A response to Jenny McDermott’s recent video
The video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5iAcfoOMxg
I’m unhappy to report that there’s in fact a lot of problematic element among the autistic community, especially anti-feminism. As an insider I try to break down it from my own perspective and as an ex anti-feminist.
First of all, you’re very correct in the aspect of how difficult to us to form human relationships, especially romantic ones. While I do accept the fact that nobody is obligated to date with anyone, and romantic relationships are not universal needs, however the notion of “romantic relationships aren’t that important” is often written from a neurotypical standpoint. When I had more and closer friends it was less important for me, but in my lowest points of my life I didn’t dream of having friends but rather a girlfriend. I also had an instant crush on the first girl I could talk to in a proper way after I left my secondary school which was dominated by male students. I didn’t even see her face for months, I was more interested in her personality. She might also be a fellow autistic as she had problems with socializing, she also was some kind of social misfit like me. Later we lost contact due to she left the internet. I guess some of us might choose a closer romantic relationship over multiple friendships.
There’s an another aspect of being an anti-feminist: belonging somewhere. I not only blamed feminism for girls to rejecting me, but I also hardly fitted into the masculine man category. I’m still weaker than the average women, and I always had financial troubles, the latter caused me a lot of angst as the low Age of Consent in here (14) caused a lot of them to go after older and richer guys (one of my classmates was even raped by a guy when she was drunk). Seeing movies, pop culture, and magazines idolizing the idea of marrying a rich guy infuriated me. There also was the conscription here, which turned the boy into a proper man, but I was clever enough to figure out that I might have to die on the battlefield, later also finding out how brutal the training was (imagine Full Metal Jacket, but instead of the access of guns there were self-hangings and alcoholism in later life). As I often was dumped for not being manly enough and others (especially women) always told how the lack of forced military duties ruined men made me to idolize early anti-feminism.
However, at one point I started to learn what actual feminism is, also that many of the source of my angst was was invented at least centuries before the women’s suffrage movement I started to turn towards feminism. Even before it I wanted to eliminate all the gender roles alongside with the “privileges” of women. I later found out the truth all about those “privileges”, learned about how MRAs doesn’t actually stand for the men who would benefit from a movement, etc. The moment when I went full feminist was when I actually watched Anita Sarkeesian’s videos and discovered how ThunderF00t manipulated others to hate her. Around that time I also started to work on my comics and I found out that a more diverse cast might make it more original in some way, also I had problems with accepting my diagnosis due to the caricaturistic representations of canonically autistic people in media (while there’s actually good representation of them if you wish to count fan theories).
It’s pretty easy to manipulate us to believe whatever others want. I almost got into the neo-Nazi cult in here Hungary known as Jobbik, only to learn that they want to legalize Holocaust denial because they don’t believe it actually happened. Same with anti-feminism. Just take a young man who have troubles with romantic life and tell him that it’s because feminism. If he was bullied by an asshole girl in school who defended herself with the “you can’t hit back I’m a girl” excuse, tell him it was due to feminism. Unlike me in the past, they want to keep their status quo, so they’re being told that they’re not properly masculine because of their mother and feminism. This is even easier if they never heard of feminism before in a proper way.
I thought on doing a video response, but due to my finals I can’t really script one then record it.
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
jacobvanloon
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