It was the nasty feminazis who were really at fault
Clementine Ford tells us about a thing that happened.
[E]arlier this week, a woman posted a lengthy diatribe to Facebook calling out a man who had engaged in threatening behaviour on public transport. The woman described him harassing three fellow female passengers, pressing into their personal space and insisting they give him high fives. After intervening, she took a photograph of the man and shared it alongside her Facebook post. It was quickly reposted by numerous people, including myself.
Shortly afterwards, unqualified rebuttals started appearing claiming this man had an intellectual disability. This was soon framed as him being autistic, with numerous people (who were not there) deciding this meant his behaviour was harmless and it was the nasty feminazis who were really at fault. Abusive comments (including the belief that she should have been raped and murdered by Adrian Bayley) were then hurled at the woman who wrote the original post. In deeply unsurprising news, she was also besieged with ‘dick pics’ – because of course, the best way to prove that gendered harassment of women doesn’t exist is to send unsolicited photographs of your penis alongside violent commentary.
Since then, the story has appeared on a handful of particularly vitriolic and paranoid men’s rights websites with the spurious claim of autism continually repeated. This is despite the fact none of these sites can actually provide the man’s name or indeed testimony from anyone other than untested ‘witnesses’ (who’ve done nothing to prove they were there). The Daily Telegraph‘s Tim Blair eagerly jumped in with a piece, offering up the bulk of his evidence in the form of a link to a fact-free blog post on the pustular website, Age of Shitlords – and yes, that is a name men seeking to be taken seriously are legitimately going by.
Does that sound familiar? It’s Elevatorgate all over again. There were lots of men – and a few women – insisting that Elevator Guy was autistic, on the basis of absolutely nothing except their desire to exculpate Elevator Guy and culpate his target.
And so now, the kinds of men who abhor ‘social justice warriors’ and fervently defend their right to use words like ‘retard’ – indeed, the kinds of men who support Donald Trump, a walking clusterfuck of offence who not only admits to sexually assaulting women but is on camera mocking a disabled journalist – are suddenly leaping on the opportunity to discredit women’s experiences once again by pretending they suddenly care about the disabled community. Of course, none of them seem able to correctly define autism, with phrases like “mentally handicapped” and “mental illness” being used as catch-alls. But what does that matter when there are bitches to roast for being oversensitive attention seekers?
It must be nice to live in a world where the experience of being harassed on public transport (and in public, generally) is so rare and so neutered that you can easily assume those who assess a situation as such view the world through, as one man put it, “an extremely narrow gaze”. It apparently isn’t relevant that women are constantly instructed to take precautions that safeguard us from harm. That we are told to be on the lookout for strange men and avoid interacting with them. That if we don’t follow this highly sensible and not at all pointless advice that we are ‘asking for it’ and should know what to expect. None of this matters – because the moment we do take measures to protect ourselves and give a heads up to other women too, we are accused of demonising all men and ruining the lives of individual ones.
Heads they win, tails we lose.
Even if the man is autistic, that shouldn’t mean that it is okay to harass women. If this is a risk with autism (and I don’t know enough about it to know), then precautions should be taken to ensure that women are not subjected to unwanted attention when utilizing a public space.
If the man is autistic, I can feel sympathy, and recognize his difficulty in understanding the limits. Nor do I think he should be excluded from public spaces. But if there is a problem with invading the personal spaces of women, then we have a situation with competing minorities, and once again, women are supposed to sit down and shut up, and take it, because…autism. There’s really something wrong with this view.
My experience of both autism and harassment is that, while an autistic man may be guilty of harassment, it’s actually less likely than a neurotypical guy because autistic people know they sometimes get social interactions wrong and most take steps not to.
The kind of public social mistake autistic folks make is more likely to be monologuing about a favourite subject, weird body language or stimming (repetitive gestures or flapping hands etc). It’s much, much less likely to be insisting a stranger high five them and being threatening.
Personal anecdote: my son has high functioning autism (what used to be called Aspergers). His main deficit is social – he suffers a high degree of social anxiety because he doesn’t “get” social interactions. I remember telling him about one of those US cases (and, god, isn’t it depressing that there are enough that I can’t remember which one?) where guys at a party sexually assaulted a drunk young woman and filmed it. His response? Shock, disgust and the expressed opinion that there must be something wrong with the guys. Yes, Aspies are quite capable of recognising abusive behaviour and condemning it. An autistic guy is far more likely to offend by not responding to a high five rather than insisting on one.
Steamshovelmama – thanks for your enlightening comments. I had thought that autistic people usually had more of a thing for not being touched than for touching inappropriately, but I wasn’t sure. It’s handy to know that.
My personal experience with autistic/Aspergers friends and colleagues is that if someone points out that they are doing something socially inappropriate they apologise and back off…unless they are both autistic and assholes/predators, which is not an impossible combination.
They *always* do this. Every. Single. Time. “ZOMG what if he’s Autistic, huh?! Betcha never thought of that, bigot!”
Meanwhile, nobody *ever* thinks “What if *she’s* Autistic?” Never.
If you’re an Autistic woman/girl, you have a target painted on your back your whole life. Predators *know* we’re different from Normies, and we are targeted specifically because of that. And because we’re different from Normies, we’re less likely to get any kind of support. Nobody ever steps in for us, we’re just left to get on with it.
The lifetime rate for sexual assault for Autistic females is something like 95%. Honestly, I think it’s probably even higher.
So many people just don’t even see us as Real People. Our disability is a convenient “get-out-of-responsibility-free” card for men, and a reason to punish women and girls even more for failing to conform to gender norms, not being psychic, failing to cater totally to dudes. Most people don’t even think we *really* exist.
So our disability makes it much harder to read the danger signs or do anything about it, we lack even basic social recognition, so nobody’s going to step in for us (because we don’t exist!), and we are specifically targeted at higher rates by predators *because of that disability*, and we may well have other disabilities which make getting away from these dudes much harder…
But no. “What about teh poor, pwecious socially-awkward-but-not-really doodz?!” That’s the only bit that matters, right? Especially when there’s literally no evidence *anywhere* that they might be Autistic, and a substantial amount to suggest that they’re perfectly ordinary Normie dudes with a sense of entitlement who don’t see women as people.
Steamshovel mama – I think you mean the Steubenville rape case. And yes, it is massively depressing.
Cluecat @5, I have a niece who is autistic (well, mildly so – or severe aspergers. The diagnoses are a bit vague and flip floppy on that point). She certainly has social issues. She never behaves in an aggressive or sexually predatory manner and she has had to live and breath constant discrimination and, since puberty, harassment. I’ve also known quite a number of people diagnosed with aspergers (science seems to go hand-in-hand) and not one of them was even remotely a harasser. As you say, it may be possible to get an autistic harasser, but it’s not the norm.
Ophelia @6, Steamshovel mama might mean Steubanville, but there was a whole cluster of very similar cases reported around that time before the media moved on to something more interesting.
Re-reading that last sentence does leave a bad taste in my mouth.