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misandry vs misogyny
(hexbear.net)
N.B. misandry is not real because men are not systemically oppressed (uninternalize your reddit MRA today: men suffer some drawbacks under the patriarchy but ultimately still maintain it due to the large amount of privileges they receive under it!)
I’m not denying that women experience these problems of intolerance and social pressures and I’m not denying that they’re worse and more common than what guys experience. They do and they are. But the ideas that all guys are “trained to inflict suffering” [the comment I initially replied to] and that guys never experience the same or similar problems (although to a lesser degree) [your comment] are ridiculous.
Most autistic people experience problems related to their social inabilities. I’ve been spanked for crying when my dad didn’t understand why I was crying (which in retrospect were mostly things related to me being autistic, like experiencing sensory overload) and yelled at me to stop which just made me cry more. That didn’t train me to inflict suffering on others, if anything it did the opposite. A large part of my social anxiety that developed as I got older is not wanting to bother others to any extent or make them uncomfortable.
To use as a metaphor a related topic that’s IMO more straightforward to discuss and understand due to its direct physical consequences:
CW: sexual violence
I completely recognize that female genital mutilation is much much worse than circumcision. But that doesn’t mean that circumcision isn’t a problem or that all guys in a society that practices FGM are accepting of and perpetuating FGM.As somebody also on the autistic spectrum I can tell you we experience the same gendered social conditioning as everybody else, and we have an even harder time realizing it due to difficulties accessing the emotions driving our own actions. A lot of autistic people like to think of themselves as martians come to earth who exist outside of human cultural mores. This is a very flattering self-deception. We have to do the same work as everybody else unwinding the things we were taught. It's fine that you withdraw so as not to inflict yourself on other people, I do the same thing. But is this not an admission that we do in fact inflict suffering on others? How much of that is due to patriarchy and how much is due to autistic social skill shortfalls, perhaps exacerbated by patriarchy?
Maybe. There are a lot of times where I've caused hurt feelings for reasons that I later came to understand and internalize. I would not put the blame for those feelings on the people I hurt. It's easy to talk about accommodations for low social skills in the abstract but when you get to what it actually entails it puts a lot of burden on others to not take offense to objectively bad behavior.