By David Futrelle
I spend a lot of my time reading through other people’s very bad opinions. And I don’t always have to go to Reddit or Incels.co to find them. Trolls and weirdos often deliver their terrible opinions directly to me in the form of emails and tweets and comments they try to leave here on the blog.
So I thought I’d open up the old Malebag and share some of these nuggets of wisdom with you. First, let’s take this, well, intriguing assertion from someone who came here to defend the Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin from my criticisms:
“Bashing a guy cause he doesn’t like you or think like you do is a form of slavery,” wrote someone called Ingar, “you seek to force him to agree with your view or be an enemy.”
That’s a rather, well, elastic notion of slavery. And while Ingar stands staunchly against the “slavery” of me critiquing a literal Nazi, he doesn’t seem to have much problem with actual, literal slavery, ending his comment by noting that
I’ll go back to 1850 thanks very much biggest expansion of the average persons wealth in history.
Not much of an expansion for the slaves though.
From a would-be commenter called “Send_Ford_To_The_Chopshop” I learned that all “neurotypicals” are abusers. It’s (apparently) just SCIENCE.
The very reason neurotypicals are considered “typical” is BECAUSE they’re abusive. They built civilization, which is to say they took more from nature and their fellow humans than they deserved, bullied everyone around them into following their ways and raped anybody they could get their hands on to spread their poisonous genetic material far and wide.
Not that Ford here is opposed to abuse, so long as it’s directed at the right people. “Hatred and revenge should be human rights provided they’re against those responsible for bullying,” Ford wrote.
Nah. Bullying bullies is still bullying.
Someone called TheGrimSpectreOfChesterton has a remarkably similar evo-psychy assessment of the alleged evil impulses of normal people, telling one commenter here that they
deserve to be castrated, as does anyone who talks about “progress”.
Huh. That seems a little … harsh. Mr Chesterton continues:
Rape culture isn’t some malign influence that makes otherwise decent men hurt women. It’s an expression of the vicious, acquisitive impulses that allowed your ancestors to kill their neighbors, rape their wives and daughters, steal their land and thus pass on their genes and their way of life to subsequent generations including you.
Weird, because there’s a lot of research suggesting that evolution also rewards cooperation, and not just among humans and, you know, bees.
It’s inside you, you swine. It’s inside you and no scalpel is ever going to cut it out. If we ever want to live in a world without it every generation is going to need to be subject to the same discipline. No progress, rather constant vigilance against REGRESS to the cruel hedonism of the past.
Worst pickup line EVER.
On a somewhat lighter note, here’s a guy who’s worked himself into a bit of a tizzy over a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it lesbian kiss in the latest Star Wars movie.
I was appalled by this scene as if it really represented what I want to see in Star Wars. No question that Disney pandered even with the number of women and other minorities. Stars Wars is now a PC joke. Other films will also suffer to the rainbow regime as that person put it. Movie making is about telling stories not PC issues. You can make whatever homosexual movies you want just leave that stuff out of big franchises but oh wait then you probably couldn’t profit well with them.
Wait, I thought the slogan was “get woke, go broke,” not “get woke, profit well with it.”
Most of the comments I don’t let through moderation aren’t quite this creative. There are the routine requests to “kill yourself;” the slur-laden attacks on women, LGBTQ folks, people of color and so forth; the regular reminders that I’m a fat fatty. (I’m aware of that!)
And then there’s this person, who thinks we’re the truly hateful ones:
Anyone reading or writing in here is clearly fucked up, wow. Please don’t waste your lives however little you capacity for love is in a place so filled with hate and negativity.
This was in response to my post Redditor outraged to discover that women want “hot fun sex with men they’re sexually attracted to.”
I’m having a hard time seeing myself or the regular commenters on this blog as the hateful ones here.
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@ Naglfar
Check your email settings. Make sure [email protected] is set not to go to spam.
@An Autistic Giraffe, Naglfar
And combating the “autistic=asshole” stereotype really isn’t helped when the most prominent autistic character in popular media in the past decade is frikkin’ Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory. Oh Lord do I hate that show.
And even the well-portrayed autistic characters are, like Sheldon, generally coded as autistic rather than explicitly so, much like gay characters were for decades.
Sometimes the lack of an explicit identity makes sense:
Temperence Brennan from Bones, given her background, would not have been tested as a child, and as an adult she has such a dim view of psychology that it is understandable that her psychologist friend thought it best never to bring the matter up.
Entrapta from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power lives on another planet with a different culture. Etherians may not even be aware of autism. (Though in Entrapta’s case, the series bible does explicitly state her autism.)
But most are like Sheldon Cooper where they are only coded autistic so that the producers can deny that they’re a vile autistic stereotype with “But we never said he was autistic!” even while presenting a caricature of autism.
(Prior to my diagnosis, it irritated me when LGBT people would look at fictional or historical figures and say “They’re gay, they’re probably gay, they’re definitely gay.”
I’m sorry that I did that. I get it now.)
@Naglfar: oh I hope he does try! I just doubt he actually knows anything about mining outside video games and when confronted with the kind of work it actually takes… I think he’ll be back on his couch complaining about us again in no time.
@Allandrel
Now that The Big Bang Theory is off the air (as it should be, it also had some real misogyny and racism issues), the show I’m most frustrated with is Netflix’s Atypical. The character Sam is explicitly autistic, but resembles every negative stereotype as a caricature (including that he’s sort of an incel) and is shown as a burden to everyone around him.
@Yutolia
MRAs love to talk about how mining is an example of “male disposability,” yet none of them seem to be miners. Anyway, who wants to bet he’d start by punching a tree and expecting to get wood?
Schnookums,
I think an Office Space fan could argue that it’s an example of a good PC movie. The entire plot centers around them! And that dastardly printer.
Allandrel,
Are there any good, well written fictional movie or TV protagonists who are explicitly autistic?
I can’t really think of any. I suppose part of the problem could be that autistic writers and filmmakers are less likely to have the schmoozing skills required to get something made. So any autistic or autistic coded character is going to be from a neurotypical perspective.
@WWTH
I can’t think of any well written explicitly autistic TV or film protagonists off the top of my head, but I don’t watch much TV or film so I could be missing something. My guess is that the lack of autistic writers does have something to do with this, as well as a general public lack of understanding re: neurodiversity. I’d love to see some well written autistic protagonists (especially autistic women, women are underrepresented or marginalized in a lot of autistic spaces) but I just don’t think there is much of a market for such shows or films.
I can think of a few books that depict autism well, mostly by autistic authors. Maybe someone could adapt one of those into a film (I would suggest an autistic screenwriter, or even the original author if possible, just to ensure a good depiction).
@Naglfar, Yutolia:
Of course, even if he did go out in search of gold, he probably forgot that during the actual Gold Rush(es), the people who actually made money were mostly the shopkeepers and innkeepers who could charge what they wanted when dealing with prospectors flush with new gold.
Not to mention that the sorts of places where you could panhandle for gold easily are almost all tapped out now, and have been for decades.
Back when I was in high school, somebody found gold on Vancouver Island, and asked a company to come in for an assay. The company came in, pretty much said ‘Yes, there’s gold there, but it would cost us more to open up a mine than we’d ever recover from actually mining it, so we’re not going to bother’ and then left. People in the area who had visions of riches dancing in their heads were pissed. But that’s the state a lot of mining is in right now.
@Naglfar
I watched the first few episodes of Atypical and felt the same way.
@WWTH
There are some!
Billy the Blue Ranger in the Power Rangers reboot movie is great. It’s mentioned once, nobody makes a big deal over it, and it isn’t even part of his character arc – that’s largely about missing his dead father and forming new emotional bonds with the other rangers.
I especially love that it so clearly avoids the “autistic people don’t care about other people” stereotype so fully – Billy is very much “the heart” of the team.
Will Graham, the main protagonist in Hannibal, is repeatedly stated to be on the spectrum, and like some autistic people he has strong affective empathy and does not process it well.
Helix in the current G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero comic series (a continuation of the 1980s series by the same author) is stated to be on the spectrum, and is treated quite respectfully. A few things I really liked are:
While Helix had a traumatic childhood, it is not presented as connected to her autism. She an autistic person who had a traumatic childhood, not someone who was “traumatized into autism” (a trope that I really, really hate, especially since those stories usually involve a “cure”).
She hates being touched, but as an adult with good social skills, her response is to jerk away and say “I don’t like to be touched” rather than to have a stereotypical meltdown.
She’s ridiculously smart and competent, but this is never linked to her autism and the “savant” word is never used. It also does not make her different from other characters, because G.I. Joe is basically Competence Porn.
*sees black woman in a movie*
Well, now there’s no story!
I have a bit of an interest in intelligence and security services.
Both our GCHQ and the Israeli forces specifically recruit “neurodiverse” individuals for intelligence work. Such people bring very valuable skills to the profession. Traffic analysis for example is far more useful than actually intercepting content of messages.
I can’t help but think there’s some fantastic story possibilities here. I’d love to write some; but I guess this is something that would very much benefit from being produced by someone with the relevant experience.
But anyway, more here…
https://www.gchq.gov.uk/information/daring-to-think-differently-and-be-different
https://www.timesofisrael.com/topic/idf-autistic-program-roim-rachok/
@Allandrel
I was unfamiliar with the examples you cite, but thank you for telling me about them. I really would like more people to see positive images of autism in media because there still is a strong lack of knowledge or misinformation among many people. Right now an autism related thing that’s frustrating me is how TERFs are attacking autistic people. Since autistic people are more likely to be trans* (I’m autistic and trans*, IIRC a few other commenters here are as well), TERFs realized they could get anti vaxxers and other “autism warrior” parents on their side by claiming that the “gender ideology” (a scare term used by transphobes) is targeting autistic children. They then go on to make numerous false claims related to both autism and trans* people, as could be expected.
Of course, this is not helpful for autistic people, but the harm they cause to autistic people is very much a feature and not a bug.
re fictional characters who are autistic, there was a character in Alphas who (in addition to having a kind of superpower, like all the ‘Alphas’ do on the show) is presented as neurodivergent in a way that bears at least some relation to the autistic spectrum (and the character “officially” has ASD in the show). Iirc the actor got some very positive reactions from autistic people for doing a respectful and observant job (not that the character is “typical”, since there’s no such thing really; the people on the spectrum I’ve met/to whom I’m related are all completely different to this and to one another, obviously).
ETA character is called Gary Bell; actor is Ryan Cartwright)
@ crip dyke
Well I’ll never forgive the Enlightenment for inventing calculus.
I really enjoyed your blog though. I’ll send you an email with something peripherally related.
@WWTH @Naglfar I don’t know of any film or TV protagonists, but there’s a novel “The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime”
@ sheila et al
There is a sort of film adaptation.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8539818/
There is an autistic character on HBO’s The Outsider series, and she’s a woman of color. I guess they haven’t explicitly said she’s autistic on the show, but she’s a character that’s been in four Stephen King books so far and she’s canonically autistic. I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet but I’ve heard good things about her character.
@Sheila, Alan Robertshaw
I’ve read that book but I haven’t seen the film.
@LindsayIrene
If she is represented well that is very good, because POC and women often get marginalized in autistic communities.
So off-topic, but if anyone feels they haven’t been faced with enough disgusting misogyny of late: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/greta-thunberg-xsite-energy-sexual-image-1.5478561
When even Jason Kenney is saying you’re an asshole, you done fucked up, bro. Not that we know who the bro is, since everyone involved with the company is swearing they had nothing to do with it.
No, this is a PC joke: A priest, a minister, and a rabbit walk into a bar. The rabbit says, “I think I might be a typo.”
@Alan Robertshaw
Have you read The Speed of Dark? It focuses on a group of autists who are employed for data analysis.
(Disclaimer: I know the author and Mr. Parasol advised on how to leverage corporate processes to thwart an evil manager.)
@Naglfar: I wouldn’t be surprised at all!
@WWTH : isn’t there a ton of characters that could very well be high functioning autists ? I am not the most knowledgeable about autists, but the main lesson I alway have had is that a lot of the time, they are just like any other people.
That being said, I am just as wary of “autism as a superpower” than “autism as a disability”. Not only because the main user of “autism as superpower” tend to be incredibly nasty, but also simply because it can easily put additional expectations on autists.
And it take a particulary good author to make a trait significant, especially one not terribly remarkable, without making it look like a quality or a flaw.
@Ohlmann
Not that I’m aware of, but could be. If you mean “high functioning and passes for neurotypical” then there could be, but that effectively means it’s not relevant to the story and that they could have any number of other things or not.
Ideally a good author writing about autism could show both strengths and weaknesses related to it. I know that in any sort of literature it’s boring to read about characters who have no flaws or who have no qualities.
@Naglfar:
This is the first time I’ve heard of anything like a correlation between autism and trans-ness. Are there any studies being done?
I’ve been watching and enjoying the show, but haven’t read any of the books she’s in as I’ve mostly only read King’s older books, so I didn’t know she was explicitly autistic.