Letters to the Editor
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has_te
autism afflicts boys more than girls, a fact that led a guy I know who works with autistic kids to wonder if a certain kind of extreme masculinity -- the emotional detachment, the attention to abstraction -- was, in fact, a mild form of autism.
But the social norm for masculinity is very different from what an Asperger's male looks like. They don't tend to be very muscular or enjoy banging nails or sawing wood or playing football. They look a bit androgynous, to be honest.
Scientists have a lot attributes that are considered feminine rather than masculine norms. Science is a kind of passive activity, because you wait for Nature to send you signals, and you patiently sit around and sip tea and analyze those signals. After which you go relax at the symphony or the opera.
That's not the kind of behavior that is seen as hypermasculine, or even masculine.
Maybe the social deficit is just a social deficit, not a marker for hypermasculinity.
I took an online evaluation for Asperger's and found that I do seem to score well into the Asperger's region.
I feel I was treated like a kind of a freak when I was in graduate school studying physics.
Maybe men with Asperger's like to recite gender norms to reassure themselves of their masculinity, since they do tend to look somewhat androgynous.
And because of their social deficit they have no idea of the emotional harm they are doing to the Asperger's women around them who are outside those gender norms the men like to go around reciting.
I keep looking for an explanation as to why being a math-gifted girl can end up being such an invitation to rejection and pain.