It's not that we are socially impaired...

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It's that NTs are simply seeing and imagining things that aren't there. We should diagnose them all with insanity and put them all in Psychiatric hospitals.

Well, it's more like being unable to conform to norms.

"Socially impaired" is such a nasty term anyway. What's it even supposed to mean? "Oh, look, that person's acting STRANGE". I don't know... It's just convention, nothing more. It's not even a nice convention. It's just "always been that way", my favourite argument.

It's hard not to apply culture and society to everything sometimes. There is a definite issue with a person who cannot be aware of reality and accept the world as it is, not that they are in denial, but the illness itself impairs their judgement.

Luckily you can sometimes come back to reality, but it's very difficult to maintain a normal life with a mental disorder. I realize that I do qualify for Aspergers, but my main issue is basically schizoaffective, or paranoid schizophrenia. One of them...though my paranoia isn't that bad, and my moods aren't that bad either, it's that I have it under control that matters.

This proves that lack of empathy is not an Autistic trait. I don't know why so many people believe it, and I don't know why so many non-Autistics make out that lack of empathy is an Autistic trait without taking a look at themselves first.

The majority of NTs only tend to feel empathy for someone else if they have had similar experiences themselves. Otherwise, they don't want to know. If universal empathy was a NT trait, then Autistics would be much more socially accepted or understood. NTs who can feel for Autistics are those who perhaps have a close relative with Autism or something. Otherwise, they can't have the empathy. They just look at someone who is Autistic and think, ''oh, they're weird, keep away from them and exclude them from our gang!'' If that is empathy, then what isn't? If NTs were empathetic, they'd look at an Autistic and think, ''I can easily imagine what it must be like to be that person, so maybe I will give them a chance.''

I think there's two aspects to empathy, you first have to detect an emotion is present in another person and then feel the empathetic response. With autism the ability to detect the emotions (though body language/intonation etc) is impaired thus we may appear to show no empathy, but if the emotion is detected autistic people can be just as caring as any NT (although their responses may not always be 100% appropriate). In contrast a sociopath can typically detect emotions (sometimes better than average) yet either choose to ignore them or even use them to their advantage, that is true lack of empathy.

Socially impaired is like Tom Hanks in "Big" when he went to that party with the girl, before he had sex. It's like Dudly Moore in Arthur in almost the entire movie. It's like Bluto in Animal House. Hell, it's like everybody at the Delta House in Animal House. I don't imagine we are going out doing things to quite that extent.

Although I'd dearly love to go to a party like in Big and see somebody dressed like he was. I'd make a beeline to talk to him!

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I have empathy. I feel compassion for when bad things happen to people I know---the problem for me is overcoming the awkwardness of showing the compassion for that person. It's difficult for me to tell people how I feel about them. My therapist suggested I script out things. But then I feel like I am just acting out something, but as he said, I am then acting out what is already inside me---then it's awkward again.

I cannot say however that I truly feel the depth of empathy that the typical NT feels. I do know I was a sobbing mess when my grandparents were killed in a car wreck years ago. It's like I sometimes have too much emotion, and sometimes too little---and getting it just right is difficult.

Well maybe men and women just express empathy in a different way. On the bus when I'm sitting on a seat that faces backwards, usually when a man will come and sit opposite me and look quite uncomfortable at the thought of facing somebody close up, so he makes sure he is looking out of the window and tries not to look straight forward in case we catch eachother's eye and end up staring at eachother which can feel very intimidating for one or both of you (unless it's for other reasons). But usually when a woman comes and sits there, she is quite happy to sit staring at me without giving it a thought that it makes me feel uncomfortable, and it seems that a lot of women seem to enjoy staring at somebody else (obviously I don't share this trait). So I like the way men try to position the situation so I can feel more comfortable, instead of always trying to intimidate me. That's where I know that sometimes women can be bitchy without caring about another person's feelings.

Obviously this is not always the case, some men can intimidate and some women can be more polite, but I go out nearly every day and I encounter more feelings of intimidation from other women than I do with men. But, I could be wrong - maybe men intimidate eachother but not so much the opposite sex and maybe women prefer to intimidate eachother and not so much the opposite sex. I'm not a man so I shall never know how men view other men, but I bloody know how women view other women.