Male vs female Asperger

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If one’s autism is “severe” enough, “masking” is an impossibility.

One can usually “mask” very well when one has autism unaccompanied by severe cognitive challenges.

The ability to “mask” does not preclude one from being autistic.

Just like having a moderate cold does not preclude one from restraining a cough.

Aaah, so maybe I was masking all along: just without awareness of what I was doing, or strategy for doing it.
That would make sense

If you weren’t aware of it, and had no particular conscious “strategy,” then I wouldn’t call it “masking” via my narrow definition of it.

Via a broadened definition which takes into account the subconscious, then much “masking” occurs in autism—and, to a lesser extent, in all people.

Via the broadest definition, all is “masking” when an action or impulse is not derived purely from instinct, especially when there is an effort to transcend instinct, whether consciously or subconsciously.

Fairy snuff

Whatever it is I’ve been doing may not have a specific term.

Struggling in ignorance?
..............................................
Ah, you added more and I didn’t notice! Whoops!

Yeah, I have spent a lot of time controlling my instincts/inclinations, so far as doing the complete opposite of what I feel the urge to do sometimes.

Thanks to the men who replied! I'd love to hear more male experiences with this concept of "masking". Maybe I'll start a thread for it so that we aren't derailing this one too much, although I believe it's still on point.

@ Karamazov I don't know how to frame or define my masking history either. I wasn't diagnosed until two years ago, far into my adulthood. Prior to that I didn't consciously know I was "faking" anything, because I truly wasn't. I did my best to be friendly to people as all human beings should do, but I didn't script conversations or try to be someone I wasn't. I didn't even know that faking, scripting or rehearsing was "a thing" because I'm rather clueless socially, and I didn't have those skills. Instead, I would go mute or stuff up interactions with people by not knowing what to say. I was a sink or swim type of girl, and I sank. Repeatedly. I ended up alone most of the time because I didn't know what I was doing wrong, or how to compensate. In that respect, masking or scripting might have helped but I had no idea how.

I have always stimmed in public, and always had odd mannerisms that I couldn't didn't know I was supposed to repress. My mother said that I looked ret*d and I shouldn't behave the way I did, but I had no ability to mask any of that. It just happened, continually, because that's who I was.

The only specific example I remember of something like definite masking, was when I was about six or seven. My mother and grandmother told me I didn't make eye contact and that I stared at people too uncomfortably when I was forced to meet their gaze. As a result I sat and watched television news reporters with a sand timer, and counted how many times they blinked in a minute. Then I would rush to the mirror and try to replicate the blink timing, slowly removing the sand timer so I could estimate a "normal" pattern by intuition. You can just imagine how ineffective this was. It made things worse because I was focussed on counting my blinks rather than listening to the other person. Then, I was scolded for being spaced out and not paying attention in conversation.

Anyway sorry for the long rant. My point is that some men do mask quite a bit, whether it's conscious or not, and some women do mask very poorly (if at all) because they don't know how, don't want to, or simply can't.

It's hard for me when I read about masking as being primarily a feminine strategy, because then I feel like I missed the boat ... yet again. Just another example of how I couldn't keep up with the girls -- not even the autistic ones.

Last edited by IsabellaLinton on 02 May 2020, 11:16 am, edited 1 time in total.

When was born growing up early 40's too small to know what masking was but learned to because my dad would scold for bad behavior so was a coping skill.When tested a few yrs ago the puzzle fell to gather autism and a couple of problems.

@IsabellaLinton Hah! Yes, the slow realisation that you’ve spent years trying your best to do what you think everyone else is doing, when in fact you’ve been doing something utterly different!

I still go mute quite a lot: it’s the one thing Mrs K finds really irritating (because it gets in the way of working out how to deal with everything else).

Didn’t have that sort of behavioural control thing from my family: violent meltdowns/losing it were met with disciplinary measures as I’ve mentioned upthread, but apart from that I was allowed to be as I was.
A couple of years ago was talking with mum when dad wasn’t there and she told me she’d known all four of us were “different in your own unique ways” when we were little, and had decided to focus on making sure we all felt as loved and happy as she could.
Oh, I’m a bit teary now...

Actually come to think of it: dad did take against my stimming by hurling myself around the room... although he never went further than shouting (well, I can sort of understand that one: a five foot ten sixteen year old leaping and crashing about the upper floor of an old house with flaky plaster was probably quite alarming... and noisy)

Don’t remember ever being told not to hand flap or fiddle with zips, buttons etc...
for that there was the “kindness” of teenagers to incentivise me to chew my cheek or clench my teeth so hard it hurt instead.

Yeah, hear hear and suchlike to gendered strategy stuff being an irritant: that’s far too simplistic to account for all the variation of paths through life we’ve had, and has potentially invalidatory/ableist implications for any of us that don’t fit it as a model.

Ten Gold Stars for the Man with the Guitar.



My point, exactly.

I have a very big smile on now

Am.

Those were perfect words. I feel invalidated when I hear that I was supposed to mask well, in keeping with my genital structure. Well guess what? I didn't know how to mask. Insert the word "ableism" and possibly the word "sexism" to those stereotypes.

The hype about girls masking suggests I was a #femalefailure as well as a #socialfailure.

Of course some people (male and female and non-binary) are good at masking, but it's not true of everyone and it isn't even part of the diagnostic criteria. SO THERE!

I fully understand why you're bothered by such generalisations, but try not to see that stuff as a personal failure, Isabella, you're perfect just the way you are

As a side note, I always had significant sensory issues since I was a kid (QFT's vivid description of his train trip scared the hell out of me lol). Later in life, I turned masking into a form of art. It had some benefits but ended up costing me so much in the long run that I regret doing it. I've spent a lot of time and effort on "unmasking" and still struggle with it.

Urgh. Yuck:
I’ve always hated being judged on criteria based upon my genitals too, it just feels like being forced to choose between being caged by someone else’s thoughts for no good reason, or being #malefailure as well as #socialfailure... with an option of #aspiefailure for afters.

Oh: just thought if you ever want to peruse some examples of how silly and laughable gender stereotypes can get, get hold of my current book Chopin at the Boundaries: the hilariousness of C19th music criticism with regards to the gendering of different compositions involved is spectacular: they even found away to be homophobic about piano instrumentals.
PIANO INSTRUMENTALS!

Thank you! It's been a bad week for me for other reasons, and I'm feeling low on self-confidence.

My question is where are people supposed to learn these masking skills? I keep hearing it's a cultural expectation for girls to follow certain norms. Sure, I saw those norms on TV and at school but how was I supposed to deconstruct and emulate any of it? My mother's input was critical "You look ret*d" rather than constructive "You might want to try xyz". I didn't have older sisters. I had lots of female cousins but all in different countries, and all of them were presented as "better than me" by my mother. They were Cinderella and I was just a defect. I didn't have female friends, and when I did have a couple of acquaintances I couldn't copy everything they said and did, or they would reject me. I couldn't shut off my quirks if I had wanted to.

NT females learn social skills by instinct, or so they say, but the salient characteristic of autism is that I didn't have that intuition. Nothing came naturally, not even smiling. I didn't know you could buy a book "How to Mimic the Herd", and there was no internet for me to read up on "How to Appear Normal". I didn't know I was autistic so I just thought and believed I was a defective loser. There was no other way to make sense of it, and no set of skills being taught to me in compensation. (I'm glad I didn't have ABA, but it would have been nice if SOMEONE took time to teach me about life as a human girl).

I remember when I was 13 I wanted to grow up and be a child psychologist so I could figure out "that thing that I have". I didn't know what to call it, but I assumed I had a separate type of personality and I wasn't formed properly on the human being assembly line. I could picture the factory machines squirting "human personalities" into everyone except me. I must have fallen off the assembly track somehow. I felt like I wasn't fully formed, emotionally or socially, because I was missing the requisite parts. I had no idea that I could pretend to have them, when I didn't.

^ I also thought I was a defective loser, thought I was evil by default and that everything bad I experienced or felt was merited and deserved by my inherent awfulness.
At one point I fantasised I was a demonic entity and the world was a hell that had been created to torment me.

In my case, it started with being severely punished for acting in any way out of the ordinary. I started imitating others' behaviour as a way of survival and for a long time it still came across "wrong", as there are so many nuances to "normal" behaviour that NTs just do by instinct and they can pick on the smallest discrepancy. Took me decades to realise that my body language was rubbing people the wrong way as it wasn't aligning well with rest, which usually gives people the idea that you're lying. I even had a friend point out to me that my style and appearance gave conflicting signals about which "tribe" I belonged to and some reacted in a hostile or aggressive way because they couldn't "place" me - he thought I was doing it on purpose

Yes, it can get that complicated and crazy