And now for something completely different.

This is the ADHD Teapot. I made it in a ceramics class a few years ago. I use it to explain executive dysfunction to people who haven’t come across the term before (and those who think of ADHD mostly as Hyperactive EightYear Old Boy Syndrome).

So, most people’s brains are like a regular shaped teapot with a single spout. Let’s say that your time, energy, focus etc is the liquid you have in the teapot. Your executive function is the spout, that directs the tea into the specific cup you want to fill-aka the task that you’re meant to be doing. Spills happen occasionally, but generally most of the tea goes in the right cup.

If you have executive dysfunction, you have multiple spouts going in different directions. You can try pointing one of them at your chosen cup and you will probably get some liquid in there, perhaps you will even fill it right up (finish the task). But meanwhile, tea is also pouring out of several other places and not going where you want it. If you have another container nearby, perhaps some of it will end up in there. But quite a lot of it is going to end up on the floor and accomplish nothing.

And at the end of the day you’ll have filled one or two cups ( or sometimes not even one) compared to the five or six that somebody with the same sized teapot (but only one spout) has filled, and everyone wonders why you’re so bad at getting tea poured, and why you make such a mess in the process.

One day I’d like to spend more time learning pottery and create a really technically good fucked up little adhd teapot. But that’s a long way off since i currently live in the outback and the nearest pottery workshop is some 400km away. But I figure that for now, it might be a useful or interesting metaphor to somebody even in its rough draft form.

This post is the cup I filled instead of cleaning my house btw.

HDG and "Horror"

So I've seen several people talk about the horrors of Human Domestication Guide and how it's really effective cosmic horror if you look past the kink part of it, but I don't really see that? At least, I don't think I've seen any points levied towards that point that don't already just exist in day-to-day life but far worse.

The main one I see a lot is the idea of this incomprehensible cosmic force that we can't fight completely subsuming our culture and freedoms, but like, is that not already just a grander version of living under capitalism? That shit invades every single aspect of our lives but unlike the affini it's perfectly content with killing us at a moment's notice, and in so many cases actively wants us dead for the crime of existing.

Like, oh they're an imperialist empire and don't give you a choice about living under them? Yeah man that would sure suck I cant imagine what that would be like

I saw a post on r/196 calling the Affini slavers which is really fucking funny to me because you can just tell whoever made that post has never actually read the fucking thing

I dunno, at the end of the day i honestly cannot fathom what makes the Affini terrifying when I'm at least *allowed* to live under them. Where basic survival isn't something I have to earn by tearing my own body apart every single day, where I'm actually loved and cared for by the people running shit. There's nothing bad about them that isn't already so much worse in the present day, and the whining I've seen in places like Reddit about "never being allowed to reach our fullest potential" is as much wish fullfilment scifi as the HDG setting as a whole is, so it's kind of a moot point

I definitely wouldn't say its cosmic horror and really the only way I see someone making that mistake is if they think tentacles = cosmic horror

The Affini Compact is overall a better place to live than the Terran Accord but I dont know if Id say its great either on an individual basis. While the affini preach about consent, a lot of the fics have affini very quickly jumping to force a domestication on unwilling people.

I think anyone who has been commited against their will would be able to see the horror aspects of being taken against your will, drugged without your consent, and people in power refusing to listen to you because they "know whats best for you." In some of the worst case scenarios in fics ive read the humans could end up getting what seems to be essentially a lobotomy.

I haven't read the original yet so maybe these issues are less prevalent there but taken outside of kink I think the setting could lend itself well to horror. Though Id still much rather live in the Compact than the Accord or anywhere on Earth atm

This is also a very good point

Admittedly I’m also coming at this from the perspective of Wellness Check and For a Better Universe being my go-to examples of HDG content I like more than something like the original fic so this might just be me

I haven't really read the original Human Domestication Guide story cause it really isn't my thing, but I've skimmed enough of it to see that it gives us a sample of an Affini floret contract (it's in chapter 7), which I can just paste here:

I think it's quite reasonable to call this arrangement slavery! The contract literally says "You are her property"!

I think reading that contract (and the scene it appears in, it's even more horrifying in context!) might give you an idea of what people who say HDG can really easily be read as a horror setting mean by that!

You can suggest that Elvira is an exceptional case and most of the humans in the Compact (and even most florets) get much less coercive treatment, but that still leaves the Compact as a society with some amount of what I think can be fairly described as formally legally institutionalized slavery, which is, uh, not good. Also, the impression I get is that a floret having almost no rights against their owner(!) is the normal Affini legal and social practice, and the system mostly relies on the Affini biological predisposition to benevolence to prevent the horrific consequences this would have if the owners were more psychologically human-like; I think it's defensible to call that slavery, though you can reasonably argue that doing so is using a misleadingly emotionally loaded term.

Like, yeah, HDG is super-easy to read as a horror setting if you don't buy the line that the Affini are genuinely benevolent and/or you don't think the problems with imperialism, slavery, and racial hierarchy all go away if the people doing the imperialism and enslaving and at the top of the hierarchy are personally nice. Personally, if I ever wrote anything in this setting, I'd be inclined to roll with a relatively noblebright take on Affini, but also to pay attention to how the problems with imperialism and slavery don't all go away if the imperialists and enslavers are nice people (like, Affini are still going to mess up sometimes cause they're not omniscient, and they might have difficulty empathizing with and understanding a lot of human motivations, and their arrogance might lead them into errors), and give the Affini some relatively noblebright opposition, and take some inspiration from how Peter Watts portrayed the Thing for writing Affini.

I think my primary objection to your broader argument would be that being conquered by the Affini is an end of history. The Affini have been spacefaring for 100,000 years and as far as I can tell their culture has had basically its present character more-or-less that entire time. The answer to "what does human society look like 100,000 years after the conquest?" is "probably a lot like it does 10 years after the conquest."

This isn't an argument about "potential" or anything like that, it's more specific and concrete: the Affini have had a society with imperialism, slavery, and a racialized hierarchy for 100,000 years, and all signs point to their society will continue to have those features for another 100,000 years, possibly much longer. As somebody who doesn't like imperialism, slavery, or racialized hierarchies, I find that highly objectionable.

Sure, the society of the Compact is plausibly a big net improvement over the society of twenty-first century Earth or the Accord. Sure, capitalism sucks (at least if you count down from plausible better societies instead of counting up from the millennia of even worse poverty and oppression under feudalism that preceded it). But capitalism isn't 100,000 years old. It's quite plausible that capitalism won't last one millennium, let alone 100 of them. Human societies can and often do change a lot in small fractions of the length of the history of Affini civilization, and that change is often for the better. Our world is pretty utopian compared to the world of 1850, and that's less than 180 years, less than .2% of the time Affini have had an interstellar civilization.

And, like, the ways the Compact is obviously dramatically better than the Accord are fundamentally downstream of the Compact having better technology cause the Affini lucked into getting a big head start on us. Left to their own devices, humans would invent matter compilers sooner or later (or, y'know, the Affini could have just given us the knowledge of how to build them without conquering us, if they'd been so inclined). I think if you left the Accord alone for, say, 20,000 years, it's pretty plausible they'd eventually develop a functionally post-scarcity society that doesn't have slavery and imperialism and racial hierarchy.

If I had to pick between being a human independent in the Compact and an average citizen in the Accord, I think I'd take the Compact. But if I lived in the HDG universe and I could somehow arrange for the Accord to be protected from conquest, I think I'd do that. Because the Accord might get better, but I'm less optimistic that the Affini will, because the Affini have spent the last 100,000 years not doing that.

This is another example of how I think if you want HDG with a relatively noblebright tone it'd work a lot better if you scaled back the size and age of the Compact a lot. If the Compact was "only" a thousand years old it'd look much more plausible that it might eventually become better than it is now.

Aside: I think the best bet for getting the Affini to change for the better might be them encountering a non-Affini civilization they can't conquer. As far as I can tell, they've so far never had that experience; they got a big head start over every other civilization they've encountered so far, so they've just subjugated every other sapient species they've ever met. If they met another civilization with technology and resources comparable to their own and had to sit with the knowledge that these beings rejected their domination and there was nothing they could do about that, I think they might improve a lot.

I'm not going to pretend that doesn't sound coercive and cruel and awful... If you ignore the core conceit of the setting.

The Affini are good. They, on a fundamental, deep-seated level, want what's best for you, and if turning you into a pet isn't what's best for you, they wouldn't do it. And they're almost always right.

This is called an axiom for a reason - if you're not starting from that assumption, you're not writing an HDG story. Some people balk at this, because, sure, it's one hell of a conceit to accept going into a setting, but if you're talking about how awful the compact is...

...how horrific their "slavery" (wherein your caretaker is utterly obsessed with making you able to be as happy as you can be, you never have to work again, and your every need is perfectly met) is...

...how awful their "racial hierarchy" (wherein it is assumed that the immortal benevolent aliens who are the most advanced species and have been doing this successfully for longer than most species have existed know better than the beings that cannot help but seem like children relative to them) is...

...how heinous their "imperialism" (wherein they indisputably make everything better for everyone by taking over and dissolving previous oppressive hierarchies) is...

... you're not really talking about HDG. You're not really talking about the Affini.

I suppose this is part of the reason stories in the setting consistently load the bases by emphasizing just how horrific life under future space capitalism is, and just how miserable it makes everyone. Like, I cannot stress this enough, the Terran accord fucking sucks. They have actual slavery, actual genocidal imperialism, and actual racial hierarchy. Not to mention total environmental collapse, food that exists to make the lower classes miserable, and all manner of other bespoke nightmares that are, at the end of the day, logical extensions of what we currently deal with under capitalism. They may eventually get better (although this is not the trend; the trend is things getting worse), but that's cold comfort for those stuck living under it.

Why would you change the compact? It's a paradise for all, to the point where "not being content and fulfilled with your life" is grounds for social intervention - and said intervention is actually based on helping you. There's no war, no strife, no misery. It is essentially perfect, and that's by design. Again, you can reject this conceit, and that's totally valid, but if you reject it as applies to these stories... You're missing a key piece of the puzzle.

One last thing. I reject the idea that the terran accord would have done better with the more advanced technology of the Affini. Technology is a tool, and a tool's use is downstream from the society that builds it. Would Star Trek replicators fix human society? That's not a new debate, and I land very firmly on the side that says "no, access to that kind of technology would instantly make all of our hierarchies that much worse". Or, to put it another way, has instantly being able to copy and reproduce knowledge infinitely led to a world where knowledge is free and easily attainable? No, and to the degree that it has, the powerful in our society have been fighting it tooth and nail for as long as it has existed.

If you reject the conceit that the Affini are fundamentally benevolent, your story isn't really bout the Affini or set in the HDG universe.

P.s. if you're looking for noblebright opposition, consider "No Gods, No Masters", which takes a long philosophical look at how human communists would handle the Affini. It's quite something.

On a purely Wattsonian level, that "almost" qualifier is the thing I'd be worried about if I was a HDG human (well, that and without access to Doylist-level knowledge I'd have some pretty serious doubts about the truth of the rest of that statement too). Sure, Affini may have benevolent intentions, but they're going to mess up sometimes, because they're not omniscient, and because they don't seem obviously much smarter than humans (most of them would have a lot more experience than any human because of their long lifespans, but experience/knowledge is only one facet of intelligence).

Somebody else objected to my position on I think basically left-skepticism grounds in the tags, and the left-skepticism argument against it is the one I find most compelling.

On a more meta/Doylist level I guess my true objection is that I'm adjacent to the kind of person the setting is designed to cater to but not actually that kind of person, and, uh...

I remember once reading a post on this site saying that calling your lover "Daddy" has different vibes when men do it in a gay context vs. when women do it in a heterosexual context. I don't remember it super-well, but the argument was something like the straight "Daddy" is about pure power but the gay "Daddy" has more of an idea of the "Daddy" as an aspirational figure and a mentor and somebody you might become like some day. It didn't say this, but the subtext I got from it was, like, that kind of relationship has different dynamics when it's between people of the same gender because then you don't have a whole cultural complex of gender bullshit encouraging you to think of your lover as a fundamentally and innately different type of person and encouraging you to conceptualize this kind of relationship in gross bio-essentialist complimentarian "natural role" terms, in a gay context that kind of hierarchy is more easily recognized as the conditional and contingent and provisional thing it actually is.

I feel like the difference between HDG and what I'm into parallels this. Like, yeah, a lot of HDG stuff reads to me as D/s for people for whom safety is hot who'd enjoy having a kind and indulgent psuedo-parental figure who they get to have some kind of sexual intimacy with, same hat, that is also one of the few D/s-adjacent dynamics that's appealing to me and it is very appealing to me. But it would be really off-putting to me have this offered to me on the terms of "you're going to get this as part of a bio-essentialist racial hierarchy in which your dom(me) is assumed to have a right to control you derived from their innately morally superior character that is derived from their biology, your subordinate status relative to your dom(me) is permanent and unchangeable (is there such a thing as floret manumission?), and this is going to come bundled with severe violations of your consent, autonomy, and bodily integrity, extreme contempt for your intellect, and radical disregard of your stated preferences." I would like having a mentor who is wiser than me and a helper who is stronger and more competent than me, I don't want a controller, and, uh... Well, there's a point occasionally made that a lot of kink scenarios are horror scenarios to people who don't have the kink, I wouldn't go so far as to say HDG is a horror setting to me, but it's definitely something that provokes mixed feelings when I read or contemplate it.

I wonder if this has something to do with the differences between the cis autistic experience and the trans experience? A lot of trans people seem to have a feeling of "I wish somebody had ignored my stated preferences to satisfy my real preferences, and been empowered to do that over my most strenuous objections" or at least find that very relatable. If you're cis and autistic (as I suspect I am) I guess you're likely to mostly just associate people ignoring your stated preferences with stuff like being pressured to eat foods you don't like and wear clothes with textures you don't like.

Like, there's a bit in Dog Of War (just read it, well, skimmed it anyway!) where Princess chooses an internet username that's a Dune reference and Camilla decides that Dune isn't quite ideologically kosher and forces her to change it, and all I could think of reading that was how infuriated I'd be if somebody pulled that shit on me and how scared I'd be if an authority figure with the kind of power over me that Camilla had over Princess at that point demonstrated that kind of interest in intrusively micro-policing my self-expression.

Aside: the point about Affini not seemingly obviously much smarter than humans made me think an interesting scenario would be Dog of War but Princess is a Blindsight vampire (in this scenario turns out they were a thing in the HDG universe too and the Accord tried Jurassic Park'ing up a few of them for approximately the same reasons Blindsight humans did). It'd be interesting to see an Affini try to deal with a person who actually has a pretty big advantage over them in raw brainpower (though, as Kirk said about Khan in Star Trek, compared to them it would be intelligent but inexperienced), who'd likely be relatively apathetic to a lot of the attractions the Compact offers, and who would definitely be in the "potential danger to others" category but would probably not like the idea of being a floret at all (vampire social instincts would be wired for low-trust relationships, the idea of anybody having the kind of power over them an Affini has over their floret would probably be extremely viscerally terrifying to an adult Blampire). And I think you could write a Blampire that's survived in human society in a way that's actually kind of on-brand for an HDG protagonist.

It kind of backfires for me, the Accord sucks so anviliciously it makes me very aware of how I'm being emotionally manipulated and it feels like the logical objections to/opponents of domestication are being strawmanned. Like, I would really like to see one of those captive humans raise the obvious relatively sympathetic objection to the Affini's face value self-presentation ("You're enslavers! We beat assholes like you on our own planet before we went to the stars and we'll give you the hardest fight we can before you drag us back to that old night! Destroy my mind if you want, the cause of freedom has many martyrs and I would be proud to take a place besides the likes of John Brown!") instead of just spouting strawman-y right-wing nationalist cliches. Even if it gets brushed off as them not understanding how the Compact's society and florethood works at all and being misinformed by Accord propaganda, I'd respect that more than just setting up "rargh gargle my balls I have indomitable Terran warrior spirit I am a fashoid space racist!" as an obviously deliberately unsympathetic strawman for the Affini to knock down. Not that I necessarily object to the latter existing, but it'd be nice to see more acknowledgment that people might have sympathetic and principled reasons to react to the alien invaders who are doing something that looks a lot like an imperialist war of conquest against your people and have something that sounds a lot like slavery with horror and defiance. As I said earlier in a different post, you could even play this as the Accord's rank and file soldiers and spacers being tragically misled and propagandized by their right-wing authoritarian leaders, but, like, if so how much more of a visceral stab in the heart would it be if instead of memetic Best Korea style blatant lies played for humor about how silly they are they're given an at face value plausible and consistent with the Affini's own words narrative that they're facing basically leafy Draka and they live out something pretty similar to this/this but then after the war the ones who lived through that and managed to survive it find out they were given a very deceptive impression of the stakes of the conflict, a lie that is half a truth is all the bitterest of lies etc. (and, like, I actually think that might be pretty good for making the Affini sympathetic too, I definitely get some feels imagining, like, the Accord's equivalent of the Battle of the Line and it cuts away to the Affini and they are doing their equivalent of crying their eyes out about how scared those poor humans must be and how brave they're being and how awful the whole thing is).

And the Accord sucking so bad makes it easier to read the Affini's deal as a Jacob's bargain/the equivalent of getting a dog to swallow a poison pill by wrapping it in meat.

Except for the wars of conquest the Affini wage against any sapient aliens they meet who resist their domination! Yes, I know the Affini don't consider their domestication campaigns wars and that totally has verisimilitude as a way they'd think of it, but my reaction to reading that exchange in Dog Of War was thinking I'd have liked if Princess said something like "It sure felt like a war to me and the rest of the crew of the Valiant, and I think our experience of it counts for something."

I think I just disagree with you about the relationship of technology and society. I think the Marxists are more-or-less right that culture and social order is mostly downstream from material conditions and the power balances that emerge from them (I mean, I think it's also downstream from biology and that might be significant when comparing the trajectory of human civilization to those of alien civilizations, but I find a bio-essentialist pessimist reading of "humanity will never build socialism unless a species more biologically predisposed to it than us forces it on us at gunpoint, thankfully the Affini are there to be and do exactly that" pretty distasteful).

I've thought of taking a look at it but TBH am not sure I want to do so because it sounds like lots of what makes me uncomfortable with the setting turned up to maximum.

what i don't understand about the egg cracking/prime directive/let feminine men be feminine men stuff is what do you think the femboy is gonna do when he notices he's aging as a man

exactly, same. turns out that boy and man are different genders after all

Feel like this has gotta ultimately be bound up in the impermissability of aging for women. You know they do it too? What do we mean by "aging as a man" here hormonally-average cis men literally get hormonally more feminine in late middle age while hormonally-average cis women do the reverse. Don't you want to grow up to be femboy Eartha Kitt/ Helen Mirren etc

The way I understood this concept is that "boy (young but adult version)" and "man" are overlapping but different social roles/categories and the former provides substantially more room to be cute and neotenous and eccentric and gender nonconforming/feminine and vulnerable without being considered a pathetic gross creepy freak for it.

I mean, also, there are some significant physical differences between how men and women age, e.g. men are much more likely to go bald (I can empathize very easily with terror of going bald, I am so glad I seem to have genes conducive to keeping my hair). But I want to talk about the social side some more.

Too lazy to look it up right now, but some years back I found a post discussing the concept that "gender is a mating strategy" and I'd say, yeah, "gender is a social role and a social strategy and a mating strategy" is the model that feels right for how I relate to mine, and I very much empathize what I think that "twink who transitions when they hit 30 cause being a guy is only tolerable to them when they're a young guy" is getting at, because the mating strategy that's most comfortable for me and would play best to my strengths and natural personality would be to lean into being appealing in a cute "Born Sexy Yesterday" kind of way (I am still salty about how intensely neurotypical feminist that "Born Sexy Yesterday" video was), and older men are the people to whom the "Born Sexy Yesterday" kind of appeal/sexiness is least accessible. Being a middle-aged man legit gives me something that I suspect feels a lot like gender dysphoria - I think it is gender dysphoria, of the bilateral dysphoria kind:

And, like, yeah, some of the stuff in that essay makes a pretty good illustration of what I'm talking about:

I think there's a definite intersection with age ranges as social roles here, the kind of expectations talked about in the two quotes immediately above also apply very much to the behavior people are expected to perform to appear "grown up." I have experiences like the ones described in those quotes, but when I do what I'm thinking isn't "I need to act more like a sullen low-energy grump or people will think I look effeminate and target me for homophobia/gender policing," it's "I need to act more like a sullen low-energy grump or people will think I'm acting child-like and target me with some combination of ableism and adultism and whatever you want to call that thing where a man who deviates from normative behavior is suspected of being evil and dangerous," when I think about ways I experience normative behavior standards as alienating and oppressive I think (among other things) about things like "some years back I went to a beach and found this weird bone in the sand and was interested in it and picked it up and examined it, I'm pretty sure that wasn't a normal adult thing to do, that's the sort of thing a kid would do, adults aren't normatively supposed to have that kind of playful curiosity, man normative adulthood sounds bleak"; I suspect this is an autism thing; retaining of child-like playfulness in adulthood seems to me like a signature trait of the autistic personality.

It feels like young men get more allowance to deviate from that "gotta act like a movie tough guy, can't show much playfulness, intense emotions other than anger, or vulnerability" masculinity script. Young men get more social allowance to be happy about the Oreos, because they get a little of the same allowances that children get.

Being cute and neotenous and vulnerable is substantially more socially acceptable for women, being cute is kind of socially encouraged and rewarded for at least young women, and being feminine is strongly socially encouraged for women in an almost tautological sense (femininity is constitutive of women's normative gender presentation, if it was anything else it wouldn't be called femininity), so, yeah, if you're male and being able to do that is important to you gender transition is one possible escape route from the social tolerance for you being that way decreasing the more you visibly age. It's a bit more complicated with vulnerability cause actually old people are vulnerable cause of aging-related disabilities and inevitably recognized as such, but, like, I remember reading a post a while back about how the people with most consistent age-related privilege are middle-aged people, and, yeah, if you're a middle aged man you're normatively supposed to be a competent confident mature 9-5-job-having husband and father who provides for his family and the closer to middle age you get as a guy the more people think there must be something wrong with you if you're not that.

Relevantly, re: "impermissibility of aging to women" that post was talking about how disabled people often don't really get a middle age and go straight from being talked about as if they're children to being talked about as if they're old and dying and how that enables the social murder of disabled people by framing them as naturally decrepit and dying if they're older than, like, 40, and one immediate thought I had about it was "Oh, hey, you know what other type of person often experiences this thing of not really getting a middle age and going straight from being thought of as presumed-inexperienced youngsters to being thought of as over the hill? Women!" Definitely made me see the Tumblr culture of talking about people older than 30 and sometimes even older 20-somethings as if they're old when I put that thought together with "Tumblr is a website with lots of women and disabled people, how much of that is internalization of that straight from being thought of as a child-like youngster to being thought of as a declining old person experience women and disabled people often get?"

Thought living rent free in my head:

The future of space travel belongs more to the person with the 50 Bad Dragon dildos than it does to anyone resembling a midcentury test pilot.

The person who can live in 24/7 HVAC while staring at a screen, *that* is what golden age writers couldn't envision when they imagined that generation ships would just fall into disorder.

It's gooners that are optimized to be the middle generation on a gen ship.

Gooners are the future.

Yeah, building a generation ship probably would be substantially easier if you could have an entire crew of introverted nerds who are happy sitting in one room and staring at a screen most of the day. The challenging part would be finding a way to make sure that phenotype reliably replicates intergenerationally.

Would be interesting to consider that as a potential bottleneck selection pressure on most of future humanity (the generation ship bottleneck might be to far future humanity approximately what the out of Africa bottleneck is to present humanity, i.e. just about every human population beyond Sol passed through it and is shaped by it). What does a far future humanity mostly descended from shut-in nerds look like?

Something something space opera novel where the author puts in a note at the end like "if my characters seem like huge weirdos to you it's cause it turned out autistic shut-ins are the ideal demographic for generation ship crews so in this setting like 99% of humanity is descended from them and that's the normal human neurotype in the far future, I have never seen an autism symptom list that didn't make me think 'that's me!' so I just kind of wrote everyone as having motivations and emotions and reactions I find sensible and relatable with no concern about whether they seemed 'normal.' Hey neurotypicals, what was it like experiencing approximately the symmetrical equivalent opposite of my lived social experience for a few hundred pages?" I kind of want to do something like this now (I mean, I'm not hugely into porn and I've never done gooning but I'm a "tends to kind of sit in a room and live in my head" person, the main thing I'd miss being in a relatively cramped generation ship would be walks, fresh air, and natural scenery).

Some worldbuilding ideas for a far future society like that:

- More tolerance for dense urban living. Very "cyberpunk" aesthetic with most people living in small apartments in huge towers and arcologies?

- Lots of people living in space habitats, less interest in Earth-twin planets than we'd expect for people with psychology like ours. A lot of the first generation ships arrived at a solar system carefully selected to have a nice Earth-twin planet... which the first generations of colonists promptly ignored as they set up their space habitats, cause lol, they didn't want to do gross uncomfortable pioneer stuff like chop wood and shovel livestock manure and get bitten by tick-equivalents.

- Normalization of lots of autistic habits (stimming, picky eating, etc.).

- Culture is less cooperative play oriented and more parallel play oriented. People mostly do fun things as individuals or in small groups, not in crowds. Crowd-oriented fun may be a weird and kinda rebellious thing favored by people who are (in the context of this society) not neurotypical? I think that'd go well with the cyberpunk aesthetic; a dive crawl where what discomforts the more (in the context of their own society) socially conventional characters is not just the "disreputable" clientele but the very nature of the gathering; it's weird, it's loud, it's uncomfortable, it feels vaguely overwhelming/threatening/invasive, and these loud oddly dressed weirdos appear to be reveling in it!

- Lots of work and social play is done from home via long-distance communication (future Zoom/Skype equivalents, forms of virtual reality, etc.). Lots of manual labor is done by robots controlled by teleoperation by operators sitting in their living rooms/bedrooms. Lots of people don't leave home often. On that note, this may lead to the physical home/apartment being very culturally important; "home is your castle" ethos, elaborate rules of hospitality and guest-right, etc.?

- I think one relatively utopian aspect of such a society is statistical thinking might be more intuitive to such people, which might have a lot of good knock-on effects on culture and politics. Though this might be partially cancelled out by lower levels of sociability making collaboration harder (e.g. almost everything being an email or a Zoom-equivalent session means they might miss out on a lot of casual idea-transmission).

- I think for a version of humanity with a gene pool heavily selected for shut-ins, family and housemates might be very important. I think they might compensate for reduced sociality outside the home by living in relatively large households and having very strong and intimate relationships with family and housemates. Crossing streams with the lots of socialization done remotely idea, actually physically living in the same space as somebody else might be seen as very intimate. Shades of Asimov's Solaria, but more noblebright ("being physically together is special and intimate, bringing somebody into your home is a profound gesture of closeness and trust" instead of "being physically together is gross and barbaric and what inferiors do, the good life is to live in magnificent isolation surrounded and tended by robot servants like some misanthropic feudal lord").

- More kinksters, asexuals, gay people, trans people, and poly people. I suspect I'm missing whatever neural networks are responsible for normal sexual jealousy, so I think in a far future where the typical neurotype was more like mine polyamory of various kinds might be normal and normative and monogamy norms might basically not exist anymore (having a strong preference for a monogamous partner might be a stigmatized sexual preference, seen as bizarrely controlling and a throwback to primitive times!). I suspect I'm similarly missing whatever neural networks are responsible for strong incest squick in neurotypicals, so I think a society of people with neurotype more like mine might be more tolerant of consensual incest too, especially if they've been heavily selected for being shut-ins (guess who your obvious potential romantic partners are if you rarely leave home and find social interaction with strangers stressful).

- If some pre-spaceflight literature is still part of their literary canon, the culture around that would be interesting; they'd be approaching e.g. Shakespeare's plays not just across a cultural gap like we are but also across a neurotype gap! For instance, if they're mostly missing the brain features responsible for sexual jealousy and strong incest squick and have developed a culture around the assumption that humans lack those motives, imagine how that might influence their reactions to Othello and Oedipus Rex!

- Earth might or might not have a reputation for having a very weird culture, depending on whether there's been enough back-migration/back-and-forth migration to dilute away the ancestral Earther gene pool.

I've never seen an autism symptom list that didn't make me think "that's me!" but my worldview feels much more "everything is connected" than "everything is separate." "I have a deeply felt intuition that everything is connected" feels right to me as an explanation of a lot of my strengths and weaknesses and eccentricities, and lots of features of the autistic personality look to me like plausible reactions to having a strong "everything is connected" intuition. E.g., yes, that would explain why we're prone to OCD and scrupulosity; we have a deeply and strongly felt intuition that if we're wrong about something lots of our thoughts, inferences, feelings, intuitions, and opinions might be tainted by garbage input and if we're bad in some way that badness is part of the context everything else about us should be understood in and thus taints everything about us!

On the other hand, I think it would explain a lot about society if neurotypicals don't have a strong "everything is connected" intuition and thus tend to be much less concerned about world-model consistency and moral consistency than people like me.

Maybe autistics and schizophrenics have different variations on "intuitively thinks everything is connected" and neurotypicals are the "intuitively thinks things are separate" neurotype?

Hi, this was me.

I can now not "perform pain correctly" - THat is, I can't get other people to realize I am in pain because of practice against letting it EVER show- Often I can't even identify it, because through the well meaning ignorance of my loving parents I was raised to internalize and ignore any and all discomfort. If I said it hurt, no it didn't, and if it hurt badly no it wasn't that bad, and I should be quiet and sit stil to be hurt like a good girl for hair brushing, curling irons and all sorts of other mundane pain. That was good and praiseworthy, to swallow your own pain like poison until you didn't notice the taste. Until you *couldn't* identify the taste anymore.

Now i have a hard time even identifying if I am aching somewhere because I am so used to my pain needing to be hidden and ignored as totally as possible, and not mattering to anyone but me and I shouldn't care either...

So yeah now I'm in therapy for a lot of that.

*stares into the near distance*

"Anyway, diagnosis is the only way out of the dilemma. It's the only way your reality can be different from other people's without someone being at fault - is if you have a word like "sensory overwhelm" to explain the difference."

It's frustrating how this person gets so close to understanding the actual fundamental problem but then veers off into, not just ignoring the fundamental problem, but reinforcing it even as they make well-intentioned attempts to mitigate it.

I have never seen an autism symptom list that didn't make me think "that's me!" I don't think my parents even knew what autism was when I was little, and they had no notion that I might have it. And yet they functionally did a lot of autism accommodation for me, because they were respectful of my stated preferences and self-reported experiences and allowed me significant autonomy and input on how I was raised.

My parents didn't know about autistic restricted eating. But they did not force me to eat aversive foods, because they didn't force me to eat food I disliked, they provided me with food I liked, and they allowed me substantial input on what I was fed.

My parents didn't know my stimming was an autism thing. But they let me do it anyway, because they realized that sometimes children do odd quirky harmless things and that's fine.

My parents didn't know about autistic sensory sensitivities. But they didn't force me to wear clothes that triggered them, because they didn't force me to wear clothes that were uncomfortable for me, they gave me input on what clothes they bought for me, and if necessary my mother was willing to modify clothes to be more comfortable for me e.g. by sowing patches of soft cloth over scratchy underwear tags.

When I was very little my mom took me see a live theatrical performance and when the lights went off I had what in retrospect I think was a meltdown. My mother didn't know about autistic meltdowns, but she could see that I was distressed and didn't want to be where I was and reacted correctly: she immediately moved me to a more familiar and comfortable environment (the plaza outside the theater) and treated me with compassion. She didn't try to make me stay in the scary environment, she didn't try to talk me into ignoring my discomfort, she didn't guilt me for ruining her fun, and she didn't get mad at me for ruining the enriching cultural activity she had planned for me. She accommodated my meltdown because she had an empathetic and compassionate response to my obvious distress and she felt that the problem that should be prioritized in that situation was my pain, not the inconvenience the outward expressions of my pain caused for her and the other adults around me.

My parents didn't realize they were (probably) raising a special needs child, but their parenting failed gracefully because they respected and accommodated my preferences, desires, and aversions. I think promoting that approach to children is probably a more reliable way of getting the needs of disabled and neurodivergent children accommodated than keeping authoritarian parenting norms and adding a bunch of diagnosis-specific carve-outs for children with legible disabilities and neurodivergences, because respecting a child's preferences doesn't require the child's difference be conveniently legible to medical bureaucracies. Also, authoritarian parenting hurts able-bodied neurotypical children too.

"They will tell someone they're in pain, someone they trust, and that person will say no they're not. That didn't hurt. It can't have. They're being selfish/dramatic/lying."

Yeah, that sounds like an awful thing for a child to experience. The reason it happens so often is that a lot of adults have a default assumption about child behavior something like "If a child acts like an ordinary experience was some kind of torment for them, they're probably lying or exaggerating or being manipulatively dramatic in an attempt to weasel out of having correct discipline imposed on them, and the correct reaction is to punish or at least shame them for it so they learn it's antisocial behavior and adults will not indulge it." If you have that as a default assumption about how children behave, it is likely to make you abuse children. The correct thing to do with that assumption is discard it and replace it with assumptions that are more respectful of children's explicitly and implicitly stated preferences, not add a bunch of "but if they're autistic or..." disclaimers to it.

One of the most horrifying things about that tweet sequence is the possible implication that, for all their good intentions, Victoria Duncan thinks that kind of invalidation would be an appropriate response to default presumed unreasonable by the adult complaints of a neurotypical child. I hope I'm being inaccurately uncharitable there, but it's hard to not suspect it when she puts so much emphasis on medical diagnosis as the only way to prevent disabled and neurodivergent children from being abused this way.

If I got killed by being run over by a bus tomorrow and it turned out reincarnation was real and I got some input on what family my next reincarnation would be born to, I think I might take a family like my previous set of parents (clueless about autism but inclined to accommodate their child's preferences) over a family with the mindset of Victoria Duncan. I'd trust the former more to not abuse me if I had some difference that wasn't conveniently legible to the family pediatrician and school nurse.

It's disturbing that Victoria Duncan apparently thinks a medical diagnosis is "the only way your reality can be different from other people's without someone being at fault" (charitable interpretation is she's describing an approach lots of parents and adult authority figures take toward children, not her own beliefs). People have different subjective realities and different preferences all the time and learning to accommodate that is a very basic social skill that's basically expected in settings where people interact as more-or-less equals; maybe Jane in accounting thinks dark chocolate is awesome and Citizen Kane is a masterpiece and her colleague David thinks dark chocolate tastes terrible and Citizen Kane is over-rated crap, that doesn't mean one of them is "at fault" and in need of correction, it just means they have different tastes and there might need to be some negotiation if they're going to share a dessert or watch a movie together. A lot of neurodivergence accommodation is basically taking that attitude and social skill and applying it to preferences and desires and aversions that are farther toward the thin tails of the bell curve. If it's especially hard to get adults to apply this social skill in interactions with children, I think it's because of the authoritarian approach many adults take toward children.

I'm not one of those full-on anti-psychiatry people, but when I see stuff like this I empathize with where they're coming from. You shouldn't need a doctor's note to make you treat your child as a person whose preferences, desires, and aversions matter.

Do you guys remember how kidnap fantasies were popular on wattpad because young girls and queer teens were both made to feel shame at the thought of their own sexualities, so the fantasy of being kidnapped totally against their will was a way for them to engage with a romantic or sexual fantasy without feeling morally in the wrong for doing so? Added bonus that the fantasy involved being whisked away from repressive environments like home or school, right?

Finding out that Bram Stoker was in a sexless marriage and that scholars believe that he very likely was closeted gay puts the entire book into perspective as to WHY it reads EXACTLY like a self insert wattpad Dracula kidnap fic:

“I TOTALLY love my wife and would never do anything that an upstanding Good Straight Working Man wouldn’t do but oh nooo, big strong man with broad back and strong enough arms to carry me back to bed like a princess trapped me and claimed me as his, completely against my will 👉👈 But he protects me against the bad evil sexual women (who I assure you, I am TOTALLY sexually attracted to, as any straight man with a choice would be) but trust me, I do NOT want ANY of this. What’s that? The Count is not capable of feeling love? Would be a shame if I had the special ability to change tha-”

This is also the fantasy behind all those old bodice-ripper romances that people today like to mock or call problematic, by the way.

“Oh, my next forty years are going to consist of nothing but washing dishes and keeping house and bearing children for the disdainful man I married right out of high school because my parents said college was for men and I had no other obvious life path open to me? What if a pirate captain thought I was worth stealing away from it all? [what if I ran away but no-one could blame me for leaving]?”

#I read an article a long time ago about a woman who was raised in an incredibly repressive conservative christian community#where all that mattered was purity and virginity etc #She talked about how for a long time rape fantasies were the only way she could derive any pleasure from sex #because she couldn’t feel safe exploring the idea of wanting sex #it wasn’t really ABOUT rape or eroticizing assault or whatever #it was about creating a scenario where she was free from the shame associated with wanting #i think this is true of a lot of icky-seeming stuff in romance and erotica #it’s an imaginary scenario where nothing you don’t really want actually happens #but you can’t be blamed or feel guilty for it #you didn’t do anything wrong#anyway that article changed my perspective a lot #i think there’s also something to be said for people who have felt ugly and undesirable their whole lives #enjoying fictional scenarios where a hot alpha werewolf or whatever is so attracted to them he ‘cant help himself’ or whatever #because it can also be really shameful to want to be desired #when you feel like youre ugly and gross ( @headspace-hotel )

#i had recently similar realization when stumbling into pit of y/n x character stories about “your dad’s handsome best friend”#it immediately introduces age gap where the man (usually) is middle aged and generally experienced#and y/n is a young adult at best but always exploring their sexuality for the first time#of course part of why this trope is popular is that teens tend to have crushes on adults#but I kept wondering why it has to be dad’s best friend until it hit me: it’s about safety#person who is your parents friend is a person who isn’t scum bc otherwise your parents would be friends with them#they’re safe and not a predator preying on young and impressionable like a groomer might#they’re your parents friend so they care about you too#which makes the fantasy at the same time spicy (age difference) and safe (dad’s bestie can’t hurt you)#idk it’s just interested how sometimes our brains try to justify things to us

@thirstyforred i hope you don’t mind me pulling up your tags because you’ve made a GREAT point which I think is also echoed in the following tropes:

While irl age gap relationships very much have the potential to be predatory, it is worth recognising why some people consider them attractive in fiction and what these fantasies help them explore.

I’m sorry to bring up HP, but let’s take Snape, for example, since I remember him being a massive hot commodity back on 2012 Deviantart. I heavily doubt that most tweens girls who had a crush on Snape would actually want to get on with their teacher - it was just a fictional crush which allowed them to explore their likes and dislikes in a safe environment (and also let this man move on from his high school crush, which is also fair because let’s be honest he NEEDS to let go of it.)

So yeah, this post does put a lot of tropes and kinks into perspective, which I think is important because one’s squick is another’s fantasy, and neither of these people are inherently more/less virtuous/problematic for liking or disliking it. Fiction is fiction. Real life is real life. What is cool in a book isn’t necessarily what you’d like to experience irl and vice versa, and it’s good to bear in mind that people’s experiences are different than yours and their takeaway from a piece of media might be different from yours.

This reminds me of that deep dive post about the Labyrinth and how it came out in a time when girls weren’t supposed to like anything to do with sex. Yet here is an attractive older gent offering to give you everything and be your slave if you say yes and run away from your crappy family

This is all cope.

You believe that this kind of sexuality is shameful and immoral. But you’re also a feminist, so you don’t want to shame women or admit that they can be as perverted as men. So you say: actually, even though these women appear to want Problematic things like kidnapping and relationships with older men, what they actually, secretly want is Wholesome, Feminism-Approved things like “not being shamed” and “not being forced by the patriarchy to be a housewife” and “being with a nice, safe boy who isn’t a predatory asshole like all the other men”.

Statements like “one’s squick is another’s fantasy, and neither of these people are inherently more/less virtuous/problematic for liking or disliking it” ring hollow when the only reason you think it’s not problematic is because you’ve come up with a virtuous excuse for it.

Years ago – I think it was on cracked.com, but I can’t find it now – I saw a take that claimed that the reason m/m pairings were so popular with women was because women in heterosexual relationships are oppressed and treated as inferior, while two men in a gay relationship treat each other as equals, and what these women really want is equality in sexual relationships. The same women who think “bottom” and “sub” are synonymous, the same women who invent entire fictional universes where humans have biological dominance hierarchies – what they really want is equality, guys! I swear!

Nobody ever comes up with these kinds of excuses for straight men’s kinks.

It suuure is.

I think there probably is some truth to the reasons that are being offered up here, for some people.

But also, yes, that’s not the entirety of it by a long shot, and people should also not have to come up with “empowering” or non-problematic reasons why they like certain things in fiction. Plenty of women just have kinks.

It’s not cope, it’s armor. You use it when evopsych assholes say you inherently want to be raped and dominated.

"Nobody ever comes up with these kinds of excuses for straight men’s kinks." - Maybe they should! I'm a straight(ish) man and the "[problematic thing] isn't what people really want when they fantasize about it, what those people really want is [way the problematic thing might give them a nice thing]" model feels right to me cause it feels right for how my kinks work! Let's go through some of them:

-- I have fantasies of younger guys being soft mommy-dommed by older women - these are basically fantasies of a young man getting the practical and emotional support, affection, and sexual pleasure I wish my younger self had gotten more of! I'm sure it's inflected by me having gotten along much better with older people than with my peers in middle and high school, like lol my 2004 19 year old college freshman self might have been more socially and emotionally at home having a romantic relationship with a well-intentioned but mildly condescending boomer or silent generation woman who thought he had an "old soul" than he would have been trying to date a woman his own age (this was probably an autism thing).

-- Consensual incest is an appealing fantasy for me (mostly in the context of fantasies about imaginary characters) - this is about I'm probably autistic with social deficits and therefore don't make new friends easily and also I suspect I'm missing the strong instinctive squick reaction to incest lots of people seem to have and I have an OK relationship to the people who raised me, so when I think about consensual incest my intuitive thought process is "Imagine somebody never having to do courtship cause when they start wanting sex they get to just start having sex with somebody they were socialized to have a close affectionate relationship to as part of their rearing. If they were raised in a loving and socially competent family that sounds really convenient and safe! I can see why the taboo and neurotypical squick reaction against incest are so strong cause if they weren't there'd probably be lots of people who'd just marry their sibling or aunt or opposite gender parent or some other close relative!" Yes, I know real incest is often abusive, you don't have to tell me about that, I am just talking about my fantasies and naive intuitions!

-- I have martyrdom-inflected romantic/sexual emotions; something in my brain shivers in dark rapture at the "I will stay and be thy husband / though it be the death of me" line in The Maiden and the Selkie, I felt I should caveat this with "I’m probably biased toward this model cause it’s extremely congruent with my kinks and damage lol," etc.. - This is about wanting to earn love (and about a lesson my brain took from male socialization being that I'm supposed to earn love by enduring suffering and doing hard things and taking risks so women, children, elderly people, and disabled people don't have to). Like, 100% the self-indulgent fantasy I could construct out of that "anti-predator defense and the origins of masculinity" thing I just linked to is like... Imagine being a 19 year old early human boy chosen as one of those anointed heroes, you know that in two days you and four of your male friends will take basically sharpened long sticks (the mightiest weapons your people know how to make!) and go off to hunt down and kill a dinofelis that ate a child of your community, but right now the women of your community are showing you and your four friends their appreciation of what you have agreed to do, they are pampering you and cooing over you and letting you have basically all the wild sex with them you want (they are all very enthusiastically consenting to this!) and they are so proud of you and they think what you're going to do is so tragically beautiful and they can't articulate this very well cause your people's language is still kind of rudimentary but they're doing their best to communicate it to you and you can tell, the dawn after next you and your friends will take your sharpened sticks and go out to take on an apex predator with a confirmed taste for human flesh, you will do that to protect your loved ones and community and improve their lives in a very direct concrete tangible way, you will go forth as one of their deliverers from a million years of fear and grief and pain and impotent anger, you will do it because you love the people who chose to burden you with that task, you will do it full of love for those people, you will do it knowing those people love you and if you return successful they will coo over how brave you were and what a great thing you have done for them and if you die on your great mission they will weep for you and honor your memory (they still keep the memory-through-words-only of a man who lived uncounted many generations ago, before people realized they could turn the tables and hunt the hunters, who saved a little girl by bringing the hunger and rage of one of the great cats down upon himself by throwing stones at it so it devoured him instead; you will go forth so there need be no more like him!).

I could make more paragraphs like these psychoanalyzing more of my fantasies and kinks and sexual tendencies this way, but I think you get the point!

Seems pretty plausible to me that the kinks and non-con and dub-con fantasies of a lot of women work similarly to this!

If you're wondering, het fantasies I find hot that involve power dynamics that advantage the man (or men) involved also fit this model in that in them the woman is usually getting something nice bundled with whatever her situation is and that's a load-bearing part of the appeal of the scenario for me.

The big thing in the "AI is only taking the FUN jobs" discourse (which is a dumb discourse) is that people aren't admitting that being an artist has social capital in some circles, gets people laid, etc. And that this social capital is hugely predicated on scarcity. There suddenly being a million more human artists in a space would have the same net effect as AI on the social capital of the artists already there.

It pays less than lots of jobs with considerably less social capital. In many cases, social capital is the *big* reason to be an artist.

Yeah, I've had a similar thought. Like, are all the people vocally afraid of and outraged by AI art really getting serious income from their art now? My impression is in terms of money the art world is already pretty close to the nightmare the AI art doomers fear is coming; only a lucky few make enough money from art to live on, the comfortable professional artists are hugely outnumbered by people whose options are living in poverty or doing art as basically a hobby that happens in the free time that is left to them when they're not doing their day job.

But what being a moderately good artist can plausibly give you in the internet age is a small social circle of people who think you're kind of cool and just, like, see you as something more than another anonymous cellophane person. This can bring tangible material benefits such as financial help in times of need and other kinds of help out of tight spots, and as you say it can get you laid, but I think probably the most important benefits of it are less tangible, more psychological; companionship, being cared about, being valued, having your work appreciated.

I think this tends to be particularly important for people who'd be rather lonely if they had to rely entirely on the traditional face-to-face grilling with the neighbors kind of socialization for companionship. For instance, I suspect this kind of modest success as an artist is often a pathway for autistic people to basically leverage their special interest into an end to loneliness, an end to the pain of being a cellophane person, access to a community that engages positively with their interests, and, yeah, getting other people sexually interested in them.

What will AI image generators do to the "is in the top 10% of the population in interest in and skill at making pretty pictures in PaintShop Pro type programs" version of that pathway to relative social success? A plausible answer to that is "they'll make it significantly more difficult," (and I think the nightmare answer a lot of AI doomers fear is "they'll fucking obliterate it," and while I don't think that'll happen I think it's a reasonable fear) and I suspect that's the threat posed by AI art that really frightens and angers a lot of artists.

I mean, cards on the table, insofar as I'm not an abject social failure it's mostly through a social strategy pretty similar to the one I've just outlined, and I think there's a nonzero possibility that without the material benefits it's given me I'd be dead now.

I saw twitter screenshot of someone saying “We need to start sexualizing autism.” and they got ratiod so hard. That post would go so hard on Tumblr because this is the autism sex website. Oh you’re autistic? *bounces on your meat like a springboard*

As somebody who's never seen an autism symptom list I didn't see a lot of myself in, I really appreciate this, big appreciative shout-out from me to everyone who helps make this the autism sex website, y'all brighten my days, love and light to y'all!

ambigender metaphor

One of the interesting ways that the ambigender nature of Estraven (and more broadly the Gethenians) in Left Hand shows up is in his scope of metaphor. Because people on his world can play either reproductive role and because there’s more sharing of childrearing labor, babies and baby colic and wombs aren’t associated with “women” (which I put in quotes because this isn’t a word or concept they have). Since babies and mothering aren’t associated with an underclass, they’re not a thing you have to discuss in a room apart, and they’re not below anyone.

Le Guin never specified in the story whether Estraven was ever a mother himself, (though there’s a legitimate reading that he was,) but the question isn’t particularly important to his use of baby/reproduction metaphor. He’s simply from a culture where those metaphors exist in the commons! Here’s some of those metaphors in action:

From Estraven’s escape into Orgoreyn:

“At last I understood him, and confused by sleep and urgency got up in haste and went to the door of my room, where the messenger waited, and so I entered stark naked and stupid as a newborn child into my exile.”

…

“At stun setting a sonic gun can locate its resonance-field only within a hundred feet or so. I do not know its range at lethal setting, but I had not been far out of it, for I was doubled up like a baby with colic.”

From Estraven’s rescue of Genly from Pulefen:

“They were all hidden away on the longbeds in their bags like babies in wombs, invisible, indistinguishable.—All but one, there, too long to hide, a dark face like a skull, eyes shut and sunken, a mat of long, fibrous hair.”

It’s not that men in our world wouldn’t think of those metaphors, it’s just that they’d get weird looks from other (especially cishet) men for using them. But on Gethen nobody would bat an eye.

"it’s just that they’d get weird looks from other (especially cishet) men for using them" - They would? I'm a cis man and this is the first time it occurred to me that there might be anything unusual or strange about those metaphors! It did not occur to me before I read this that using metaphors like that might be somehow socially dangerous for me!

What does it feel like to actually HAVE these personality traits?

This is pertaining to autism and rule following. The thing with the interior experience of following The Rules, is… do people who are following The Rules, feel as if they are choosing to do so out of their own agency, or like they are compelled to/have no choice in the matter? 

This is a thing that breaks my brain over discussing “rule following” as applies to spectrum stuff. Like, I know what it looks like from the outside but a lot of the descriptions of this as a spectrum personality trait make it sound like there’s no agency or real personal choice. Like, it doesn’t come off to me like the spectrum person who is rule following, is thought of as having made a choice to follow those rules as a product of their own reasoning.

Would you say that when you are doing something that seems like a stereotypically autistic trait, you are *choosing* to do that thing? Did you exert agency in doing that thing? Did it seem like it was the best choice based upon your own information and your own life experiences?

I think I have some of the "follow rules" trait and... honestly, from the inside it feels like taking morality and law and philosophy more seriously than most people do and being at least a little proud of that.

There's a pretty big element of volition and of it being an ego-syntonic endorsed value. Like, yeah, I'm probably that way because of how my brain works, but also I endorse this aspect of how my brain works. I don't think I could fundamentally stop working that way, but I could definitely change which rules I endorse and try to follow (and I have done so in the past).

Or with stuff that doesn't really have a moral component, like a structured pattern of meals, it's like... yeah, there's an element of the desire to follow the rules being kind of pre-rational (though my brain tends to rationalize it as "discipline is important" and "if I just eat whenever I want I'll get fat and unhealthy"), but I am actively choosing when I do and do not eat and drink and I could make other choices (I do sometimes, like when it's not a regular mealtime but I can tell I could really use some hydration so I drink something).

My ex felt I couldn't be autistic because they had that label and were more impaired at a younger age than I was, and also a lot less privileged. I pointed out "but yeah I hung out in old school nerd culture" and "I met people online" and he pointed out that he couldn't even do those things, couldn't even make friends with weird nerds, and if I could make friends at all, I couldn't be autistic. He was actually convinced I was BPD at one point and that I was just some BPD person trying on identities and scamming people. He saw me do the mask change/code switch on a couple of occasions and became convinced I was a big fake.

Interestingly, he became almost socially normal after his (gender) transition, got a degree, became a professional with a friend circle, etc. He stopped even openly IDing as autistic after his transition. Interesting. (At what point are you just isolated because you *are* trans, and not living as who you really are?)

Like... it became clear to me in a lot of ways that we couldn't possibly have the same thing. (And if it turns out that the thing we don't have in common is being trans, well there you go.)

Then later about half of my old weird nerd crowd got adult-diagnosed, so idk

Sounds to me like your ex had a very Tragic Disabled Person concept of autism. I'm pretty sure there are a lot of autistic people with friends (spouses, even!). Somebody like @alarajrogers would probably be able to talk about this better than me, if they are so inclined? But just looking around Tumblr, "if you can make friends you're not autistic" sounds like an extremely clueless neurotypical person with very stereotyped concept of autism view - or I guess in this case an autistic person who got their ideas about autism from clueless neurotypical people view. Notably, autistics seem to often get along better with other autistics than with neurotypicals. Which really makes me wonder to what extent the supposed autistic social deficit is really a being bad at theory of mind and reading social cues problem. If it actually worked that way, autistics should have the same problems with each other as with neurotypicals, and should actually have a harder time interacting with each other because there'd be social deficits on both sides of the interaction instead of just one. But it doesn't actually seem to work that way at all; autistics often seem to get along with each other better than they get along with neurotypicals. That could be because when people with social deficits create relationships and communities with each other they tend to treat each other the way they wish neurotypicals treated them, i.e. they tend to be much more understanding and compassionate and accommodating about social deficits than neurotypicals are. And I suspect there's a strong element of that dynamic, but I'm not sure it explains it entirely. This makes me wonder how much of the supposed autistic "social deficit" is just that autistics and neurotypicals both by default do a lot of typical minding but typical minding is a much more effective cognitive/social strategy for neurotypicals because most other people actually are a lot like them. How much of autistic "social deficit" is that we're actually bad at reading cues and theory of mind, and how much is that we're playing on hard mode while the neurotypicals are playing on easy mode? If you dropped a neurotypical-in-our-society person into a society of significantly neurologically different hominids, I could see them having problems that look a lot like autistic social deficit; having a hard time grokking the logic of "obvious" social conventions (because those conventions are built around common emotional reactions they don't share), being bad at predicting other people's emotional reactions (because other people's brains work differently), etc.. By this model, it makes perfect sense that autistics tend to get along better with other autistics than with neurotypicals: they're more similar to each other and therefore they have an easier time understanding each other; socializing with other autistics for an autistic is getting to switch to easy mode after a lifetime of playing on hard mode, getting a taste of the easy mode neurotypicals are playing on by default.

Originally posted in a response to a post that said the part of the brain that lights up when looking at half-naked women is the same part that lights up when looking at tools:

There’s an analogy I’d like to draw. When men show a physiological arousal response, but say they aren’t aroused, researchers say the arousal response means something else. When women show a physiological arousal response, but say they aren’t aroused, researchers say they’re unaware of their own arousal. The response is real, but the researchers choose what they want the response to mean. By the same token, there isn’t a specific part of the brain labeled “tools go here.” If it responds to tools, and it responds to half-naked women, there are probably a whole bunch of other things it responds to. You could say people view half-naked women as equivalent to any of those things, and you may or may not be right. The choice is dependent on what results you want to be true.

When you put it that way, I wonder if maybe the parts of the brain that are getting activated are related to manipulating objects with the hands? Like, not to be TMI, but for me a big part of eroticism is wanting to touch people in a kind of stimmy way, like e.g. a big part of the erotic appeal of breasts for me is "those look like they'd be fun to play with!" This might be an autism thing, it does feel like an eroticization of stimming, but that sort of playful touching happens a lot in normal sex, so I think it's a pretty significant part of neurotypical sexuality too. It seems pretty plausible that this sort of behavior might involve a lot of the same neural pathways that get used when you're opening a can or using a wrench or something like that. Especially because this sort of behavior is usually done with an intentionality of wanting to make the other person feel good, so it's not just that you're touching stuff but also that you're doing it to achieve specific results and you're modelling the properties of what you're interacting with to figure out how to achieve certain results with your manipulations.

And thinking about it I think you also see interface-with-a-tool-like dynamics in the ways people use other body parts during sex too. Like, giving somebody oral sex has the same sort of dynamic of trying to physically manipulate parts of the other person to achieve a result, and the same would apply to using your mouth to more generally stimulate your partner through kissing them and so on. And even with PIV sex, it seems pretty common for men to conceptually approach it as kind of like using a sex toy on their partner; I don't think it's an accident that one of the euphemisms for penis is tool. I know I do this!

A cliche for saying that somebody is good at sex is saying they play their partner's body like a musical instrument!

I mean, it makes sense if you think about how incredibly important and ubiquitous manipulation of tools and manipulation with the hands is for humans; it makes sense that those neural pathways would get used over and over, for lots of different stuff! Like, remember those sensory homonculi illustrations that show a human as some weird creature with a tiny body and giant head and hands, using that to illustrate how prominent different parts of your body are in your tactile world?

The one thing (aside from it being pure speculation) that makes this hypothesis seem kind of shaky to me is... Did they check if this happens with women too? I feel like it totally would check out if it did, given the "hand pics are the lesbian equivalent of dick pics" thing, but it seems basic charitability to assume if this is being talked about as a male-specific thing there actually is a pretty noticeable gender difference in it (although actually, now that I re-read your post, you didn't actually say this was being mentioned as a distinctly male thing). If there is, one possible explanation I can think of is... this is making me remember a post I saw here a while back that suggested that an implicit message of the cinematic language of porn is that sex is basically for women; the way that person put it was something like "yeah, the Large Penis is there and there is some indications that what's happening feels good for the dude, but it's basically the woman's expressions of pleasure that are getting most of the attention." It does seem plausible to me that male sexuality tends to involve conceptualizing one's own body as something tool-like and approaching sex as a kind of skilled mechanical labor more than female sexuality does; narratives of a man being a good lover put a lot of emphasis on performance, and per "auto[X]philia is actually a very common sexual desire/behavior that lots of cis people do," autoandrophilia often seems to work that way. I think this is the male equivalent of what that "women often have an easier time connecting to their desire to be desired than to straightforward sexual desire" thing is for women.

I.e. my hypothesis in quick summary: the part of the brain that lights up when looking at half-naked women is the same part that lights up when looking at tools, it's not cause you're seeing the woman as tool-like, it's cause the possibility of having sex registers as a "I might be about to do manual manipulations and use tools" situation.