![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Emotional labor, gender, and autism
Jan. 17th, 2017 09:38 pmHere's an interesting article about the gendered dynamics of emotional labor and its relation to autism (in particular, the under-diagnosis of autistic girls/women): https://autisticacademic.com/2016/09/11/emotional-labor-gender-and-the-erasure-of-autistic-women/
The post links to another post that talks about emotional labor generally.
I get the fact that emotional labor is something women are expected and socialized to perform and men are often given a pass on. At the same time, it's interesting to compare these experiences of allistic/neurotypical (NT) women with my own (as an autistic person), because I simply lack the instinct (socialization?) to perform emotional labor the same way NT women do, and therefore find some of their experiences...odd.
For me, it's in part because I place a lot of emphasis on clear communication. If someone doesn't ask me to do something, I won't do it. Sometimes I guess this makes me come off as rude, but I hate being expected to micromanage other people in any way. (This may also come in part from my own upbringing—one of my parents is very demanding, even domineering, when it comes to other people, which has caused me to be the complete opposite.) I'm obviously not a mindreader and it literally costs $0 for someone to communicate their expectations clearly to me.
On the flip side, I also mostly don't expect people to do things for me unless I ask them to. So I wouldn't be offended if my hypothetical romantic partner doesn't buy flowers for me every once in a while; if I want something romantic, I'll explicitly suggest something we can do together, and I'd get offended if I was always turned down. I'd be very weirded out if my partner got offended at something I didn't do when they never asked me to.
And, I don't know whether this is due to autism, my stubborn/rebellious streak from how I was raised, or something else, but I will absolutely not console/soothe a man's ego if he did something to make me feel bad. The idea that NT women do this is bewildering to me, because if I were expected to do that, I would think the dude's an asshole who doesn't respect my feelings, and nothing else positive about him would outweigh that enough for me to consider keeping the relationship.
Another thing that shapes my attitudes toward relationships and emotional labor is that I, myself, am autistic (as I said), mentally ill, and sometimes prone to negativity—so I've always envisioned that my ideal romantic male partner (since I am only attracted to men) would, actually, bear some of the emotional labor, because I don't have the spoons or temperament to carry all of someone else's emotional labor on top of dealing with my own issues.
So...yeah. Interesting for me to consider things from an allistic/NT viewpoint and how different they are from my autistic viewpoint.
The post links to another post that talks about emotional labor generally.
I get the fact that emotional labor is something women are expected and socialized to perform and men are often given a pass on. At the same time, it's interesting to compare these experiences of allistic/neurotypical (NT) women with my own (as an autistic person), because I simply lack the instinct (socialization?) to perform emotional labor the same way NT women do, and therefore find some of their experiences...odd.
For me, it's in part because I place a lot of emphasis on clear communication. If someone doesn't ask me to do something, I won't do it. Sometimes I guess this makes me come off as rude, but I hate being expected to micromanage other people in any way. (This may also come in part from my own upbringing—one of my parents is very demanding, even domineering, when it comes to other people, which has caused me to be the complete opposite.) I'm obviously not a mindreader and it literally costs $0 for someone to communicate their expectations clearly to me.
On the flip side, I also mostly don't expect people to do things for me unless I ask them to. So I wouldn't be offended if my hypothetical romantic partner doesn't buy flowers for me every once in a while; if I want something romantic, I'll explicitly suggest something we can do together, and I'd get offended if I was always turned down. I'd be very weirded out if my partner got offended at something I didn't do when they never asked me to.
And, I don't know whether this is due to autism, my stubborn/rebellious streak from how I was raised, or something else, but I will absolutely not console/soothe a man's ego if he did something to make me feel bad. The idea that NT women do this is bewildering to me, because if I were expected to do that, I would think the dude's an asshole who doesn't respect my feelings, and nothing else positive about him would outweigh that enough for me to consider keeping the relationship.
Another thing that shapes my attitudes toward relationships and emotional labor is that I, myself, am autistic (as I said), mentally ill, and sometimes prone to negativity—so I've always envisioned that my ideal romantic male partner (since I am only attracted to men) would, actually, bear some of the emotional labor, because I don't have the spoons or temperament to carry all of someone else's emotional labor on top of dealing with my own issues.
So...yeah. Interesting for me to consider things from an allistic/NT viewpoint and how different they are from my autistic viewpoint.
