Asperger's and Women: A Match Made In Hell

The Wench recently finished reading Look Me In The Eye by John Elder Robison, and hereby recommends it to anyone wanting a funny and poignant first-hand account of growing up with Asperger's, before there was an awareness of Asperger's.

Robison had tremendous difficulties forging relationships with others, and suffered much rejection and abuse as a young man. Things seemed to turn for him when he began working in the music industry (among other things, creating cutting-edge guitars for KISS) and in engineering.

Certainly, these fields are populated with a fair share of eccentrics and "misfits". But more importantly, in The Wench's view, these fields are populated with men.

The Wench firmly believes that on the whole, men are more willing to accommodate and tolerate differences in other men than women are willing to accommodate and tolerate differences in other women.

And if you're a female and you disagree, your junior high experience was obviously much nicer than The Wench's.

Case in point: The Wench's husband once worked with a very bright, very successful patent attorney with an engineering background. This man possessed an amazing rational mind -- as well as an array of strange facial gestures and other social tics. His voice was never modulated quite right. He failed to meet you in the eye. He sometimes burst out in laughter at inappropriate moments.

And yet: the male attorneys in the office frequently took him out for a beer. Perhaps they made a few jokes at his expense. But they rather thought his eccentricities were endearing.

Contrast this with a female teacher at the nursery school where The Wench sent her spawn. She was a financial whiz who formerly worked in the stock market. She also failed to meet you in the eye, and was rarely seen smiling. Her speech often seemed stilted and she was incapable of exchanging small talk. She would greet a simple "How are you?" with a non-sequitur, like "You need to fill out the permission slip for the field trip."

She worked solely with female teachers, and all of them made no attempt to hide their dislike and disdain for her. Likewise, the nursery school mothers professed to "hate" her -- especially her flat, affectless face. They gossiped that she was in clear need of medication: "massive amounts of Prozac."

(Interestingly, the three-year-olds which she assisted seemed to like her well enough, perhaps because they had not yet learned to judge others as mercilessly as adults.)

The Wench believes it's no accident that the patent attorney fared better than the teacher in terms of colleagues and peers. And gender had everything to do with it. Not one woman accepted the teacher as "eccentric" or a "bit of an oddball." Not one woman accommodated her behavior or tried to understand it. Some of these women had their stomachs tied up in knots with fear that their boys were autistic because they enjoyed machines. Yet amazingly, the possibility that this teacher -- who exhibited some classic Asperger's tendencies -- was on the autistic spectrum never once occured to them.

Sigh. For all our much-vaunted nurturing abilities, for all our much-lauded capacity to protect the weak and spread the love, women can be a vicious, vicious bunch.