Another important quote:

[xiphias]

From beccastareyes: "The autism spectrum and the jackass spectrum are disjoint."

I know some jackasses. I know some people on the autism spectrum. The overlap between the two sets is only as much as would be expected by chance. Having Asperger's, or any other autism-spectrum trait, is neither an excuse for being a jackass, nor a reason to be one. Autism doesn't make you a jackass, and my friends who are autism-spectrum aren't jackasses, nor does their autism push them toward jackassery.

If you act like a jackass and then say "it's not my fault; I have Asperger's", you're just plain wrong. Having Asperger's doesn't make you a jackass any more than being left-handed does.

Comments

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

My impression was that people with autism don't get any fun out of malice, though it's still possible to be a jackass by having a policy of letting one's desires override other people's too much.

Is my impression at all correct?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I don't really know, come to think of it. People who get fun out of malice don't get to be my friends in the first place, spectrum or no. I know people who do practical jokes, but they're of the surreal or absurd variety, not mean. Think the "Improv Everywhere" or MIT hack model of pranks, rather than the mean variety.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

To put it another way, it's true that my friends who are on the spectrum just plain don't understand why inducing a negative emotion in another person would be attractive ( possibly with an exception of active hate of the subject who you are hurting).

It's just ALSO true that my friends who AREN'T on the spectrum ALSO just plain don't understand why inducing a negative emotion in another person would be attractive.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I know a number of people who when presented with evidence of their own assholery will give the "I have Asperger's" excuse. I don't think any of them have been diagnosed with Asperger's, and, well, I have my doubts. (In fact, one of them will deny having Asperger's under other circumstances.) I tend to think there's a distinction between being an introvert and having not developed particularly good social skills and being on the autism spectrum, but I also don't think I'm in a position to identify which is in play.

Hm. I know folks on the spectrum who have committed assholery. But it's mostly an isolated instance sort of thing. In one case, the... I'm not even sure it's assholery, exactly, but there was some repeat creeping (particularly, hitting on women who had just been assaulted and were obvious upset) that bothered me enough to change how I dealt with the person* but the circumstances are complicated enough, and the individual socially idiosyncratic enough that I don't feel I can really pass judgement.

* I wasn't upset when he hit on me a few hours after I'd been raped - even under the circumstances it struck me as darkly funny, if not welcome - but when I found out that he did this to other people it seemed much most disturbing in retrospect.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, reading what you've described put a shudder down my spine. I'm sorry you had to experience that.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Being raped sucked - though at the time being referred to, I hadn't quite put it together that I'd just been raped* - the rest really didn't seem to be a big deal right then. And honestly, I'm still not sure how to interpret it. I'd been at a con, once I got away from rapist guy** I found the friend I'd gotten a ride with. Who I'd known for years, and who had a rep as being epically clueless with regard to social issues, but harmless. I told him I needed to go home right now. The con was in Tacoma, while I lived in Seattle, so this wasn't a minor request, but he complied.

I didn't tell him I'd just been raped, as I hadn't worked it out for myself. But the entire way back I bitched at length about how now that I was eighteen I was being treated like a piece of meat by everyone and I hated it and wanted everyone to just leave me the fuck alone. We got back to my place, parked the car, and then he started telling me how he thought I was just fascinating.

I don't think I actually laughed in his face, but... it really didn't strike me as sinister at all, at the time, just so, amazingly indicative of the social cluelessness of the guy it was from. I mean, tactically speaking, worst idea ever, right? And finding it funny kind of gave me perspective about the whole thing.

Now, over time, I did find the guy in question harder to deal with. We were coworkers at Microsoft, and had lunch occasionally. I'm not sure how much this my social radar improving - I needed a bit of distance from my family to build a better one - or that he didn't age well, but I tended to find him more grating over time, and sometimes a little creepy (though most of this came down to inappropriate humor). It was probably a decade after all this went down that I found out I wasn't the only woman he'd hit on right after they'd suffered some kind of traumatic event.

* Which was really weird. I mean, when I objected to having sex without a condom, he threatened me with a knife, held me down and raped me. It wasn't exactly subtle. But it took me a day and a half to go from "Ugh, awful, need to be somewhere else," to "Holy crap, I was just raped." And I was a safer sex advocate and peer AIDS educator at the time, if also only just eighteen.
** Who, it seems, became a registered sex predator some years on - that I didn't press charges is my biggest regret about the whole thing. Assuming it is the same guy, he went on to rape a friend of a former girlfriend.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I need to figure out how to turn the interpretive dance of horror I just did into a coherent response. Thank you for telling me this, and, well, I continue to be sorry you had to live through it. And I know what you mean on taking awhile to realize what seems in retrospect objectively obvious -- I didn't realize my first boyfriend had abused me till several months after graduation separated us, rather than right when he was choking and slapping me. (I regret not pressing charges against him, too, not least because I wonder if he ever did that to another woman and how many he might have gone through before getting in any kind of trouble.)

[lietya.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, being a jackass does tend to correlate with seeking obnoxious excuses for one's jackassery. ;)

(Says someone who is autistic, and has thus far noted that allistic people seem far more prone to self-centeredness/lack of empathy and jackassery than my compatriots...)

[gingicat]

Preach it.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

Word.

[ron_newman]

nitpick: that isn't really what "disjoint" means

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The two spectra have no points in common. A particular person can be on multiple spectra. So the spectra are disjoint even if individuals can include both.

[paper-crystals.livejournal.com]

I find most people when they get to a certain degree of asshole require special social skills in order to rise to that level of asshole. You need to be able to read subtle facial expressions very quickly and calculate from them very quickly as well as be a good liar. Typically people with Asperger's syndrome are far too worried about getting through everyday interactions without building up new and special skills for assholery.

At least, this has been my experience. I am not saying that people who have Aspergers as immune from being assholes but they do often lack some of the basic social skills sometimes to be one as part of the condition. Mostly I find people with Aspergers want to talk my ear off about a particular topic for hours on end which is usually find with me because they are usually quite knowledgable about said topic.

Also, another big difference between people who have been assholes to me and people who I know with Aspergers is that people with Aspergers tend to have very little to no interest in physical contact and assholes tend to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get into my personal space.

[fatpie42.livejournal.com]

I have definitely met people who have acted like a jackass when it has been in some way related to their Asperger's condition. I don't think either of them would want to say "it's not my fault; I have Asperger's", but it's just so blatantly connected that they don't HAVE to say that.

One friend of mine said to a transgendered friend of mine "I have views about people like you". I don't know why he said it. We were in a group of people who all liked to do that social activity of saying little comic zingers at one another. I can't do that so I try to stay out of it, but my friend clearly didn't want to be left out, so he was getting it wrong - and generally annoying everyone as a result. But that comment towards my transgendered friend in particular really did NOT go down well at all.

Now the next time I saw him, he seemed very very sorry for what he had said. He clearly recognised there was no excuse for that kind of comment and wholly regretted it. I absolutely think it was issues with handling social interactions, particularly in big groups, which led him to saying something he hadn't fully thought out without considering the rammifications for other people's feelings properly. Naturally Asperger's is always going to make that sort of thing more difficult.

That being said, he knew he was to blame for what he said. There was no suggestion that saying "oh I have Asperger's" would be to excuse anything.

As a teacher, I'm aware of a similar thing with dyslexia. (Bear with me, the parallel will make sense eventually.) To a certain extent you have to make allowances for dyslexia, but it only goes so far as an excuse. Dyslexia doesn't mean that you cannot write English properly. It simply means that it will be more difficult for you. There are people who are no damn good at English who don't have dyslexia at all. As a teacher I shouldn't accept dyslexia as an excuse for bad spelling and grammar. People with dyslexia still need to learn to get better, just as much as anyone else. (Moreso in fact. They need more support in getting better.) But nevertheless dyslexia may involve a slightly different approach to the issue.

Um, do I need to explain the parallels now? To sum up, Asperger's makes it harder to deal with social situations, but not impossible. It's not a complete excuse for acting like a jackass and people with Asperger's need to learn from social mistakes moreso than anyone because it's always going to be harder for them. Still, someone with Asperger's does need a different approach. That doesn't mean you are excusing their behaviour, but just recognising that their cases may often involve a genuine mistake rather than spitefulness, arrogance or things like that.

I've spent a while talking here, so I'll finish by noting that I am not an expert and I'm happy to be corrected on any of this. This wasn't supposed to be a sermon. Just my own subjective observations.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I think that your friend's action and reaction to his own reaction demonstrates the distinction between "acting like a jackass" and "being a jackass". I think we all of us act like a jackass sometimes. However, one only IS a jackass if one refuses to recognize, apologize for, and attempt to change such actions.