Variations in the Presentation of AS Women

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I had these experiences, too. I often got "Sick" so that I could miss school. By the time I'd reached high school, I dropped out. Just couldn't take it.


Wow, that is true for me, as well. I have posted elsewhere that I am trying to get one of these types off my back. After I had time away from her, I realized that she was annoying me a lot, because she is trying to mother me. The whole concept of mothering is weird and suffocating to me, because my own mother neglected me. So it is a major irritant. And I do attract those types, too!

^ i find it really helpful to identify with many of you. thank you.
and thank you morgana for starting the thread as it helps me to understand others and also to understand others' experiences where they may be similar and also different from my own. that helps me in the journey of life.

sorry...me again...

regarding things that have been said about eating disorders...

I was the opposite of anorexic as a child....I had a very strong fixation on food that I used to help deal with the pain of my awkwardness. I WISH I had been able to be anorexic..as childhood obesity combined with social oblivian can only serve to stigmatize a person even more.

My very AS-ish mom, on the other hand, was anorexic...and still strongly limits her food intake while maintaining a major obsession with foods...

Would food-addiction be considered a valid example of a possible ASD-related eating disorder? Or does it only count if it is anorexia/bulemia?

Same here....practically the only females who have ever showed any interest in me as a friend whatsoever...

^ poopylungstuffing, my personal view is eating disorders take many forms, including food addiction, in the manner you describe. I do not in any way think it is limited to anorexic/bulimic behaviours, but more to a manifestaton of any kind of repetitive or regimented or routined behaviours around food and eating (which includes your experience as much as anyone else's.)

It is interesting that are two almost oposite theories about gender differences and AS:

- one is that women have more pressure to be social, and, because that, many female Aspies are more social than male Aspies and remains undiagnosed

- the other is that women have less pressure to be social (or perhaps more pressure to be non-social?), and, because that, many Aspie women remains undiagnosed, as her symptoms are more "socially acceptable" than in men.


I wonder if, in both theories (or in many theories about AS, or psychology in general) there is not much cultural parochialism.

I tend to agree with this one, because I, as a female Aspie, have lost count of how many times I have been urged to "smile!" Usually the person urging this odd behavior on me, is probably feeling threatened because I am not acting approachable by smiling. I have hardly ever heard anyone urging a male to smile, unless they are getting their picture taken.

Well if we assume that girls are trying to "adapt" by attempting to find strategies to mitigate their exclusion and facilitate inclusion (in peers groups etc), it would make sense if a number latched onto the clear message that for females being thin is highly advantageous (in fact they might mistake not being thin for a cause of their lack of popularity if they happen to be over-weight and this has been used as a means to tease them).

It (females are better-off socially if they are thin) is such a long strong loud message, that it is relatively accessible even for people with AS (who do not necessarily pick up the same "social common sense" messages with the same fluency as people without AS). Once someone with AS starts on this path, it can transition to an "encompassing interest". Restricting calorie intake as an all encompassing intense interest, is unlikely to end well.


"Officially", no idea, however unofficially, if someone has AS and their "relationship" with food is the focus of an intense, encompassing, preoccupying interest, then in my view, that would be ASD related.

I never did have an eating disorder, though I did think that I was fat, and ugly most of my life, even though I'm not even close to being fat. I kind of went another direction, and became obsessed with my looks, often spending lots of time on hair, and make up.

One of my special interests to this day is psychology. I'd gather up self-help books from the library, and once I got the internet read about psychology. I've made so many lists on things that I need to change about myself. I really believed that a big part of my problem was that I was flawed, and if I could just gather up enough willpower I could overcome my problems. When I wasn't able to, I thought that I was just weak.

I think that I could make a good profiler, because of my extensive study of human behavior. People think, and act in predictable patterns. Being able to detect these patterns became a coping skill for me. I can't tell if someone is lying to me by their body language, but if I'm given some time to intellectually run it all through my head I can tell by their pattern of behavior. I spent a lot of time just being on the sidelines just watching people, and how they interact.

I've also had many of the same expriences with female friends as others posted. I don't know if I'd necessarily call it 'mothering', though. It really felt kind of insulting, like I was a fixer upper friend. I've had women say things like " I'm going to give you a social/love life" "if only you weren't so quiet more people would get to know you, and like you" and my favorite "smile".

I was also a target for manipulative girls that just wanted someone that they could control. It wasn't hard to get me to do anything, or believe anything. I still constantly question my own perception of what I think is happening. When I was young, under the wrong influence I would easily become someone's puppet.

I would have loved to have done that at my evil junior high. But my mum was a nurse, and she could tell when I was lying... so I went to that awful school every day. I hid in the library when I could but they closed it on Wednesdays so I didn't know what to do with myself then.

I never lied either.
MY mother just never even noticed or asked. When my report cards came home with 30 and 35 days absent for some terms, she barely noticed, as i - and her other children - were outside of her spheres of interest. (Her main interest was always her engineer boyfriend or the one before that who was a junkstore hoarder and owner. neither of these men could look anyone in the face. They both talked on HIGH VOL. One scrunched up his eyes and tilted the head at the ceiling when he talked and had talk to the ear syndrome and both were socially impaired and isolated.....hmmmmm.....not a fan of diagnosing others .....but...........)

When I was a teenager I ate sparsely for a few years but never got to the anorexic stage. I was very passive and would never allow myself to have meltdowns as my sister did those and it never helped, only made everyone very uncomfortable and made my parents restrict her even more.
I realised my teen son could be autistic a year into therapy for his anorexia and depression when it suddenly struck me that our similar personalities looked like aspergers and then I read Attwood and he mentioned how adolescents often had school problems, depression and anorexia and that's how it was often picked up. I was pretty annoyed at the psychologist for not realising this as he is trained in adolescent psychology and my only clue was that an aspie on an NT forum had suggested to me years earlier that I sounded aspie and I had dismissed it as unlikely. When I heard that (my) face blindness was linked to aspergers I did some research and took the AQ test.
I'd say my son's anorexia was more the result of extremely fussy eating and the depresstion which came from Chronic Fatigue. He's trying hard to get his weight back within normal limits but needs a lot of encouragement and positive feedback.


My passion over the years has been psychology and self help though I was never able to take any formal study as I have a word finding problem and I seem to do everything in slow motion, both of which get in the way of exams and assignments. So I just read things randomly that take my interest.
I remember well when I was very young and my mother explained to a neighbour how different in personality my sister and I were and that started the spark. Then I realised I wasn't like anyone else as I was isolated in the playground and liked to watch the top of the school building glide past the clouds while imagining the clouds were stationary and the earth was visibly spinning. Meanwhile the kids were racing around making lots of noise in some strange cohesive mass while I stood apart in my imaginary world.

As a teenager I hid in my bedroom most of the time trying to figure out why my large family acted the way they did. I had imaginary conversations on the way to school while looking at the ground as I walked and was teased for talking to myself. I was practicing over and over what to say to people, if only I had the nerve. After watching my out of control sister I worked out the best strategies to earn brownie points from my parents. In high school I escaped bullies by sticking with another 2 girls who were odd, shy and intellectual even though we had little in common, we felt safe together. I wanted to wear fashionable clothes just so I wouldn't appear so odd. There was certainly social pressure to conform but I was also repulsed by the older sister who had gone down the whole popularity, fashion and boys route which was an affront to my highly moral stance of the time.

All this was good fodder for my analytical mind as I tried to figure out why people acted this way. I didn't discover psychology as a formal subject until years later as I was bought up in a very deprived English neighbourhood where university was a far away place for the privileged upper class. So I'd say my interest was biological, not social.

I have also had a huge variety of interests which are secondary to psychology and each of which have consumed me at first then gradually or sometimes suddenly eased off to be replaced by my next passion. Things like nutrition and other health issues have been typical but even an interest in whether learning to draw faces could help me with the face blindness can grip me for weeks till I realise it's more about the overall facial snapshot than individual features that I need for recognition.

In my school there was a policy (middle school, upward, not in grades kindergarten thru 6th). We automatically failed a class if we had more than 9 unexcused absences every nine weeks. Unexcused meaning no doctor's note. If we were absent because of a chronic illness we could bring notes from doctors and have our absences excused. I never had such notes.
I could have easily had much more than 35 absences each term but because of that policy, I did not. Realizing you can fail classes and not graduate on time is a great motivator not to be absent.

I missed lots and lots of school every year. There was not a day in elementary school after a certain point that I did not have the impulse to go to the nurse's office to go home. Every year, my parents went to speak to the principal to ask that she let their poor sensitive nervous wreck of a daughter pass even though I had missed more than the limit of days. A lot of the other stuff on this thread is creepily similar to what I went through. I HAD to have the ability to doodle at my desk. My mom actually believed I had the RIGHT to doodle at my desk if it helped me cope. I think she tried to defend my doodling to my (2nd) 4th grade teacher who perpetually had to confiscate my notebooks over and over and over again. My thing was fake ads for imaginary products...or I would rewrite and illustrate fairy tales....and rewrite the same part of the same story over and over and over again in different wording....If I could not have a doodle pad then I felt really tortured and squirmy...i spent a lot of time in class counting objects around the room..another thing I would do is roll a pencil under my feet till all the paint came off and then decorate the pencil...it was less noticeable than the doodle pad..A lot of my socializing consisted of me drawing stuff for people. Sometimes I would do portraits. I also carried around a theasarus and other books and would go around telling people synonyms for words. I would also spout off facts on whatever subject I happened to be absorbed in at the time....and this gave people the impression that I knew a lot about stuff so people would come up to me and ask me questions about various things...(and I frequently knew the answers or had some remote idea anyway...) I was an info sponge and there was some info that I seemed to pull from the air....like in music class I was really good at identifying the composer of a song by the style even if I was not exactly positive of who it was....(i don't think I could do that now...and I don't know where a lot of the info came from...except that my dad is a musician and naturally in to classical music, so i had been exposed to it.) During library, we were given a test on the dewey decimal system, and I made an A and the rest of the class failed...since I was little I was really fixated on the library, and i wanted to be a librarian....but overall my ability to function academically within the constraints of the regular class work and meltdown causing homework....was extremely stunted....My working skills were beyond those of my peers...I was the best reader in my classes....I made the highest scores in the school on the standardised tests while my class work was simply dismal.

One thing that i did that might be "atypical" for an aspie (along with the food addiction as opposed to anorexia)....I impulsively told stories. I would not lie about things that were real, but stuff was constantly popping into my head and i had the strong compulsion to say it even though it was not real or true...Much of it was highly unbelievable and even a bit disturbing....
It certainly helped me estrange myself from the herd even more.
I also started stealing things when I was young...not from other people, but from shops. It was a form of stim...I think....it was something that made me feel in control and better about myself..it was part of my secret world.

I noticed that my possibly AS-seeming young cousin...who eventually committed suicide as a teen ...had many similar tendencies when he was little....and he also had a bluntness to him and he would constantly say offensive things to people....(no filter on social appropriateness...no filter between fantasy and reality) ...he stole things too...

I always told stories, only I kinda believed them myself. Apparently my teachers noticed it and put it on my reports...

Oh wow, I had this experience a lot! And I always wondered why I attracted these strange, controlling types so often. At first, I would allow them into my life due to social naivete, I guess. But after having some particularly bad experiences with some, I now avoid them like the plague!

Yeah, I also never got "mothering" peers (not in a nice way, at least) when I was young. (But have had plenty of these destructive types, mostly as a teenager and as a young woman). Nowadays, though, as an adult, a few of my friends warn me or tell me about social things. I guess they notice that I miss things, so they may mention something. They are hardly mothering, this is just something that may happen once or twice, due to a particular situation. I would not want to have friends who "mother" me, the word kind of puts me off.

Regarding what Attwood said about that; first off, remember that he´s looking from the outside in. I think still not a lot is known about AS girls and women, they´re still trying to figure it out. In addition, "peers" are not a set quantity; in other words, one group of people may be totally different from another, so one can´t judge too much by "peers". Some groups of people are just more accepting and accommodating than others, mostly due to education and upbringing. (I have definitely noticed this in my own life). Basically, much of what is said about peers should be taken with a grain of salt, because each person is going to have a different experience, depending on the people around them. Some people happen to be more understanding, and some are just a-holes! And these people seem to band together and have similar thoughts and feelings....a lot of it, I think, is just the luck of the draw.