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

[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.)