I’m autistic as fuck so I can’t read anyone’s signals but men are just as bad. I could never understand why men worked so hard to get my attention and got all weird when I didn’t give them that attention.
They also spend a lot of time trying to shape me into the type of man they want to be around yet they would never outright say what they are doing and why I should change for them.
Then they would get all jealous when I actually hung out with women and get even weirder about it when I wouldn’t engage them in the weird conversations they wanted to have about women.
Like dude, if you want a hug or a cuddle, just say so because these roundabout games you’re playing is confusing as fuck.
1 - Have a somewhat societally common and shared, but also very unique and specific to yourself/particular social group, way of understanding and projecting tone, microexpressions, vocabulary choices, speech cadence, etc, with many distinct or uncommon idiosyncrasies.
2 - Assume everyone else on the planet has essentially the exact same way of seeing and performing all this as you do.
3 - Confidently interperet social cues incorrectly considerably more often than Autists, but be blissfully unaware of this, pathologize and shame the idea of asking for clarity and communicating in a direct, precise, and less ambiguous way.
… Autistic people consciously learn, process and evaluate how social cues actually work, and Autistic people also very much like logically consistent things that are not contradictory… so they are more likely to either be very rigid with one way of understanding something, or to.ask questions to clarify things that are not actually clear, consistent, universal, precise.
It thus takes them longer to learn how to adaquetly perform all this, aka, Masking.
Neurotypicals on the other hand learn, process and evaluate and perform social cues much more unconsciously, and they are far more likely to just assume their interpretation is correct, that their projected behaviors convey exactly what they think they do… despite the fact that if you sit a bunch of them down, they will all describe significant differences between their ways of understanding and performing mannerisms.
Essentially, they’re bullshitting it, but there are more bullshitters than non bullshitters, so bullshitting is the norm.
See my other wall of text reply to your other comment, lol, I could go on for days with anecdotes of esoteric bs I’ve seen NT men do to signal things to other men and women, I totally agree this isn’t a sex/gender thing, its a neurotype thing that manifests differently in different sexes/genders.
I tend to ignore terms like neurotypical and neurodiverse because I just view everyone as neurodiverse. And if everyone is neurodiverse, then nobody is neurodiverse. That just means to me that people are people. Some more insecure than others.
I also think that everyone is gay. Which means I personally don’t really view anyone as gay, just people doing normal people things no matter who they love. Some people just happen to be insecure as fuck about loving another person.
What I do see are a lot of insecure people attempting to set and enforce normal behaviour because they are afraid of being weird while ignoring the fact that being alive is the most weird and pointless experience ever.
Gotta have a little fun with the weird, pointlessness of existence, that’s what can make life beautiful and interesting :)
They get all weird because they see getting your attention as a sort of investment. They take time, effort, dedicate themselves to figuring out how to best build contact with you, and when it doesn’t work out, it naturally leads to frustration. From there, they either close down (minimize losses), or get weird (frantically trying to make it work).
As per hugs and cuddles, masculine culture heavily disincentivizes tender emotions, and they can be seen as a reason for ridicule. Being burnt heavily on that, many men prefer to be very careful about communicating such needs.
Part of the confusion is the men I have had experiences with spend a lot of time talking about women but then invest an uncomfortable amount of time trying to turn me into a man that they want me to be for them.
One guy spent nearly two weeks trying to get me to take creatine and go work out with him. Like if he wants me to cuddle him with big, strong, manly arms, he was going about it in a weird way.
It’s just as confusing when men love that I treat them as unique individual but get upset with me that I also treat women like unique individuals, almost like they are jealous.
100% agree, tons of NT men do weird, esoteric, ‘interperet my strange, indirect dance of actions, and if you fail to understand what they mean, well you’re an asshole / a bitch / a tease’ type bullshit.
NT women of course do this as well, watching a couple recent compilations of women explaining that they are sending an extremely obvious flirting sign by literally holding eye contact with a person they are walking past for an actual quarter second longer than their own personal normal duration for this… has been uh, eye opening.
Like these girls would be irate, immensely frustrated that no one noticed this form of flirtation, no guy noticed that and then immediately asked for their digits… because this form of flirtation is apparently just extremely obvious and noticeable?
Everything would be about a million times easier if people just actually stated what they wanted… at least in concept… but the problem is that being that direct forces people to be honest with themselves, forces the possibility of a direct denial/rejection, and people tend to not like that.
The whole problem is that NTs all seem to think their specific weird actions are universally, easily understood to convey the same meaning to everyone, but other NTs will significantly disagree about these things when they bother to actually examine them in detail!
So its less that Autists ‘cant figure out social cues’ and more like ‘NTs can’t agree on social cues, but they all act like they do universally agree’… and then Autists are confused by this, because much of it actually is inconsistent and contradictory.
I’d love to be able to ask directly, but my fear is they’ll treat me differently after I ask. It’s already happened once to me; a friend stopped hanging out with me for a while (I think that’s fixed now, but it lasted months). I feel a bit safer about it around autistic people though, because I’m pretty sure a rejection would be just a “no” and then we proceed like nothing happened.
Oh, many men are jealous when women they like hang out a lot with other women and enjoy their time. Modern culture made it look like women may form a special form of deep connection men can never reach, while simultaneously making men feel isolated overall, and some are driven quite crazy over it.
As such, when they get the attention they crave, they don’t feel they can secure it. Thereby, mentioning other women and what they mean to you feels like a threat. This takes a while to unlearn, and is one kind of trauma many men get to experience.
I do not have many personal insights about how men want their friends/partners to be manly, but I may suggest it may come from the same point. Male friendships nowadays are fairly rare, and some folks really just want a bro to hang out with.
I’m autistic as fuck so I can’t read anyone’s signals but men are just as bad. I could never understand why men worked so hard to get my attention and got all weird when I didn’t give them that attention.
They also spend a lot of time trying to shape me into the type of man they want to be around yet they would never outright say what they are doing and why I should change for them.
Then they would get all jealous when I actually hung out with women and get even weirder about it when I wouldn’t engage them in the weird conversations they wanted to have about women.
Like dude, if you want a hug or a cuddle, just say so because these roundabout games you’re playing is confusing as fuck.
So now I wander the earth thoroughly confused…
How to be a neurotypical:
1 - Have a somewhat societally common and shared, but also very unique and specific to yourself/particular social group, way of understanding and projecting tone, microexpressions, vocabulary choices, speech cadence, etc, with many distinct or uncommon idiosyncrasies.
2 - Assume everyone else on the planet has essentially the exact same way of seeing and performing all this as you do.
3 - Confidently interperet social cues incorrectly considerably more often than Autists, but be blissfully unaware of this, pathologize and shame the idea of asking for clarity and communicating in a direct, precise, and less ambiguous way.
… Autistic people consciously learn, process and evaluate how social cues actually work, and Autistic people also very much like logically consistent things that are not contradictory… so they are more likely to either be very rigid with one way of understanding something, or to.ask questions to clarify things that are not actually clear, consistent, universal, precise.
It thus takes them longer to learn how to adaquetly perform all this, aka, Masking.
Neurotypicals on the other hand learn, process and evaluate and perform social cues much more unconsciously, and they are far more likely to just assume their interpretation is correct, that their projected behaviors convey exactly what they think they do… despite the fact that if you sit a bunch of them down, they will all describe significant differences between their ways of understanding and performing mannerisms.
Essentially, they’re bullshitting it, but there are more bullshitters than non bullshitters, so bullshitting is the norm.
I was just having some fun by pointing out that women aren’t the only mythical creature whose signals are hard to read.
I do agree with your last point thoroughly, bullshitters do be bullshittin’ it. A lot. Too much I would say.
See my other wall of text reply to your other comment, lol, I could go on for days with anecdotes of esoteric bs I’ve seen NT men do to signal things to other men and women, I totally agree this isn’t a sex/gender thing, its a neurotype thing that manifests differently in different sexes/genders.
I tend to ignore terms like neurotypical and neurodiverse because I just view everyone as neurodiverse. And if everyone is neurodiverse, then nobody is neurodiverse. That just means to me that people are people. Some more insecure than others.
I also think that everyone is gay. Which means I personally don’t really view anyone as gay, just people doing normal people things no matter who they love. Some people just happen to be insecure as fuck about loving another person.
What I do see are a lot of insecure people attempting to set and enforce normal behaviour because they are afraid of being weird while ignoring the fact that being alive is the most weird and pointless experience ever.
Gotta have a little fun with the weird, pointlessness of existence, that’s what can make life beautiful and interesting :)
A bit of insights:
They get all weird because they see getting your attention as a sort of investment. They take time, effort, dedicate themselves to figuring out how to best build contact with you, and when it doesn’t work out, it naturally leads to frustration. From there, they either close down (minimize losses), or get weird (frantically trying to make it work).
As per hugs and cuddles, masculine culture heavily disincentivizes tender emotions, and they can be seen as a reason for ridicule. Being burnt heavily on that, many men prefer to be very careful about communicating such needs.
Part of the confusion is the men I have had experiences with spend a lot of time talking about women but then invest an uncomfortable amount of time trying to turn me into a man that they want me to be for them.
One guy spent nearly two weeks trying to get me to take creatine and go work out with him. Like if he wants me to cuddle him with big, strong, manly arms, he was going about it in a weird way.
It’s just as confusing when men love that I treat them as unique individual but get upset with me that I also treat women like unique individuals, almost like they are jealous.
The signals are there but I can’t read 'em!
Autistic guy here:
100% agree, tons of NT men do weird, esoteric, ‘interperet my strange, indirect dance of actions, and if you fail to understand what they mean, well you’re an asshole / a bitch / a tease’ type bullshit.
NT women of course do this as well, watching a couple recent compilations of women explaining that they are sending an extremely obvious flirting sign by literally holding eye contact with a person they are walking past for an actual quarter second longer than their own personal normal duration for this… has been uh, eye opening.
Like these girls would be irate, immensely frustrated that no one noticed this form of flirtation, no guy noticed that and then immediately asked for their digits… because this form of flirtation is apparently just extremely obvious and noticeable?
Everything would be about a million times easier if people just actually stated what they wanted… at least in concept… but the problem is that being that direct forces people to be honest with themselves, forces the possibility of a direct denial/rejection, and people tend to not like that.
The whole problem is that NTs all seem to think their specific weird actions are universally, easily understood to convey the same meaning to everyone, but other NTs will significantly disagree about these things when they bother to actually examine them in detail!
So its less that Autists ‘cant figure out social cues’ and more like ‘NTs can’t agree on social cues, but they all act like they do universally agree’… and then Autists are confused by this, because much of it actually is inconsistent and contradictory.
I’d love to be able to ask directly, but my fear is they’ll treat me differently after I ask. It’s already happened once to me; a friend stopped hanging out with me for a while (I think that’s fixed now, but it lasted months). I feel a bit safer about it around autistic people though, because I’m pretty sure a rejection would be just a “no” and then we proceed like nothing happened.
Oh, many men are jealous when women they like hang out a lot with other women and enjoy their time. Modern culture made it look like women may form a special form of deep connection men can never reach, while simultaneously making men feel isolated overall, and some are driven quite crazy over it.
As such, when they get the attention they crave, they don’t feel they can secure it. Thereby, mentioning other women and what they mean to you feels like a threat. This takes a while to unlearn, and is one kind of trauma many men get to experience.
I do not have many personal insights about how men want their friends/partners to be manly, but I may suggest it may come from the same point. Male friendships nowadays are fairly rare, and some folks really just want a bro to hang out with.
I’m quite literally a bro they can hang out with, and have always been. I just lack the big strong arms they want me to have to cuddle them with D: