Australians discussing asperger's joke

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http://www.mamamia.com.au/weblog/2011/0 ... s-gag.html

what's your take on this? I thought it would be a good idea for us say what WE think of it, as apparently they are discussing it without (many) of us .

I saw this last night, and I must say that I didn't take any offense to it. She wasn't dissing ALL people with Asperger's, as many assume when they read the articles on an "Asperger's joke"; she was dissing the posing douchebags who use their undiagnosed "mild Asperger's" as an excuse to be a total ass. Yes, those people exist, and I have met several of them in real life (and even more online.)

I think people need to calm down on the matter.

I couldn’t stand it if you thought less of Denise because of a misunderstood gag.

And then they wonder why the 'real' Aspies might not have gotten the joke...

Well, everytime I mention I have Asperger's, I get "the look". There's not many people left who believe asperger's is a real thing, I just think these jokes don't help the matter.

i don't understand the part about celiac... they say that the joke is that it's not behavioral, but... i'm lactose intolerant and so is one of my friends, and while i can take pills to eat dairy, she can't... and she has gotten in TROUBLE for "refusing to eat cheese" when she had explained at least 5 times by that point why eating cheese would make her SICK... then she got a blank stare and a dismissive "well just eat it really fast, you'll be fine."

i think the problem with NTs and non-disabled people is that they don't realize just HOW stupid some people can be... so they make jokes that seem hilariously ridiculous to them, and then we don't laugh because that's how people actually behave towards us!

...which is why I fully support laughing at their ignorance. The Autism Comedy Network... but then ,when we make fun of NT's we'd be called bitter and self serving. The joke is always funny when it's not about you...

Just eat cheese really fast... Really?! We are talking middle school level biology here... the digestive system. My body can't digest dairy so just eat it really fast? What?!

There really is no excuse for that kind of ignorance other than being dumb.

the particularly upsetting bit was how accommodating SHE was being towards THEM already! she is jewish and vegan (or vegetarian, but i'm pretty sure vegan) and she ate BACON there, just to be polite! she broke pretty much all of her rules, except for the one that was actually physical.

there was another girl there who was allergic to pretty much everything (well not everything, but LOTS of allergies... couldn't have wheat, milk,.... i forget a lot of it, but allergic to a lot of things and has lots of health problems, goes to the hospital a lot) and they made her buy pretty much all her own food rather than providing it like they did for everyone else... >>

edited to mention: there was also a guy (well, girl, but she hadn't realized she was trans yet so i shall refer to her as a guy) who flat-out refused to eat mcdonalds. there, i understand them being less than sympathetic, since that wasn't so much a medical condition as "it makes me feel sick, i'm not eating it" type of thing. but then we had to walk a bit to a football (soccer) game, and he started shaking and slowing down. i stayed with him and he was pretty much incoherent and begging for food. skipping dinner wouldn't be a super big deal for most people, but... he is/was at least 6 feet tall, and his weight ranged between 95-100 pounds. for those who might not know, that is the OPPOSITE of a healthy weight. i'm more of a healthy weight than that (same weight but shorter) and i get sick when i don't eat, so i can't imagine how he felt... and he(she) can't either, since later i asked her (sorry about the switching pronouns, but this was later) and she said that she doesn't actually remember walking there... she was starting to walk and then suddenly was in the stadium with the girl with allergies making her eat one of her onigiri...

the reason i mention this was there was one of the chaperones with us (possibly the same one, not that it matters, they were all the same) and she flat-out REFUSED to let us stop at one of the gazillion food stands along the sidewalk! when someone is SHAKING from lack of food, and are as thin as he was, it's time to stop being bitter about their "refusal" to eat and start being concerned about the health of the teenagers left in your care! -_-

(btw, the main reason i was switching pronouns is that once she started transitioning, she gained a little bit of weight since females are shaped differently. now she can actually sit in a chair without pain, she couldn't before because she was just THAT THIN. it's not that she didn't eat, though, she normally eats a TON so i have no clue why she's so thin (she's still ridiculously thin, just not as extreme now))

Last edited by torako on 08 Apr 2011, 12:12 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Neither funny nor original. Two Americans told this joke already- Dennis Leary and Michael Savage. The exact same outcry ensued and rightly so. Whenever this joke gets told, there's always the same rationale: that people who really suffer are of course not included. It never occurs to them that you can't tell this from the outside. It also never occurs to them that it's a lot easier to fix a problem once you understand why it's happening. What these people really want when they tell this joke is a license to say, "you're a bad person- stop trying to say you aren't".

I think the comment thread after the article has a really healthy debate going on. So that's good.

WTF? Quite apart from the fact that people have the right to choose what goes into their bodies regardless, saying to someone to eat anything that makes them sick is downright stupid and to refuse to allow a really hungry person stop for food is just cruel.

Personally, I did get sick (stuck on the loo) multiple times when I ate various things at McDonalds (a few different branches). I don't eat meat anymore so I don't eat there (except sometimes ice-cream) much now. I never got stuck on the loo from eating their ice-cream.

About the original subject, I didn't think it was funny until she was talking about what the girl who said she had intellectual problems said to her. The first part made no sense to me, I don't see why they thought she was funny.

This is simple irresponsibility and inflexibility. Especially if you are in charge of a group with special dietary needs. Even companies make accomodations for vegans and dietary concerns at corporate functions. If you choose not to eat at McDonald's on ethical grounds, then be prepared to fend for yourself. But if you have legitimate dietary needs - it is just cruelty. I know how fast my moods swing with changes in my blood sugar... it's irresponsible for a chaperone not to account for the needs of their charges.

And, looping it all back to the OP; it's funny until someone gets hurt by the ignorance. just like this example by torako.

they pretty much were angry at us about everything, constantly... i got yelled at for having a migrane at some point...

Torako, what kind of trip was this (if you don't mind me asking)? And who organised it (if you don't mind me asking)?

They shouldn't have been in charge of a lightning rod on a calm day though.

I thought one of the prerequisites for a "joke" was that it had to be funny.

This could, potentially, be part of the "build-up" for a joke - but as a flat statement, there doesn't seem to be any element of humor there. Maybe I just don't get it, but I don't find the statement offensive, or funny - just stupid.

I agree. It really is just a flat statement, not a joke. If you strip away all the specifics such as "Aspergers" or "celiac disease", what you are left with is the unfunny flat statement that "people with hypochondria annoy me".

Yeah I completely agree.

I really can't stand when people say "People like that exist so it's okay to perpetuate stereotypes because it's about them, not about us." No. There is a long-standing stereotype that says that lots and lots of disabled people are faking it -- to get attention, to get a break from society, to get disability benefits (because they pay so much money, you know? ), as license to be a jerk, whatever.

Honestly? I think people who talk about "People who use AS as an excuse to be a jerk" are most often the ones looking for an excuse to be a jerk.

It works like this: The nonautistic person sees an autistic person who has done something very autistic -- taken something too literally, not realized someone was joking, been blunt about something without understanding people can be sensitive about it, failed to notice and respond to the body language (or implied meanings, if online) of everyone around them, whatever. The nonautistic person then starts flaming the autistic person -- very angry at them, maybe feeling self-righteous, belittling, maybe even mocking, all about how they are in the right and the autistic person is in the wrong and the autistic person is a Very Bad Person. The autistic person says "Er, I'm autistic, how was I supposed to pick up on that?"

At that point, the nonautistic person faces a dilemma. In a lot of societies, it's considered really a terrible thing to flip out on someone for something they can't help because of a disability. In fact, in a lot of societies, it's considered the lowest of the low. The nonautistic person at that point is internally flip-flopping between "I want so badly to be angry at this person and express that anger in any way I want to because this person is in the wrong," and "OMG, maybe I just did something that I've been taught since childhood is a terrible social sin in itself." Also, they probably have a lot of stereotypes of what "real autism" is, and very few autistic people actually meet these stereotypes. And they've probably heard the stereotype of "people who say they have AS as an excuse to be a jerk". And they have this strong idea to be angry and maybe even cruel without any annoying moral implications of doing this to someone who can't help it.

So they then say, "You're not really autistic, you're just making excuses for being a jerk." They don't actually know this. They have no possible way of knowing this, especially given the number of autistic people who can pass for nonautistic in certain situations (including people who actually do look very stereotypically autistic, but where each stereotypically autistic behavior is explained away by those around them as being "crazy", "attention seeking", whatever, and so everyone remembers "crazy" or "attention seeking" instead of the behavior... I've had this happen to me before even when I was doing things that people who knew a lot about autism knew looked very autistic). They're just making a judgement call and frankly they're doing it because they want to be a jerk to autistic people without having to answer for it to anyone or to their own conscience.

There's another dimension of this that is really ugly, too: The stereotype itself. The stereotype of "fake autistic people using it as an excuse to be a jerk" is rampant on the Internet. Far more rampant than actual autistic people who do this. And the stereotype is really just a specific example of the stereotype that lots of disabled people are faking it to get perceived benefits to being disabled. (Few people realize that being perceived as disabled has too many awful parts for the benefits to make up for them, and therefore it's only a small number of people who do this.) I remember reading somewhere that the term "angry black woman" just sort of... rolls off the tongue, in a disturbing way, it's like it's very easy for people to think that stereotype is real. Well... the person faking a disability for perceived social benefits is just as easy for people to think.

Worse, here's how stereotyping usually works for those who do it. They hear the stereotype enough that it gets lodged into their brain. Then, they see one example of someone that they think looks like that stereotype. It only takes one, and it doesn't even have to be a real one. It could be a woman in a wheelchair who can wiggle her toes -- they don't have to understand you don't have to be paralyzed to need a wheelchair, or that you can be paralyzed and have body parts that move around either due to the paralysis being partial or due to nerves firing off and causing spasms. They just have to think that this person really fits the stereotype. So they see this one person, and the stereotype does this thing in their brain. The stereotype makes it seem as if this person is but one representative of thousands of people like this. So even if they see people like this (or that they think are like this) infrequently, they'll say "Oh yeah people like that exist, I've seen plenty of them." And they'll honestly believe this.

The stereotypes also cause "faking" to pop into their head as the first explanation any time they see a disabled person acting what they think is out of character for that disabled person. Hell, it might even pop into their head just every time they see a disabled person... they're just looking for it. I remember riding with my brother through Berkeley, and seeing two blind people using white canes and looking around and pointing at things. My brother said, "They don't look very blind." My brother didn't understand that lots of people are blind enough to need white canes while still having some residual vision. Some blind people who can see sort of well enough to get around to some degree, use white canes to warn traffic that they can't see cars and that they need to drive carefully around them. All of these things are perfectly legitimate and all of these people count as legally blind. But the first thing my brother's mind jumped to when he saw them was that they probably weren't really blind.

So think of the scenarios in question. The emotions are probably already heated. The nonautistic person wants to dislike someone for what they're doing, maybe even wants to be a little cruel in response to what they perceive as the person being a jerk. (And in some cases, the person outright wants to bully someone and have an excuse for it, without actually perceiving the person as a jerk.) And you combine that sort of heated emotion with the stereotype of disabled people faking it and the specific stereotype of people saying they have AS to be a jerk, and the first thing that pops into their head is to say the autistic person is just faking it so they can be a jerk. It just "rolls off the tongue". They do this enough (and/or simply hear about it enough), and they'll say "Oh yeah, seen it all the time", and become some of the people who perpetuate the stereotype. And this is how it spreads.

Since I don't have the stereotype in my head as real, I react differently to meeting people who use autism as an excuse to be a jerk. (Yes, there are a few. There's a few of anything you could possibly think of out there. And I'm not making a judgement about whether or not they're autistic here, I'm just talking about people who do actively cruel things and blame autism.) I don't think "This person is a representative of this widespread phenomenon," I think "This is one person."

There's one person I know who is terrible this way, he walks up to people and deliberately screams insults at them unprovoked (and I mean the n-word, the r-word, etc., and these are not tics), acts physically threatening towards them, and then accuses them of abuse if they do anything to defend themselves, and then does the "I'm just a poor little autistic person who's being abused" routine (and will actually lie about the insult-screaming thing, saying it never happened and the person is just making it up in order to persecute him). Yes, it's terrible that he does this. But he is one person. One. He's not representative of a trend, he's just himself. (And he's definitely autistic. The character of his lies alone make that blatantly obvious, because few people besides an autistic person would (a) be such a terrible liar and (b) come up with some of the things he says that are based on clearly autistic perceptions of the world that he assumes nonautistic people share... like confusing two totally different-looking people for each other because they wear the same shoes.) Interestingly enough, he's one of the biggest promoters I've ever seen of this stereotype, not because he fits it, but because he is constantly complaining about people just like him (not just in that way with that stereotype, but in a number of other ways with a number of other stereotypes).

But okay. I've met a handful of people who use autism as an excuse to be jerks to people. On the other hand, I've seen easily dozens of exchanges on the Internet where autistic people make very, very autistic social mistakes, and are then flamed to a crisp by everyone around them. Then the autistic person says "Er... I did that because I'm autistic, not because I wanted to hurt anyone," and then the people who were flaming them go "Oh don't pull that trick, you're just one of those people who's saying that as an excuse to be a jerk and I'm not going to listen to this BS." And continue to flame the person, or in some cases be even more cruel to them than just flaming -- mocking, belittling, all kinds of awful things.

So I weigh the handful of people I've known who seem to actually fit the stereotype, against the huge number of people I've known who made honest autistic mistakes and had the stereotype thrown at them by people who were flaming them to a crisp. (Including many instances where it's actually a long-term bullying situation where when the person points out they're autistic the bullies accuse them of saying that as an excuse to be a jerk... because "that person's a jerk" is their excuse to bully them.) And there's no contest. The stereotype is more damaging than the very few people who fit it.

However, autistic people are not blameless here.

When autistic people hear about things like this, they don't want to be targeted by it themselves. Some of them don't do anything different, are just afraid of it, which is fine. Some of them speak out against it, also fine. Others, though. Others do their own role in perpetuating it.

The way autistic people perpetuate it is by distancing themselves from it while claiming that it's true of lots of other people. "Oh yeah, I'm a real autistic person, I can't stand those people who use it as an excuse, make us all look bad." "Oh they're not talking about us real autistic people, they're talking about those ones who fake it so they can use it as an excuse to be a jerk. Trust me, they're everywhere. I've met them."

Doing those things may help those people personally distance themselves from the stereotype, but it does not help autistic people as a whole because it perpetuates the stereotype and the rest of us (particularly those prone to making major social gaffes because of autism, which is most of us) are still at risk of being accused of this. I tried to come up with analogies to this from other disadvantaged groups I'm part of, but honestly I couldn't think of one that would make the point because every stereotype I thought of was one that people here would probably believe to some degree.

So I don't consider it okay to simply distance oneself from such a harmful stereotype while acting like the stereotype is justified because "people like that are out there". Or worse... some autistic people seem so invested in the stereotype themselves that they will accuse other autistic people of using autism as an excuse, and they do this on a hair-trigger of even the slightest example of "I really did that because I'm autistic and I took it literally" or whatever. All of these things are bad. Not just for the autistic people they are targeting, but for all the other autistic people who have to be subject to this stereotyping. Because every time one person perpetuates the stereotype, lots and lots of other people pick up on it and become those who perpetuate it themselves.

Which is why, whenever I have the language to do so, I try to explain all this. It's complicated enough that I don't know how to do it briefly. It's funny that way, isn't it? It's so easy to perpetuate a stereotype. You can perpetuate this stereotype with one sentence. But to try to explain why it's not true and how it's spread and why people perceive it to be true, while it isn't true, and to explain how it perpetuates, to hold it up to the light and explain why and how it harms people, that can take paragraphs upon paragraphs. Oh well.

a group of 20 junior high and high school students from my city going to our sister city in japan. it was organized by the city. =P

i understand being strict with junior high students, but every person i've mentioned so far was in high school at the time... we can take care of ourselves, we don't need to be forced to eat things that we know will make us sick...

the high school students were also pretty much the only ones who knew ANY japanese at all... our chaperones didn't (and got offended when we politely corrected their huge and blatant mistakes... "wateeshi" is not "watashi", no matter how much you yell at me...)