx posthumously by highly credentialed experts. While I can only muse at the possibilities and share my musings in a friendly discussion with others who enjoy doing the same.

Last edited by cosmiccat on 04 Mar 2009, 6:03 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I'm thinking "feminist" is a lot like any other group of people who share an ideology--the loudest and most likely to be seen in the headlines are also the people that are on the extreme end of things, and tend to embarrass the rest of the group.

Basic feminism: Take people as individuals first, not as representatives of their gender. If somebody can do a job, they should be allowed to do it. Everybody gets the same rights. Everybody is subject to the same laws. That means no prejudice against men, either, nor automatically ruling in favor of somebody just because she is a woman.

That's not radical at all; most women nowadays, and most men for that matter, could be called feminists by that definition.

BTW, I didn't have access to the Internet when I did my first bits of activism, in my early teens. I did a lot of letter-writing to try to get late-term abortions banned in my home state, for example; I also wrote complaint letters, or letters to the editor or to local government about current events. Written media, yeah, but not Internet.

Activism is easy; it's organizing a group that's hard. Autistic people don't need the Internet to be activists at all, but it really helps to organize autism activists, which requires a group of people who are bad at socializing to do exactly that. Early feminists wouldn't have been entirely autistic--at most, they might have had four or five times as many autistics as the general population--and the NTs among them could've been the organizers. That's what NTs do best anyway--network.

Well, I'm glad this discussion has gotten more lengthy. I've been told that I'm too verbose, sometimes. But it's hard to flesh out one's thoughts on some topics briefly. Anyhow.....2ukenkerl: Well, a lot of women were afraid that they would "bulk up", etc... The truth is that exercise can actually make women look better, and there is a BROAD line between feminine and too bulky. I have seen a lot of women that were obviously very strong, but still very pretty and feminine.

I agree about the bulking up, and that exercise is a good thing. I agree with this whole paragraph. Also, in response to higher standards, I am too young to remember, but am aware, nonetheless, that standards were much higher for everyone. Of course, it seems that every year standards become lower for all, irrespective of feminists or any other group. So, I didn't mean to imply that men weren't subject to higher standards as well.

Also, I don't think of feminism merely in terms of women being strong or getting jobs. I just used some examples because they seemed to be a more concrete way of discussing the topic.

Inventor: Aspies stay home. Librarian maybe, but the feminists I met were also in the Red and Black Bookstore, United Farm Workers, The Red Brigade, Joining Che to free south america, and working to overthrow the white male power structure for the downtroden masses. After none of that worked out, they became feminists. The FBI did not keep records on feminists. Then they decided they were lesbians, but still, no one dates a troublemaker.

Interesting that you mention the FBI not keeping records on the feminists. I know a woman in her late 60s, actually two women, that were in feminist and consciousness raising groups in the heyday, and they did show me their copy of what they said was an FBI file. A lot of things were blacked out on them. They claimed that when the information was released to them, that it was already that way.......I don't know. But some of it was left readable. And I will say that if the FBI was keeping tabs....well, no wonder we have bad intelligence in this country, they focused on the most inane things. Such as, a majority of the women wore red shirts today, what does that mean? And having talked to these and other women, they did say that they were written off as lesbians. Although, the two women I know are lesbians, I don't think their feminist/ CR groups at the time were specifically so.
I'm not saying you're wrong about the FBI, per se. Who knows what incidents are isolated or were regionally specific.

I do agree with the first part about overthrowing the white, male power structure-in that, that is what they were initially fighting for.

I've never been to NYC, but knew someone who was from there, and those same sentiments were echoed.

Interesting point about lesbians......I don't know if I agree or disagree with that, at the moment.
I do think, unfortunately, that there is a lot of truth in your final comments in that post, regarding big government.

srriv345: I think that is a good point to make a distinction between the suffragists and the feminists. I think there's a trend in postmodern discourse, especially in the women's/gender/queer studies arenas-and no they're not all the same, but often related, that in trying to re-appropriate history, re-read texts, and change the discourse to supposedly make it more inclusive and reflective of outsiders that people tend to claim groups and individuals that we can not positively label as this or that. I think of people like Judith Halberstam and her book entitled: Female Masculinity. She tries to reimagine both through historical examples and contemporary media and pop-culture, women as feminists, lesbians, even trans-gendered in some way. I don't think her arguments or either wrong or right, as such. I think contradictions exist in the world, and that simultaneous things can happen all the time. I think really that works such as hers, and that of others in many fields, is a natural response.

In fact, in a way, we're doing it now. We don't know De Beauvoir, or Woolf. We're not even contemporaries of them who can have a conversation with them. It's far easier to look back and say that in light of new knowledge, theories, or even personal identification with a figure, that they are this type of thing or fit this category. Even when people are more tentative in their pronunciations, including "experts" who claim that things suggest that some people had whatever traits.....how can one definitively say anything.

Granted, I don't mean to take the argument to reductio il absurdium levels. I know I misspelled that, probably. But I do think that it's good to be mindful of looking for that which confirms what we already believe. I think that's called a confirmation bias in scientific research.-

cosmiccat: Great information on Simone De Beauvoir. I don't think I've studied her in depth. I did read some of Julia Kristeva's stuff, but it was for a course comparing Kristeva, John Rawls, Foucault, and Derrida. And it's been some years now. I can barely remember.....I should do more reading and re-reading. Even if she were diagnosed as AS or on the spectrum now.......the exception proves the rule.

Morgana: I echo the sentiment of your most recent post. And when reading the initial post, I didn't feel that you were making a judgement based on one movie.

TPE2: he problem is that many of this things (bad at games, precocious reading, daydreaming, solitary, low care with appearence, etc.) are typical traits, not only of Asperger Syndrome, but also of what we can call "intelectual personality type" (for the people who believe in MBTI, basically the "Introvert iNtuitive" types; in regular English, "nerd/geek").

In other words, when you read a biography of an intelectual/writer/philosoph/scientist/composer/etc. much probably you will find many of these symptoms and you can think "perhaps [X] was an Aspie".

I'm probably going to contradict most of what I wrote here. I agree with everything you've said about the "intellectual personality type". Which begs the question....how broadly or narrowly used can a label be, before it loses its usefulness. Sometimes, I do think that oh, person x or y is just like me or this person I know or this category, etc., so they must be. But then I step back, and it's sort of like the old, What is art? question......if everything is, then nothing is. However subjective, there have to be lines drawn somewhere, otherwise things lose their meaning through dilution.

No, they are more than likely borderlines.

I am thinking of historical figures here. One person who springs to mind as a possible Aspie is the British feminist Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960). On this website - http://www.sylviapankhurst.com - she is described as an "eccentric and indefatigable spirit who lived 'before her time'.

Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870-1945), the half-sister of Virginia Woolf and eleven to twelve years older than her, was possibly autistic. Hermione Lee in her biography of Woolf comes to the conclusion that she possibly had a "form of autism". This observation seems to fit from accounts of speech difficulties, repetitive communication and gestures, and what are described as "emotional outbursts". Laura lived with her family until 1891 when she was put into a home for the "imbecile and weak-minded". She lived in similar establishments for the rest of her life. I don't know if Virginia Woolf had Aspie tendencies. She was mentally unstable and suffered from bipolar disorder.

Yes, my thoughts exactly. Of course we can´t know for sure, and I would never "diagnose" someone if I didn´t have access to their innermost thoughts and how their brain works. But it is sometimes interesting to think about.

Yes, you have a point about the organizing aspect. Another reason I never became an activist of any kind was I just never would have known how to start, and it´s difficult to know what to do when it´s a new activity. If I ever would have been any kind of an activist, I probably would have had to have been at the right place at the right time and just "walked into" an already existing group...you know, the sort of thing that just happens by chance (or fate). I also forgot when I wrote the initial post that activism would consist of networking...I´ve never been an activist, so I didn´t think of that. I guess the networking part would have been pretty unlikely for someone with AS...

I didn´t specify that of course, any group is mixed, so it would be highly unlikely that all the feminists would be Aspie anyway. I was just wondering if maybe a high proportion of them were Aspies. I simplified it by writing "Were the Feminists Aspies" because that sounds more catchy than writing something much less definite.

But, yeah...it´s most likely they were a mixed group, with each of them doing the part that they do best.

Just because I favor human rights, that does not make me a Masculinist.

Women's Rights were a real issue, men and women working the same hours on the same job, factory work, and women being paid a third less.

Equal work for equal pay was more a Unionist issue.

As this was cold war era, the business did try to paint it a communists in the workforce, and government goons for the Chamber of Commerce.

Radical Feminists were a political ploy to discredit a real Women's Rights issue.

The FBI did not get all those files by watching TV, they had thousands out to become leaders and gather names and information.

It was in the government interest to make it seem a threat, and hence justify their actions.

One of the things they did was seek out the leaders, then do things to discredit them, then they put their own in, and gathered names.

Women's rights to equal pay, treatment, in the workforce, became Radical Femminist Communists calling for the overthrow of the white male power structure. It was a government run program.

As The Communist Party in New york said, I think in the Village Voice, we could not pay the rent without all of our dues paying FBI members, and they always volenteer for doing paperwork.

I remember Lee Harvey Oswald, standing on Canal Street in New Orleans, handing out flyers for Fair Play for Cuba. Fair play for Cuba was invented by the FBI, Lee was one of their's.

There were others in New york, handing out flyers for the various communist factions, which they invented.

When women gathered to organize for equal pay, they were invaded by leaders of the movement who did not work there, and proposed burning down the factory and killing the employers.

It was plain and simple Union Busting. In generations before they sent in men with clubs.

Having lived through that era it is impossible for me to see Radical Feminists as anything but agent provocatures of the government working for business interests.

They worked to discredit the basic human rights of women, equal pay for equal work, and to paint that as a communist plot.

They were also the ones making demands that women be hired for jobs that involved being able to lift a few hundred pounds. A Fireman does have to be able to sling someone over their shoulder and walk out of a burning building. They attacked job qualifications, saying hundred pound women had a right to those jobs.

They demanded jobs most women could not do, when the issue was equal pay for jobs they could do, which are most jobs.

There has always been a differance between men and women, and I am in favor of that. Still, they are both human, and work, so there all things must be equal.

I see another government plot in the threat posed by geeks and nerds, the new Psychology, which claims the 5% of the population who are intellectual, who are the readers, thinkers, inventors, are in fact suffering from a string of recently invented mental illness, which even have national organizations dedicated to seeing that their kind stop being born.

The main target is the Autistic, 0.66% of the population, but I think the true target is the 5% who read, think, and are a danger to the state.

There is a lot of truth in that IN's and EN's are being labled as defectives.

Like the real thinkers of prior eras, they are a threat to the government that is based on conning people with little education and an IQ of 100.

All leaders were targeted by mass disinformation in the Civil Rights era, Republicans and Democrats do the same to each other, and both will attack any outside movement that can take over herd leadership. Call them Communists, or Crazy, make the people fear, hate, play let's you and him fight, and it was not something left behind in the 60's.

Homeland Security is going much farther then the Nixon-Agnew FBI of the 60's.

Control of the intellectuals has always been a government program.

I disagree that the intellectual women of the past, those who wrote books, books that will affect the thinking of all who read them, were in fact suffering from impaiments in three major fields of social behavior, and were suffering from a tragic mental illness, that important organizations are now working to eradicate.

Modern Psychology is like Radical Feminists, creating a distorted view of the intellectual community. Considering they are mostly supported by government jobs and drug companies, and have no scientific backing, in fact often contradict themselves, suport a view that IQ 100 normal people are the best for the state, and that mainstream thinking, or lack of, defines mental health.

The attack is not directed at aspies, a doubful and unproven classification, but at the whole intellectual population, for Autistic does translate into self, those who put their own though and perception above the government propaganda dished out by a controlled media.

Create factions, play them against each other, is the way the game is played.

Inventor: Where do I begin? It's interesting that you mention the FBI sending in people to discredit the women's groups.
In one sense, it seems conspiracy theorist to me.....and I know some theories are true, but in another sense, I don't know. There were/are valid issues that women have with the white, male power structure. Or just the male power structure, period.

Coming from my own personal experience entirely, I lived with one of the women I mentioned earlier that had an FBI file briefly. Initially, when I met her, I thought wow, she's great, educated, brilliant, liberal-minded and politically so. Well, that all changed when I was staying there with she and her partner. I haven't heard such racist, sexist, ridiculous nonsense in years. This was in the northeast of the U.S. where these women were originally from, and were residing after hurricane katrina. I came up there after the hurricane, a couple of years later, after trying to make a go of it elsewhere-I'm originally from New Orleans, and hope to get back there one day, soon.

Anyhow, it just seemed strange to me that people who back home that were living in a low income, minority neighborhood, were closeted, classist, racist people of the establishment up there. I chalked it up to people not being what they seemed to be.....but I never could shake the feeling that something weird was up. That these women could supposedly lose everything and then just buy a fabulous house in the blink of an eye. That they had ph.d's, and were putting on the act of no one understands me, that's why I can't teach or publish, so I'll self-publish or whatever, but had never, ever had any real success in 60 plus years.
I have another friend that I still keep in touch with, who also has a file on her. And while she seems outwardly honest and generous.....and is from and remains in New Orleans....she too seemed to be almost unaffected by what happened there.

Maybe I'm merely upset that people who have the resources to change not only one city, but make real change in the world, even if it's in a small way, don't use their ample resources. A lot of these "liberal" folks that I've met are really all talk. Once you really get to know them, it's a bizarre thing.

But there are real issues that women can take with the white, male power structure. Women still don't have entirely equal pay. There are men who are incompetent in various ways working in fields that they shouldn't be, but only the 100 pound women get attacked.

Yet, I know that the culture wars from the 60s never stopped either. The b.s. of the war on drugs-which is really a war on freethinkers and all kinds of minorities. There's a pill for everything today. I' m waiting for the day when itching will be renamed irritable skin disorder, or some such nonsense.
This country has a history of anti-intellectualism. So, I don't doubt that there is deep animosity towards nerds/geeks people who think. But is it a coordinated attack, mere coincidence, or just plain old ugly human nature, I don't know.

I've heard and met people who are "different" who have horror stories of forced confinement to mental institutions, medical procedures, all kinds of things. I have family members, firsthand, that should have been able to sue the U.S. government for some of the things it pulled. I guess these things are so hard to prove on a large scale until it's too late, and no one believes people when you tell them any of it.

But I've also seen people who do seem to be suffering emotionally. I can't just say there aren't people that don't have real problems. I can't say that even I don't have problems. Whether autism is the word any of us should be using or not, whether it's merely a difference or an illness or something else entirely, here we are all over this forum talking about coping in an NT world, in one way or another.

I feel that all illness that isn't age related or due to just being stupid and abusing one's body, is the natural response to civilization. Or at least civilization as we know it. I think that this push to control our most basic impulses nearly 24/7, to censor how we relate to each other, is maybe the most destructive thing ever. But utopian thinking never seems to get anyone where we think it will either. In fact, there are many different "utopian" vision out there, and most of the ones put into place have been catastrophic. Divide and conquer has always been the name of the game. I'm just not sure it's as much of a concerted effort as we think.....maybe most humans just suck most of the time. Who knows?

Anyhow, I'm not trying to hijack the discussion. And I guess to tie it into feminism.....I wonder if women in general are in denial? Is feminism different from women's rights? Should they be seen as separate. Everyone deserves to be treated with humanity. But I can't lift someone over my shoulder with ease and run out of a burning building with them. Do I have the right to ask that standards be altered for me? What about men? People speak of men lacking empathy.....I don't have enough close male friends to know if it's true....but hypothetically speaking, if it were, then should men raise children, or be in "nuturing" professions-teaching, nursing, etc.? There are disproportionate numbers of men who commit crimes, especially violent ones. But women are so, in my term, socially violent. The backstabbing, the inconsistent messages, gossip, rumors. Is it better to hit someone, where in a way, you can heal from an injury if not too severe, or to have your life ruined from inside a social circle purely through manipulative, verbal communication?

And are these just neurotypical traits. I know how I am personally, and haven't met people, in person, who I knew that might have really had the even the possibility of AS or other things on the spectrum......or if they did, I didn't know it......and while I like to think that people who are "different" are more honest, straightforward.....and I do think I am/ they are....couldn't anyone be caught up in their larger societies to some extent? I don't think that people can escape the influence of their home cultures wherever they come from, totally.

This.