Recently, I received this question from Angel:
‘Hi Xan,
A friend of mine is writing a newspaper on Aspergers. She asked me what neurotypicals could do to communicate better with those on the autistic spectrum. What are your thoughts?’
After some thinking, this is what I answered:
Hmmmm – this is a difficult question because it presumes that all Aspies have identical communications problems – and we don’t, so that’s important to keep in mind. Still, there are patterns that we can work from.
1. Say what you mean – don’t ‘send signals’. We’ll likely not pick up on those signals and, if they are part of the message, we’ll miss it.
2. Be honest – we’ll take ‘little white lies’ at face value and believe that is your true opinion.
3. Don’t freak out when we’re honest.
4. If you have to ask questions like ‘Do you know what I mean?’, then we probably don’t.
5. When we ask for clarification, please, please, don’t just repeat the same sentence as before, as if that would somehow explain things – use different words, clarify and explain!
6. Don’t tell us how you feel, tell us what you think – we rely on intelligent people using their thoughts to override their feelings. Especially if the conversation is about issues and real-world stuff, if someone starts their sentence with ‘I feel that …’ – boom, we’ve tuned out.
7. Same thing with ‘beliefs’ – if you cannot support it with facts, then it’s just a prejudice and we’ll resent you imposing your prejudices on us. So, unless we are specifically discussing ‘beliefs’, sentences starting with ‘I believe that…’ are not only meaningless, they are annoying.
8. Don’t give us a choice unless you expect us to make a choice freely. If it’s a thinly veiled threat – we’ll simply see it as a choice you gave us and be bewildered if you get angry that we’ve actually made a choice, when you clearly offered us a choice.
I hope this is a good start!
Anybody else with some constructive advice?
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
June 12, 2013 at 03:08
all well said. i really have nothing to add, you said all i could think of
June 12, 2013 at 19:24
Xanthippa:
This is curious… on two fronts.
Firstly, if I had written about what women can do to communicate better with men, I would have made the exact same points!
I often find myself reminding women that I’m not a mind reader, to which they usually reply, “do you need a brick to fall on your head?” And I tell them, “yes, from your point of view, that’s exactly what I need.”
Also, I often hear women say “that may be true for you but it’s not true for me.” And they think it’s overbearing to say “no, there is only one truth; what differs is our perception of it.”
Over time, I began to suspect that women say “the truth” when they really mean “my feelings.” To test this theory, I asked numerous women how they decide what is true. And the replies I got back were mostly variations on a single theme, namely:
“I hold it in my mind and ask myself how I feel about it.”
What a revelation that was!
For women, what they think depends on how they feel.
For men, how they feel depends on what they think.
Secondly, in conversations with men in the past, these issues seldom if ever came up, but nowadays they increasingly do.
Men are thinking more and more like women as time goes on.
And that isn’t surprising, given that boys are increasingly being pressured to “get in touch with their feminine side” at a time when more and more boys are growing up without a father in the home to provide a masculine role model. Meanwhile, estrogenic pollutants in the food and water have driven young men’s testosterone levels to the lowest values ever recorded.
And this brings me to my point: it seems that the definition of “normal” (or if you prefer, “neurotypical”) is shifting away from the male, towards the female. At the same time, the boundaries of what are considered more or less pathological “syndromes” are expanding to engulf more and more of what is simply masculine.
It used to be that we considered males to be more rational and grounded, while females were called emotional and flighty. Nowadays, women are considered normal and sensible, while men are called obtuse and confrontational.
In short, we are seeing a normalization of female ways of being and a pathologization of male ways of being.
And this is exactly what the globalist totalitarians want.
Because women – and effeminate men – tend to value harmony over truth, and are prone to opt for safety over freedom.
This used to be common knowledge, but now it has become forbidden knowledge.
And if you are a person who actually does value truth and freedom… well, then you suffer from Asperger’s syndrome, which is an autism spectrum disorder, and you therefore obviously need therapy.
Xanthippa says:
CodeSlinger,
I’m afraid we’re going to hit a bit of an old argument here – one where I eplain that what you term ‘male’ is really just ‘rational’ and what you term ‘female’ is really just ’emotional’.
Perhaps it is the effeminization of males, but, in my life-experience, I have met so many rational women and emotion-ruled men that I find your gender-identification to not reflect the makeup of society.
But, having skipped the male/female vs. rational/emotional difference of opinion between us, I do agree with your assessment of the situation completely.
People who are ruled by emotions are much more easily manipulated and cotrolled – a function which religion had fulfilled for millenia. The rise of the age of reason de-throned the power elites and they are busy trying to return humanity to the age of emotions, so as to return greater power to themselves.
June 13, 2013 at 13:26
I agree with Xan entirely and I agree with Code somewhat.
As for the last sentence about Aspergers, I agree that Aspergers is a social disorder, and Aspies, in the social aspect, can only benefit from improving in that sense. But when you italicize the word “therapy” Code, that is where I laugh. But that’s not my main point of discussion. We both seem to agree that the Aspie Supremacists aren’t doing much good.
As for the stereotype of men being logical whereas women are emotional, which IS what Code is suggesting. Like all stereotypes, they exist for a reason. It’s based on some degree of truth. However, stereotypes have their limits and cannot accurately judge groups of people as a whole (but rather just average the sum of a groups parts).
When it comes to masculinity, I think the best thing a man can do is be secure with himself. This means, not seeing it as a crime to be traditionally masculine. Not being guilty of enjoying the sexual aspect of life. Not being afraid to be a logical assertive leader. But this also means a man can be emotional as well, just secure with himself.
If a man can be open about his emotions, and accept his emotions (without being a basketcase or without making himself effeminate), then he has the right idea. I’ve just met way too many “macho men” in my life who are afraid of handling emotions. It’s not that they don’t have them. They just suppress them, and they’re even less masculine than they appear on the surface because it’s just an act because they are insecure of themselves.
If you do it right, you can very masculine and have your emotions add depth to who you are rather than feminize yourself.
Xan and Code, feel free to let me know your thoughts on my comment.
Xanthippa says:
I think you missed a part of CodeSlinger’s meaning: I don’t think he’s talking about Aspie supremacists in the least. Rather, he is stressing that rational thinking and what he considers natural male behaviour are increasingly being portrayed by our society as abnormal and in need of eradication – in order to create a more docile, more easily manipulated population.
June 13, 2013 at 16:57
Oh! I completely misread that sentence! Sorry!
Still, Aspergers, at least socially, does have a border between respectable difference and genuine social impairment. And the spectrum does tend to cross both sides.
June 13, 2013 at 18:03
Juggernaut:
I understand that Asperger’s is a real condition that can be very debilitating in some cases. My point is that the boundaries defining what is pathological are being expanded to include many aspects of the normal male way of being. The misuse of Asperger’s to stigmatize objective rationality is only one example.
He isn’t exuberant, he has Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder. He isn’t strong-willed, he has Oppositional Defiant Disorder. He isn’t dedicated, he has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. He isn’t passionate, he has Intermittent Explosive Disorder. He isn’t ambitious, he has Competitive Personality Disorder. He isn’t individualistic, he has Antisocial Personality Disorder.
Get the picture? These are all real conditions, but their boundaries have been expanded so far that only sloppy-thinking, placid, pliable, apathetic, unmotivated conformists are considered normal these days.
Everything that makes boys difficult for the system to deal with now has an entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. And that allows them to wring their hands piously and croon “we don’t want to hurt you, we want to help you” – as they slyly punish you for stepping outside the box they put you in.
I quite agree with your remarks about masculinity, by the way. See my reply to Xanthippa below on the subject of male and female stereotypes.
June 13, 2013 at 18:09
Xanthippa:
Please don’t make a caricature out of it when I speak of men being rational and women being emotional. My meaning is far more nuanced than the straw-man stereotype propagated by cultural Marxism because it’s easy to refute and ridicule, and because it’s hard to think past it to get a realistic understanding of the relationship between male, female, emotion and reason.
In general, women can reason just as well as men, and men can be just as emotional as women. And motivation is rooted in emotion for both sexes. Of course. How could it be otherwise? We are motivated by what we want, and want is a feeling.
What differs is the primary direction of the cause-effect relationship. As I said:
What women think depends on how they feel.
How men feel depends on what they think.
This says nothing about the relative amounts of thinking and feeling going on in each case. That varies widely. Of course. How could it be otherwise?
The matter is further complicated by the fact that thoughts and feelings drive each other in a chicken-and-egg relationship. So which came first?
For a man, thoughts come first and for a woman feelings come first.
But this is getting harder to see and understand as the psychological and chemical castration of the modern male proceeds unheeded and unimpeded. You’re quite right about that, in general:
Males these days are so badly effeminized that it’s hard to tell them apart from women.
Xanthippa says:
Perhaps my inability to see this huge gender-divide is because I was raised in a country where Marxism was the rule for decades before I was born…perhaps because as an Aspie, I find it difficult to discern the motivations in others, only in myself.
And, speaking for myself, my thoughts have never been driven by my feelings, quite to the contrary. Yet, I am very secure in my femininity.
Does that mean that, by definition, I am abnormal? Perhaps – I am an Aspie…and, in many aspects, my cognitive processes have been demonstrated to be (at least) two standard deviations from the mean, so why not here?
Yet, how can I acknowledge the existence of a gender stereotype when I have not myself observed any evidence of it except for ‘traditional hearsay’?
June 13, 2013 at 22:27
I largely agree with both of you, Code and Xan.
I think logic and emotions are two sides of the same coin. Logic tells us how to meet certain ends. Emotions tell us which ends are worth meeting. When David Hume said we are governed by the passions, he was right.
It’s unfortunate that axiomatic arguments can be broken apart in this manner, but it DOES depend on where we are and what our experiences are to make general statements about humanity. I suspect Code lives in an environment where he is surrounded by radical feminists, whereas Xan and I have been able to largely avoid them.
But keep in mind the whole man (logic) , woman (emotion) IS a generalization. That means the extent of it can only be taken lightly. So, lets say 55% of women put emotions well above logic, that can warrant the statement “women are overall more emotional”, but it’s still not a safe bet to assume most are.
June 16, 2013 at 16:58
Juggernaut:
Actually, all Western males are surrounded by radical feminists.
But, like the shrill, piercing wail of an industrial band saw, you get used to it and after a while you hardly notice.
Just because they aren’t militant, man-hating diesel dykes doesn’t mean they aren’t radical feminists.
The whole purpose of putting the diesel dykes on display is to make the average Western woman look moderate by comparison.
But, as most people in the world know very well, the average Western woman is anything but moderate!
And, just like that band saw, it’s the fact that you stop noticing that leads to permanent damage.