What AS issues do you feel are ---

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What AS issues do you feel are swept under the rug? Important topics that Aspies and/or NT's are uncomfortable talking about, forget to talk about, or are widely ignorant of.

I'm asking this because soon I want to start my own Aspie vlog, where I cover things that few if any have covered in the past.

Sex.

I think generally it's assumed that aspies are asexual (same with all people with 'disabilities'), those of us who are not asexual (and who can get sexual partners) can still face problems that is hard for NT's to understand such as intimacy or the myriad of sensory issues or OCD issues that can get in the way of having a 'normal' sex life. We on the spectrum can also be far more prone to sexual abuse and being taken advantage of - if you consider female NT's can be taken advantage of, pressured into sex, have sex tied-in to their self-esteem/self-worth, idea's about sex being required in a relationship, etc. imagine then how much more complicated it may be for aspies.

I think that sex in general is complex and with many pitfalls, with many issues that people face relating to sex and sexuality, but if you then add asperger's or autism to the subject it's beyond comprehension at times for even us to understand what's going on with your sex lives or sexuality, let alone our NT partners or other NT's in our lives. I've posted this link before, but I think this is a very light-hearted look at sex from the perspective of an aspie - What it's like to have sex with someone with Asperger's - this is about the only things I've ever seen about sex and aspies, other than articles looking at sexual abuse of people on the spectrum from a carer or psychological perspective.

I don't think you can talk about sex and asperger's without mentioning abuse because I think it is a real problem, although no all aspies ever face abuse or are even at risk of sexual abuse as a result of AS, I do think many of us can't really see when we're being abused so most of us may be at higher risk. I am a sexual abuse victim, although sexual abuse I faced as an adult was down to more than just the AS, the abuse in my childhood was most certainly down to being on the spectrum.

Thanks for sharing the article. The writer is endearingly odd.

That's an interesting point on how some Aspies may have not realized they were being violated. Young aspies tend to be so out of touch with social norms, that they may believe what they're experiencing is "what normal people do".

It's certainly a dark topic, and one that needs raised awareness (that hopefully leads to lessened risks). I cannot speak from experience on sexual abuse. That's why I'd like to ask you some questions in PM, if you're comfortable with that.

You can PM me, can't say if I'd be comfortable until I know what you say, lol.
Feel free to PM me and we'll see.

Job placement. Other than driving, job hunting is probably the biggest mismatch with autistic traits there is, combining the aspects of establishing and maintaining a social network, cold calling, meeting strangers, selling yourself to strangers, and finding strange places (as a bonus, you might have to drive there, too!). Also, at least in the computer field, a lot of job interviews are designed to see how quickly a person can think under stress, which AS people don't do well. Someone otherwise well-qualified for a job could get bombed out of existence in the job search and interview process. Right now, there are "executive placement" firms which place managers and highly skilled people - I'd love to see (and would even pay for) a "autistic placement" firm that does a lot of the social connections such as doing cold calls, selling a person's skills and previous track record, etc to get their foot in the door. Once all that happened, for example, a technical interview about a position wouldn't be nearly as bad. The placement firm would explain autism to the company, and both strengths and weaknesses to expect.

I feel that the subjects that we are great at and the ones we aren't are ignored and the fact we're the high function autism people seem to mix up autism with aspergers and vice-versa

I agree about both sex and job-hunting.

- Using sense of humor in bad situations. Nonautistics can do this, but I can't, because bad situations aren't funny. This is the only nonautistic ability I'd really like to have.

- Instead of the hammering on social skills that nonautistics think we need, I'd really like to know from them how to discourage them, without causing bad feeling, from talking to me, acting as if they're related to me and including me in their social groupthink.

Funny thing about having a job. I'm not offically dx with AS, but I'm going in next week to a psychologist to talk to him about that and ADD.
I work as a tech support phone rep. My brain hurts almost every day. At least it helps me with understanding people...sorta. That or I've made auto mannerisms to coupe with people. I still can't tell when someone is upset. Or when people get happy I dunno what to say, lol.

I don't know if it's swept under the rug (there is more than one "adult" forum here, but I haven't yet explored them much), but I would second the suggestion that sex is something important to talk about from an Aspie perspective. (Or Aspie-like - I don't know yet what I am.)

I don't know if I was sexually abused as a child (but I was badly abused in other ways, and my sexuality has always been odd, to say the least), but I have definitely been sexually abused as an adult (and violently attacked, in one case by the same person - moreover, in front of witnesses, who did nothing to protect me, and excused the abuser and attacker, until she went on to try the same things with someone else), even though I'm male (but transgendered), and most people would probably think that what happened to me was either impossible, or else insignificant. (In fact I very frequently wake up in deep distress thinking of those events of 25 years ago.)

Abuse aside, this is a topic which preoccupies me hugely, because (although it would take several long posts to begin to explain this properly) I have long been aware that there is a deep, undeniable, but mysterious connection between what kind of sexuality I have and what kind of mind I have.

No-one has ever understood this! (And I don't understand it myself, I'm only aware of it.)

When (only recently, towards the end of last year) I began to explore more seriously the possibility that I might be autistic in some way (it's tricky, because of my age, 59, and the long series of things that have happened in the last 40 years of my life), I began for the first time to glimpse for the first time the possibility that it might be one and the same person (my long-buried younger self, aged about 19) who has this peculiar kind of sexuality, and this peculiar kind of mind, which moreover has at least many things in common with the kind of mind that Aspies have. The connection between sexuality and thinking came to seem less like a puzzling abstract hypothesis, and more of a living (if long-buried) reality.

I think the kind of sexuality you have follows from the kind of mind you have, not the other way around. Did your decision to change your physical gender coincide with admitting more language into your mind? There appears to be a strong connection between language and thoughts about one's own identity. I am a heterosexual male but I wouldn't mind much if tomorrow morning I'd magically wake up as a heterosexual female. I'd be in the same situation experienced from a different perspective. Being "male" (and a bunch of other labels that together would make up a potent sense of identity in a verbal mind) doesn't mean all that much to me.

That might well be.

I don't have any clear thoughts on this myself, not yet. All I'm sure of is that these two aspects of identity (my identity, at least) are connected, in a way which one never normally sees suggested as even a possibility. (Except in the writings of W. R. Bion, perhaps? Not someone I want to try to read at the moment!)

Can you say anything about why you think the influence goes in this direction, rather than the other direction?

That's an interesting question, and an unexpected one.

I take it you are referring to my reply yesterday, on page 2 of the thread "Can you drive?", to what you said about "splitting" in the NT mind.

I didn't decide to change gender. When I say I'm transgendered, I mean the term in the broad general sense, as defined for instance on the Wikipedia page for "transgender". A fair approximation to what I mean, more specifically, is that I think I would be infinitely more comfortable if I were free to wear what are conventionally regarded as "women's clothes" (even though skirts and dresses probably make more anatomical sense, for men, than trousers, with a seam just where it gets in the way!), and I would then relax and behave more in a way that is conventionally regarded as "feminine".

(I don't have any clear thoughts about the degree to which gender roles are determined by convention and the degree to which they are determined by biology.)

I'm extremely constrained, suffocated, and twisted up inside, from having to occupy the conventional "male" role (even though it does have some flexibility, which I'm probably failing to exploit, largely from having lacked a good male "role model"), as expressed by "male" clothing.

(I think it is quite astounding the depths to which one's very mind is affected by being literally forced - by physical threats, and other social sanctions - to wear a certain kind of clothing against one's will. It is, in a sense, "castrating" to have to do so.)

I'm sure this is related to having to act in an NT-like way when I have an Aspie-like mind, although I'm only starting to learn about this.

Language and clothes are related. Meanings are clothed in words.

Clothes and body are related. We tend to perceive clothes almost as if they were part of the body.

Words (and symbols in general) and their meanings are all mixed up.

I'm blurring almost into free-association, in an attempt to address your question. [I think "address", here, and "dress" might even have the same Latin root, but I don't know if that means anything.]

A person's use of language might in some way appear to the mind to be a kind of "body". (And we talk about the "spirit" of a text.)

I have certainly wondered whether gender, in the psychological sense, is related to transmission and reception, to the ways in which minds communicate, in a way which is analogous (in some kind of higher-dimensional mental "space") to the sexual functions of bodies. But I don't think I've ever taken that thought very far, nor have I thought about it at all recently.

There might be wisdom to be found, concerning the relationship between language, sexuality, and gender, in the intolerably obscure (to me at least!) writings of Jacques Lacan, but she's someone else I don't feel like trying to read at the moment!

Returning more directly to your question [apparently "address", "dress", and "direct" are all etymologically related]:

Although gender is something I seem to find in myself, and I don't seem ever to have decided on it, whereas language is something I had to work very hard, and for a very long time, to acquire (rather than having it acquire me, so to speak - or be spoken?):

You might be right (with the qualification I've noted, about not "deciding"), and you're certainly provoking me to think about something I had never really questioned.

As a teenager, although I revolted (helplessly, and only internally, not openly) against "masculinity", I did not feel particularly "feminine", either.

(It's been interesting to see so many Aspies declare themselves genderless. In this and in many other ways, my 19-year-old self seems at last to be tentatively meeting other beings of the same kind as himself, almost the same species.)

I wore skirts (in secret), but I was a boy in skirts, or at least, not a girl in skirts.

I have only very slowly come to feel more and more "feminine" (but still suppressed, largely because I am still forced to wear "male" clothes), and it might well be because I have been deliberately engaging more with language, and trying to find in it a friend as well as an enemy. (Language was always my enemy as I was growing up.)

In the family in which I had the misfortune to grow up (or rather, to be kept down, to be stunted), (ab)use of language was certainly associated with the two triumphant females, while all three of the unfortunate males, for various reasons (mainly severe brain damage, in my brother's case) were "dumb".

You have certainly given me something very interesting, and possibly important, to think about! These are only my first impressions.


Again, I suspect that this may be because a person's language is somehow conceived of as a kind of "body". I'm not sure that that makes sense, and it's another thing that I'll have to think a lot more about.


That's another fascinating thought!

I have very little sexual experience indeed (long story!), but I have a vague sense that identities tend to merge and be played with during sex, or in sexual relationships. (Cathy and Heathcliff, that sort of thing. Me and my ex-wife, to give another, more horrible example. [shudder]:eew:) I sort of like the idea of identifying with a female, so as to be able to reconcile myself to the male, in a way which I presently can't. I have more and more homosexual fantasies as the years wear on (while continuing to be repulsed by almost everything about masculinity).

Anyway, I like the (succinct!) way you put this: same situation, different perspective. Almost as if to suggest that we are both the situation and the perspective at once?


There, I get a bit lost, not being sure what you mean by "mean all that much"! Is it that you like sex, but don't particularly associate any gender (in the psychological sense) with what is going on, and you also (as part of the same preference, or lack of preference) don't particularly mind from which of the two perspectives you view the enjoyable action?

I agree about the job hunting.

Yes, the asexuality is interesting. Or, lack of interest in sex, in that there are so many things that are more interesting. All the energy that 'normal' people have in that area is being redistributed in the Autistic mind. Also I am not offended by sex or sexual images, but I do find the fact that people talk about it constantly to be a bit odd. Something I could never relate to. It's just not interesting enough to warrant so much focus, I think.

This place is amazing!

I've said, or typed, things very similar to what you've just said, and never gotten anything other than blank looks, or the Internet equivalent thereof.

And these weren't instances of my unreadable prolix style (such as I've just exhibited, a few posts ago), just simple statements to the effect that my obsessive, almost monomaniacal interest in mathematics, as a teenager, somehow took the place of sex, somehow was sexual. (The two statements seem equivalent, although that has to be argued, in some vaguely "Freudian" sort of way.)

It's not really all that weird an idea, given the number of jokes and cliches in common circulation to the effect that nerdiness and sexuality are somehow mutually exclusive. It's just that people never seem to take such ideas or observations seriously.

Excuse me, almost off on a rant again! And there are other things to discuss in this thread. We haven't all only got sex on the brain.

But it's nice to be somewhere where one can talk seriously about such things.

I'll wait for another thread (probably one I'm overdue to start in the "Getting to know each other" forum) to talk about the disaster which happened to my mind, when, at age 19 or 20, I did start to get interested in sex.

(Something else happened at the same time, something purely intellectual, which on the surface seems like an independent event, a separate catastrophe, but I am pretty sure the two things are linked.)

It is that disaster, and the 40 massively distracted years that have elapsed since then, that make it so difficult for me to work out whether I'm on the autistic spectrum or not. I've almost literally "lost my mind", so it's hard to know what kind of mind it is, or was!

(The bottling-up effect of those 40 years makes me pretty hard to contain when I post to threads, I'm afraid.)