Autistic men are not "coddled"
I keep seeing this ridiculous idea being parroted everywhere on this platform and I had to say something about it. It's not only false but honestly offensive to me as an autistic man who's experienced what it's actually like.
This narrative mainly comes from autistic women who claim autistic men get away with not masking while they don't. If you don't know what masking means in the context of autism, it means behaving in such a way that makes your autistic symptoms less visible to others so that you can socialize more easily.
So where did this claim originate from? In recent years women have been getting diagnosed with autism on a scale never seen before. Autism as a label has for most of its history been given to men. Many people now wonder why it took this long for women to get diagnosed. How did these women go their entire lives undetected?
This is where the narrative begins but we can already ask some pretty obvious questions. When you get diagnosed with autism you do so by having its symptoms. If the symptoms have been noticed more in men, couldn't this point to them causing more problems in the way men are socialized? That many of these same symptoms don't conflict with the way women are socialized and go undetected?
Well, according to the narrative autistic symptoms look different in women, primarily because they mask more. But masking is a pretty nebulous thing to define here. How do you know if you're masking more or if conforming is simply just easier? Autism can look widely different in people, but autistic men not coming off as masculine is a hallmark trait. And lacking masculinity is a detriment to the social lives of men which affects everything else, such as their economic prospects. The inverse of this is simply not as severe for women. Women are permitted a much wider spectrum of gendered behavior, especially in dating. Both autistic men and women get infantilized but being a "manchild" is a gendered concept.
When people point out autistic men compared to autistic women are disproportionately friendless, single, jobless, poor, etc there is no sympathy. On subreddits for autistic women where you'd maybe expect some kind of solidarity there is none. The reason autistic men underperform? They simply haven't tried hard enough to mask because they're coddled, entitled, whiny, etc. That's what the responses are. Autistic men supposedly being "creepy" is one of the worst ones, since it's one of the reasons often used in those subreddits for why autistic women themselves don't date other autistic men. It's such blatant and ironic ableism that's used as justification to claim autistic men should just take personal responsibility. How the fuck is living a miserable life being coddled?
If I complain about any of this I get written off as an "incel". Autistic men are at the bottom of society's hierarchy yet receive absolutely no sympathy. The brutal bullying and abuse I've received when I didn't mask has traumatized me for life. The type of open harassment and violent attacks not only me but other guys I suspect also were on the spectrum received in school is something I never saw a single girl that could've been autistic be subjected to, even if she obviously got mistreated in other ways. I know this wasn't the most well-written post but I really had to say something.