Men and Masking

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^^ Have you read John Elder Robison?

I wonder how often many of us are oblivious to how we're perceived by those around us. We may have an idea we're different, and others see us as different. But, we may not realize just how different they see us. If we could read their minds, we'd be amazed..."you all think that about me??" It's possible that while we probably all mask to an extent, we may assume our masking is more successful than it actually is.

I've heard his name and I'm reading the wikipedia now. Thanks. Are there others? I can name scores of books by autistic women describing their journey. I love the books and for the most part I can relate to them, unless they describe extensive masking or a difficulty being taken seriously as autistic / being diagnosed. I wish there were more books for autistic men by autistic men, but I concede that (in general) men tend to be less expressive of their feelings, spend less time in therapy, and less time writing introspective material. That doesn't mean their experience should be "cancelled" or replaced by women writers.

I was pretty oblivious to how people viewed me when I was younger. And I really didn't care all that much.

Nowadays, I care a bit more, and I'm more aware--in general.

I don't believe there are separate "autisms" for males and females.

Females are underdiagnosed, though. Because there is the tendency for them to be shy, rather than demonstrative like males. Although, it must be said, I've met plenty of females with autism who exhibit their autism just like males do.

To men:

Do you feel that the diagnostic criteria describe you? Is there anything you'd want to add / subtract from diagnostic criteria used for all people of all ages?

- Are you diagnosed / self-diagnosed, and at what age?

I'm formally diagnosed.

- Did you have difficulty finding a diagnostician as an adult?

Not particularly, but it only became an option once I was willing to pay.

- Were you taken seriously by your GP, your family and friends, etc?

Not at first. Once my parents understood better they took it more seriously, they take it seriously now.

- If you weren't diagnosed in school, what challenges did you face trying to fit in?

I didn't know how to fit in so I failed to fit in.

- If you were diagnosed in school, or you went to special ed., how did that affect your social confidence?

I finally received an IEP and was placed in a 'resource' class my last year of high school. I didn't mind because I had a friend in the class who was socially fluid and intelligent, just had executive functioning issues so I didn't consider or care there might be a stigma.

- How did your autistic traits affect your relationships or your self-concept?

I struggle to form relationships, although I've often had best friends, romantic partners and FWB relationships I don't know how to maintain broader friendship networks and the romances tend to be short lived.

- Did you feel pressure to hide your autistic traits? (sensory issues, special interests, etc)?

Yes.

- Did you feel pressure to hide your emotions or fake them?

Yes, downplaying them led to issues with identifying them as well as with appropriately coping with them.

- Did you play sports or get ridiculed if you didn't play sports? (male stereotypes?)

I played some sports, I wasn't very good at team sports but I've usually been quite good at combat sports. Not playing hockey and not being very good at it made it hard to fit in while I was elementary school aged.

- Do you feel that society judged / will judge you for not conforming with NT boys / men?

Yes. I've gotten in physical altercations resulting from harassment over how I dress/present. Because authorities always used that as an excuse to blame me for the incident I learned to handle them by using more force than the harasser would be prepared to deal with.

- Do you feel like you wore a "mask" socially, or tried to fake it?

I've always had to keep parts of myself boxed

- How does it feel knowing other autistic men are often branded as serial killers or psychos?

It doesn't surprise me. A lot of men who struggle to function socially that I encounter carry a lot of rage and don't know how to handle it. ASD tends to correlate with a tendency to get fixed into certain patterns of thinking. Most men with ASD aren't killers or violent, but I don't think it's problematic to discuss whether certain traits might make certain behaviours more likely even if those behaviours are still incredibly rare even in people who might seem the most potentially predisposed.

- Did you ever feel like you'd be called an INCEL if you wanted to date or have sex?

No.

- Were you ever worried to tell a partner that you were autistic, or thought you were autistic?

No, I've disclosed to every partner I've had since being diagnosed.

- Do you feel society / women have unfair expectations about your career or your income / skills?

Yes and no. It's not fair to complain if women prefer to date able partners who have their s**t together, because not all women are able and have their s**t together either. I feel society doesn't know how to make effective use of people with disabilities or how to enable them to contribute to their full potential. Industrial society craves standardization and non-standard individuals sometimes struggle to find a suitable role or to receive help with finding a suitable role.

- Is your mental health taken seriously, overall?

I hope.

- Do you feel like autistic men's voices are heard in the media?

As loudly as any autistic voices are heard, so not really.

I don't know if it's because they're shy. Lots of autistic men were shy and they flew under the radar too because people just thought they were introverts. I do agree women are underdiagnosed because there was a widespread belief that girls and women weren't affected by autism as frequently as boys. I get that. I can't blame professionals for it in my case. I went to lots of therapists but never requested an autism DX, so it wasn't offered. When I finally asked for it, I got one no problem. Maybe it's because I'm Level 2 and my characteristics are so pronounced? I know it's not that easy for all women, but my point is that it's not easy for men either.

I talked to a male friend today and he said it took him 2 years and a 150 mile drive to get his diagnosis. People like firemonkey and mountain goat waited nearly their whole lives in distress, not being recognised. It seems sad to me that no one talks about how hard it is for men to be diagnosed, or the pressures they face coming out. I was trying to imagine being a middle-aged man perhaps getting a divorce, with young kids. It must be so hard for men to announce they think they're autistic, given that the media treats autism like a cold and heartless condition. It must be a difficult step to take when seeking custody of your kids, or when divorcing. It would be so easy for the court to portray men as schizoids with no emotion or ability to love their children. I know that's a contrived example but this must be real for many men, and the pressures they face are just as hard as the ones women have to endure.

Men are less likely to attend therapy at all, so it stands to reason that men haven't been "misdiagnosed". Their lack of therapy likely means they haven't been diagnosed with anything at all. Perhaps they've just been left to suffer in silence, unsure of their neurodiversity - just like many women.

I think the issue between 'male' and 'female' presentations largely comes down to social awareness and social conditioning, with the choice of labels basically being sexist stereotyping.

Because I can mask (even if I describe it as compartmentalization) and have some degree of social awareness compared to a lot of men with ASD I'm sure my experience with ASD could be described some closer to what's sometimes labelled as female presentation, it wouldn't even make me butthurt because it wasn't until reading resources about autism in women that I was convinced because some sources at the time describing autism in men made me assume I might not count.

I don't believe I mask effectively because I slip too much but I believe I try to subconsciously most of the time, even after pro-actively disclosing.

Yes it does, more or less. Can't think of anything in it I'd change. Though somehow I've never been able to relate to it, when I look at it I don't get a gut reaction of "that's me." But I can't put my finger on why not.

Thanks for all your input, fxe. Your comment made me pause and wonder if I'm butt-hurt as a woman who can't present the "female autism" mystique. I guess it's possible, but I don't think that's the issue. I think I'm hyper-empathetic about men's emotional health because most of my friends are autistic men. I was also really close to my dad and my grandfather, who took his own life because of undiagnosed ASD and toxic masculinity. I've noticed that autistic men don't have the same support system of positive, autistic role models that women have in all the recent books detailing their experience. Maybe I'm too hung up on gender equality and human rights. I notice that it's on my mind a lot lately, to the extent that I get frustrated by subdivisions of people into gender categories, or the notion that autistic men's feelings are somehow less salient than women's.

I hope I don't come off as dismissive over your concerns about how those labels aren't really accurate. They're not very accurate because male vs female isn't actually the split.

Further, the fact that it wouldn't upset me doesn't mean your feelings about how the gendered language made you feel aren't valid, you describe the source of them well and clearly articulate how that language can be harmful.

I'd say feeling personally insulted by the imperfect label probably isn't the healthiest reaction, but that it's also up to the experts to come up with a better term to describe the concept in order to stop provoking people with a poor choice of term.

When I was younger I would have been insulted to be described basically the way I just described myself (suggesting that my presentation might be more 'female'). But, since the first time I heard the term I identified with the description that might make it easier for me to tolerate the term. I can understand how most cis-gender people might be irritated to be told they have the 'wrong' presentation even if my path to a similar conclusion might have inoculated me from being hurt/offended/put-off by the wording.

I believe a lot of the failings in regards to how we consider men's mental health stems from how we socialize men and what we promote as ideals of masculinity, and men with ASD might be especially prone to internalizing poor or exaggerated versions of these ideals but also be prone to not being well-suited to living up to them, causing angst, insecurity and feelings of inadequacy, all of which will be bottled up and experienced as rage if they lack suitable support and coping skills.

I'd suggest that some of that is likely true regardless of whether the man's ASD would be viewed as more 'traditional' or as 'masking-prone'. I don't think labelling insecure young men with what I'm calling 'masking prone' as having 'feminine' ASD would help them because they'd be prone to being wounded by that even if I don't believe it's worth being wounded by.

Ideally they'll pick a term that describes what makes what they describe as female different instead of just applying an inaccurate gender label (like masking-prone, or similar).

That's me. I know that I look and act "wrong" but I really believe that I look at and "wrong" to a far greater extent than I can perceive it. Once example would be posture. Whenever I see my reflection in a store window I always try to straighten up. My natural stance makes me resemble a vulture. I hate the way it looks yet I can only change my stance through conscious effort and most of the time I don't think to do it.

Sometimes I just get into some social dilemma to which I don't know the answer and think it's probably obvious to everyone else. This is almost enough to make me panic. One example would be when I'm in a restaurant and I don't know if it's one of the restaurants were the waiter will take your order or one of the restaurants were you have to go up to the counter/bar to order.

I'm sure there are many other ways I look wrong. Ways that I'll never be aware of.

I would like to subtract the idea that autistics are horrible at writing and speaking. I've met plenty of people on the spectrum who are good at writing and can speak eloquently. Yet I keep encountering this stereotype that even high functioning autistics are "good at maths and bad with language".

You're probably right. I'd be a sceptical of the official statistics. If they have an estimate on how many women vs men are currently misdiagnosed, how would they know? How would they know about diagnoses that hasn't happened yet? The only accurate statistic would be for people who were misdiagnosed and then later rediagnosed. But even that ignores the unknowable number of people who are still misdiagnosed/undiagnosed.


Yes, when I was a child and even a young adult it felt like the study of autism was focused exclusively around children. Back in those days very little of it was about girls or women. It was mostly boys. As far as I can tell focus on women's autism is a recent phenomenon. Perhaps they're trying to make up for their earlier focus on boys. Unfortunately this change came just at the same time researchers thought it would be a good idea to look at autistic adults.

What a great set of questions!

- Are you diagnosed / self-diagnosed, and at what age?
Diagnosed at 38
- Did you have difficulty finding a diagnostician as an adult?
A little.
- Were you taken seriously by your GP, your family and friends, etc?
... I still don't really know.
- If you weren't diagnosed in school, what challenges did you face trying to fit in?
I neither fitted in nor tried to fit in. I had no friends until university, though I did somehow manage to have a girlfriend. I was always the class wierdo. (She was also fairly odd.)
- How did your autistic traits affect your relationships or your self-concept?
Left me feeling that there was me on one side, everyone else on the other, and no common ground between the two. I have moved away from this attitude as I grew older.
- Did you feel pressure to hide your autistic traits? (sensory issues, special interests, etc)?
No, though that's mainly because neither I nor anyone else understood what they were.
- Did you feel pressure to hide your emotions or fake them?
I learned (slowly) that my outbursts of rage were not acceptable. That's about it.
- Did you play sports or get ridiculed if you didn't play sports? (male stereotyes?)
I was awful at sports but don't recall ever being judged for that. My lack of interest in watching sport is another matter....
- Do you feel that society judged / will judge you for not conforming with NT boys / men?
I seem to have blundered into an acceptable alternative way of being "manly": the eccentric train-spotter type is a valid species of British male.
- Do you feel like you wore a "mask" socially, or tried to fake it?
No. I am relatively socially functional for an autistic man, but "masking" is not how I do it. I cannot hold a public persona together at all. I'm not sure how I do do it, to be honest.
- How does it feel knowing other autistic men are often branded as serial killers or psychos?
I've not actually encountered this hostile stereotype very often, so it doesn't worry me.
- Did you ever feel like you'd be called an INCEL if you wanted to date or have sex?
No.
- Do you feel society / women have unfair expectations about your career or your income / skills?
People who knew me as a middle-class kid seem to regard my current state as a tragedy. This is not helpful.
- Is your mental health taken seriously, overall?
Post diagnosis, it has beenharder to get mental health support.
- Do you feel like autistic men's voices are heard in the media?
Rarely, except for the occasional (and unrepresentative) tech billionaire.

I would add executive dysfunctioning.

I can answer this.
- Are you diagnosed / self-diagnosed, and at what age?
I self diagnosed at 20 then got oficially diagnosed ar 23.
- Did you have difficulty finding a diagnostician as an adult?
Yes because i didnt find it necessary to get a diagnosis.
- Were you taken seriously by your GP, your family and friends, etc?
Not all of them know but the ones who knew just shrugged it off
- If you weren't diagnosed in school, what challenges did you face trying to fit in?
I was alone most of the time and didnt really try to fit in until i was a teen.
- If you were diagnosed in school, or you went to special ed., how did that affect your social confidence?
N/A
- How did your autistic traits affect your relationships or your self-concept?
Most of the time i was abandoned.
- Did you feel pressure to hide your autistic traits? (sensory issues, special interests, etc)?
Yes sometimes
- Did you feel pressure to hide your emotions or fake them?
Sometimes.
- Did you play sports or get ridiculed if you didn't play sports? (male stereotyes?)
They told me if i didnt like sports i was not a man, and i never liked them.
- Do you feel that society judged / will judge you for not conforming with NT boys / men?
Yes
- Do you feel like you wore a "mask" socially, or tried to fake it?
Yes i got a tic because i tried to act as an NT.
- How does it feel knowing other autistic men are often branded as serial killers or psychos?
Very bad i read a comment about someone comparing aspies to psychopaths that was just mean.
- Did you ever feel like you'd be called an INCEL if you wanted to date or have sex?
No
- Were you ever worried to tell a partner that you were autistic, or thought you were autistic?
I have never considered saying it.
- Do you feel society / women have unfair expectations about your career or your income / skills?
Yes i feel society expects too much from me since i have other disabilities.
- Is your mental health taken seriously, overall?
Not really.
- Do you feel like autistic men's voices are heard in the media?
Compared to before yes, but theres still more to do regarding that.

Not at all! You didn't say anything wrong. I've been trying to figure out why this topic is weighing so heavily on my mind, so I asked myself quite realistically if I felt butt-hurt. I know you weren't suggesting that I was. But my answer is nope. I just find that I get frustrated. I wish men's voices could be heard, but also the voices of women who don't mask. I feel like most of the current research is done about women and the predominant narrative is that those women had excellent camouflaging skills, or they were very resourceful about faking it with their peers. I certainly couldn't fake it, and I didn't even have peers. As I've said before the literature and research suggests I must have a "male brain", and I just don't buy that even though I don't give a rat's arse what other people think.