Ill Will Hunting
The autistic everyman and the case against blank slate sexism in relationships
Why should I watch Matt Damon cry without her at my side?
I pined as days went by, but now it's fine
'Cause in the end, we're such close friends, sugar and spice, and since then
There's more time for me, I've started a diary and washed my car again
And I can watch Good Will Hunting by myself
I can shop for clothes without her help
I can hang out with my friends, do the good times ever end?
Yeah, I can watch Good Will Hunting by myself— Ludo, “Good Will Hunting By Myself”
Reader, I made a mistake again: I read public comments on social media. Honestly I do this way too often, because the opinions of random strangers on culture war issues interest me. The best part is when normal people post sincerely, unaware that they will attract the negative attention of monomaniacal extremists no matter what they say. The most recent extremist archetype I have identified I call the “therapeutic constructivist”, for reasons that will soon become clear.
The therapeutic constructivist is usually, but not necessarily, a heterosexual woman. She has had many negative experiences with men in her life. She shows up to reassure frustrated women, confidently and inaccurately, that sex differences that manifest in men’s communication styles and cognitive priorities are actually the product of male socialization and even free choice. In other words, the therapeutic constructivist tells you that the reason your man cannot “read your mind”, as we infamously tend to describe that desirable behavior, is simply that he is not trying. Why doesn’t he try? Because he does not value or care about you, or even women in general. (Good news: this is false.)
While rarely a rigorous feminist, the therapeutic constructivist exhibits a personal hatred of men that recalls a handful of influential second-wavers, not to mention many McFeminist clowns of the Jezebel variety. In defense of her misdemeanor misandry she deploys a familiar excuse: her claim that the typically male behaviors she has problematized are learned. Male objections to this argument only ever register as the sound of hit dogs hollering. We fellas need only do the work to unlearn everything the therapeutic constructivist finds annoying and thus, more or less implicitly, to redeem ourselves of the criminal disorder of difference.
This is why the constructivism is “therapeutic”: it soothes frustrated women and casts the male behaviors that annoy them as both pathological and curable. Masculinity, in even its most neutral and descriptive sense, becomes a personality disorder. Here one can sense that men enjoy no right to decide whether we should change, to assess whether a given problematized behavior is truly problematic, just as a murderer can’t revive his victim to make up for getting caught. To the therapeutic constructivist, men constantly get away with the heinous crime of pretending we are not secretly more like women.
The creed of therapeutic constructivism is straightforward: men and women are psychologically gendered through sex-specific socialization rather than sexed in ways that shape the socialization of individuals. If conflicts around such gendered differences in behavior emerge, it is because men are immature, misogynistic, or malevolent. On this axiom it appears obvious that men engage in a conspiracy of emotional and domestic laziness, among other reasons to keep the bar for “bare minimum” as low as possible.
On this basis the therapeutic constructivist argues that patriarchy allows men to employ “weaponized incompetence” to shrug off our share of basic household tasks or “the mental load”, and that men who care about women have a duty to stop doing so. She may even call on us to fix other men, to hunt down and discipline single guys so their next girlfriends don’t “have to ‘soft parent’ them”. You cannot justify this inaccurate account of population-scale sex differences, even to yourself, unless you frame observations on sex differences in psychology as outcomes of patriarchal socialization1.
Having established that we are products of our supposed artificial supremacy, you can smoothly conclude that men are total assholes who constantly teach each other that disregard for, devaluation of, and even violence against women are all acceptable in relationships. One could describe this more formally as a “homosocial reproduction of patriarchy”, saying e.g. that men are tolerant of and thus complicit in systematic and pervasive misogyny, even by our own definitions thereof. Typical male objections to this unrecognizable nightmare about how men typically act when women are not present, as imagined by women who are not present, get framed as “not listening to women” or even manipulation.
So there we are: we have women thinking the men they love don’t care about them, and men thinking the women we love expect us to read their minds! No space remains for the possibility of profoundly different experiences distinguished by sex, at least not without undermining the hard-won abstraction of “personhood” that makes equality of the sexes meaningful2. Men are told that women are so richly empathetic — an emotional “skill” beaten into them by our own dang patriarchy, even — that they can describe our subjective experiences better than we can. If we argue that we don’t think like women on average3, that the evidence indicates this, and that women cannot read our minds as well as many think they can? Gaslighting or sexism or both.
From constructivism to heteropessimism… and beyond?
Stuck in the crab bucket with therapeutic constructivists, frustrated women ask every day, Why are men like this? For many the question is rhetorical, but as we’ll see, for any woman interested in answers, there are more compelling albeit less cathartic explanations that don’t involve gendered socialization. Refusal to consider the possibility that men and women are psychologically divergent in fundamental ways leads men and women alike directly to heteropessimism: the dismal sense that we can’t truly get along in heterosexual relationships.
To quote the Ivy League, Cambridge-pedigreed queer theorist who coined the term:
Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are “performative” does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality. Sure, some heteropessimists act on their beliefs, choosing celibacy or the now largely outmoded option of political lesbianism, yet most stick with heterosexuality even as they judge it to be irredeemable. Even incels, overflowing with heteropessimism, stress the involuntary nature of their condition.
— Indiana “Asa” Seresin4, “On heteropessimism” (2019, emphasis mine)
The author focuses on heteropessimism as a performative disavowal of heterosexuality. In queer theory, such a performance without transgressive follow-through is an incomplete action. Complaining without dropping out is an abdication of responsibility in dismantling “heteronormativity”, a term queer theorists use to frame the fact that most people are heterosexual as an artificial and oppressive social construct5. In the quote, for instance, we get the idea that one can “abandon” heterosexuality, which requires identifying heterosexuality with being straight as though one’s sexual orientation were a kind of cultural identity. This analysis is, as you might have suspected, a steaming pile of bullshit6.
Still, ideas like heteropessimism and its sibling, heterofatalism, capture a specific moment in history in which men and women have to reproduce the species in the context of a poorly-articulated distinction between equality and sameness. Queer theorists like Seresin insist on an underlying, sexless human sameness supposedly obscured by constructed normativity. In this view, we are human in logical or metaphysical essence before we are male or female in fact, which you’ll notice makes no evolutionary or biological sense. For my part, I prefer to emphasize that equality requires that we not only respect difference, but acknowledge its concrete existence!
The full implications of heteropessimist mythology — indeed, of any worldview that can respond to why are men not more like women? without reference to biology — are perhaps more macro scale than I am qualified to explain. It surely plays a role, for example, in rates of divorce, but as only one of many variables. As Seresin notes, heteropessimist misogyny looms heavily in the ideological landscape of the incelosphere.
Speaking for myself, I believe there are tons of men and women who are miserable in their relationships because one or both believes that their partner can think differently and chooses not to. Why does this belief exist, though? Allow me to answer as follows: most men are mildly autistic, and most women can’t relate to that.
Autistic license, or: Spilling the T
Before we get into my claim, I ask you to recall that the word autistic means “morbidly self-absorbed”. You might assume this etymology reflects research limited to disabling forms of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) that render patients non-verbal or otherwise unable to communicate. However, the word also reflects the subtler fact that an autistic person’s experiences are less social in nature than those of non-autistic people.
It is not that autists see no value in others’ emotional states or in social conventions, but that we lack the ability to intuit them. (This is a major distinguishing factor between Autism Spectrum Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.) Many autistic people even experience alexithymia, an inability to recognize one’s own emotions. Our emotions are also less regulated when they do get expressed, whence the trope of “autistic rage”.
One can make progress on masking and mitigating clinically significant autistic traits using cognitive therapies, but they don’t actually go away. The autistic patient simply learns a more effective way to live with his or her abnormal psychology. But are autistic traits really abnormal, or just rarely concentrated enough to lead to an ASD diagnosis? What if the autistic spectrum is, from another angle, a spectrum of concentration of traits that are typical of men in general, due specifically to their relationship to physical masculinization?
Not long ago, I read The Pattern Seekers by Simon Baron-Cohen, a renowned psychologist and the funniest member of his extended family. In the book Dr. Baron-Cohen presents a model of Autism Spectrum Disorder that I will oversimplify as follows:
Humans have a set of traits in our gene pool that constitute a genetic basis for the creative intelligence that makes us distinct among intelligent animals, including among our close relatives like the Neanderthals.
This uniquely human type of intelligence involves both cognitive empathy and systems reasoning.
In any given person, there is potentially a zero-sum relationship between these empathizing and systemizing dimensions of human intelligence, as measured by psychometric testing.
We each have some allocation of empathetic and systemizing traits as a function of our ancestry, expressed in turn as a function of our environments, which leads to immense observable variation.
Nonetheless, across cultures, sex is a key predictor of the visibility of these traits: most women out-empathize the average man, and most men out-systemize the average woman.
Here we should note a distinction between affective empathy and cognitive empathy. Affective empathy is the fact of caring about another person’s emotional state, whereas cognitive empathy is the ability to imagine another person’s emotional state. In other words, cognitive empathy is a measure of one’s theory of mind, though admittedly I can’t figure out what aspect of theory of mind it measures.
If I have any argument of my own to advance, it is this: Baron-Cohen’s model of autism provides valuable context for the average woman as to why most men appear so emotionally repressed or unempathetic. Unsurprisingly, the reason is that we experience fewer emotions and have a lower capacity for cognitive empathy — though, crucially, we still have affective empathy, meaning we care even if we can’t relate. For men, it helps us understand why women sometimes seem unpredictably emotional, or paradoxically avoidant, or so intuitive about other people’s feelings that it sounds like they are making stuff up.
Less relevantly, the Baron-Cohen model predicts already-observed lower rates of ASD in women. This disparity is sometimes held to result from sex bias in diagnosis, on the assumption that the condition is equally distributed between the sexes. My view at this point is that the potential for autism is evenly distributed, so to speak, but that in autistic males, endogenous androgens exert a crucial “autisticizing” influence on both development and behavior. As a result of the relevance of androgens in the expression of autistic traits, fewer women ever become clinically autistic even if they may carry or partially express those traits7.
Through the lens of the Baron-Cohen model we can interpret what we call autism as a clinically significant concentration of the systemizing “autistic traits” that, at lower intensity, are broadly characteristic of “masculine” personalities in both sexes. You may have spotted a problem-shaped question, however. Sexed genetic traits would be encoded on sex chromosomes, right? Yet irrespective of their known compatibility with the model’s predictions, the fact that autistic women exist at all is of interest for the theory of autism as a kind of hypermasculinization.
Actually, because women in general are indeed capable of systematic reasoning, we know that at least some of those traits travel on the X chromosome, or rather that they do not require a Y chromosome. For argument’s sake, and with the disclaimer that I Am Not A Biologist, let’s say that the X chromosome encodes all of the traits that can add up to ASD. This would mean that girls have twice the chance to inherit any given autistic trait, because they have two X chromosomes. Could we still expect that even non-autistic boys would express autistic traits more often and more noticeably?
To introduce a likely answer, let’s consider male pattern baldness. Pattern baldness is also a genetic trait, carried largely on the X chromosome. The expression of this trait is associated with the androgen DHT, which men naturally produce in much higher quantities than women. As a result, if you are a woman and you take exogenous androgens, like anabolic steroids, you are likely to find out the hard way whether you are a carrier of male pattern baldness. Without excessive androgens, however, carrier women typically do not experience pattern baldness, especially not before menopause. Autistic traits, regardless of their relationship to sex chromosomes, might well have a similarly sex-dependent mechanism of expression.
At this point we have a model for genetic traits that are not exclusively sexed, but nonetheless get expressed as a function of male sex hormones. We know that biological sex determines which sex hormones are naturally dominant in our endocrine systems. We know that the quantity and proportions of androgens, as well as our sensitivity to them, are subject to genetic variation within distinct sex categories. Are there other physiological phenomena that parallel our hypothesized autistic brain masculinization? What of the psychological effect of the androgens that trigger these changes?
On these questions I refer you to psychologist Carole Hooven of Harvard University. In her acclaimed popular science book, T: The Story of Testosterone, Hooven shares insights from her research on human sex differences. For this piece I will focus on the influence of androgens on behavior, which is our second question. Please see the book for details on their relevance to physiological development, as she covers that first question in depth, especially in relation to disorders of sex development (DSDs)8.
Dr. Hooven set out to investigate sex differences after an unsettling experience in primatology, during which she observed a stark split in use of violence among our close relatives, chimpanzees. It struck her that male chimps acted much like stereotypically brutish human men, and that sex differences seemed to shape the way a given chimp related to his or her group, in terms of social hierarchy. Despite her sympathies to constructivism, as a scientist she had to face reality: clearly, men who act more like male chimps than like human women do so for reasons that predate human beings — and, therefore, gendered socialization.
While Hooven provides an evolutionary explanation for many “toxic” male tendencies, I want to remain focused on interpersonal relationships. To quote directly from the chapter “Violent Men”:
Empathy is our ability to understand how others are feeling, and men are less able to do this than women, across cultures. This is a widely replicated and consistent finding, and it’s not true just of human males and females. In chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, elephants, dogs, and wolves, researchers have observed that males engage in lower rates of behaviors related to empathy, like caregiving, cooperating, helping, and comforting. (p. 159)
In this passage Hooven gives evidence that supports my basic point: men behave more “autistically” on average, because the lack of cognitive empathy characteristic of autistic social blundering is downstream of general masculinization, relative to one’s sex.
As to my speculation that androgens have an “autisticizing” effect, perhaps even an acute one, Hooven explores the relationship of environment to androgen concentrations. Endogenous androgens fluctuate in relation to animals’ threats, mating opportunities, and social hierarchies. Testosterone drives acute risk taking and competition, which makes it maladaptive in many social contexts, such as when you are trying to cooperate with people you dislike or avoid getting beaten up by a Dwayne Johnson impersonator at the bar. Perhaps an analogy does the job best here: would you not describe “roid rage”, a result of exogenous androgens, as “morbid self-absorption” on the part of anabolic steroid abusers?
Conclusion: Shattering The Masculine Mystique
As a man I literally can’t imagine, from a woman’s perspective, how frustrating most men are in situations where cognitive empathy skills are useful. I reckon it feels like telling someone who doesn’t know he’s colorblind to buy green apples, only for him to come back with red apples and no sense of what went wrong. Being more clearly on the autistic spectrum than most, I expect I am all the more annoying for it.
Regardless of the accuracy of my theory of men’s lower capacity for empathy, the fact remains: no amount of wishing that men were more like women will change what we physically are. There exists no switch in our heads that enables an overlooked mind-reading function allowing for flawless communication from here on out. Still, we cannot read cause for conflict into these superficially irreconcilable differences. A battle of the sexes offers no possible victory but extinction, so we have to fight all who seek to start one.
Against the constructivist view that denial of psychological “dimorphism” reflects the novel freedom of Western women to voice global female complaints, I argue that the practical ignorance needed to reject this reality reflects and exacerbates the atomization of couples under “late capitalism”. Just as it is important for men to bond with male friends in ways that women find baffling, most women have social needs that only their fellow women can meet. Heterosexual partners seeking in each other what each can only acquire from homosocial friendship is a recipe for frustration at the very best, and leads to resentment in the typical case.
Borrowing a page from Mary Harrington’s “reactionary feminism”, consider the position of today’s stay-at-home mothers, who figure disproportionately in the therapeutic constructivist population. Even our common use of stay-at-home to describe them, instead of full-time, reflects the absence of social spaces that accommodate women alongside rather than in spite of their children. Young women without children often lament that their friends dissolve one by one into a cloud of domesticity. In truth such women only disappear insofar as they are imprisoned, by capitalists’ isolation of the working classes from e.g. the spontaneous cost-free childcare characteristic of less-atomized pre-capitalist family forms.
In discrete and disruptive stages, liberal capitalism has separated women’s lifecycles from reproduction. Ideologically this agenda advances in the name of enabling choice, but with harmful disregard as to which choices women actually want to make. Certain beneficial outcomes of pursuing maximal choice, such as the ability of lesbians to live openly and of a given woman to choose a career over starting a family, we should seek to preserve. Yet these benefits are incidental to the freedom fetish that comes with them; progress, change, and liberation are distinct things. What real choice is it, for that majority of young women who do want children, between having a social life and financial independence vs having adequate time for her family?
Alongside the forced normalization of double-income households, we have seen public space left to rot where not outright privatized, made increasingly hostile to children, and turned into a bogeyman by sensationalist media. Full-time mothers and their children have been made publicly homeless, thereby confined to their private homes except in spaces mediated by consumerism. How are women with children supposed to make friends with other mothers in this neoliberal hellscape? Are we going to make another goddamn swiping app?
Men and women become more and more different in the prime of their lives and return to childhood’s relative androgyny as they age, nonetheless maintaining immense differences on average at all stages of life. We all suffer if we lie to ourselves about this! Equality of the sexes, in the liberal-humanist or Marxist sense, is not the liberation of women from men who kept them down artificially. It is a step towards realizing humanity as something more meaningful than a species of primate.
The abstraction of labor in industrialization, alongside the birth of the urban working classes, laid the groundwork needed to free both sexes from the millennia-old economic requirement to live more as “men and women” than as “people”. We find ourselves now mixed up, equal, and genuinely freer than ever. We now face the reality that freedom is not always easier than restriction. One question remains: is the dogmatic belief in human sameness more important than learning to thrive as equals?
Off topic: I am enabling comments on this post, in violation of my normal policy. I may or may not continue allowing comments. It depends on whether I find them productive and whether I can resist the urge to curate them that led me to avoid it so far.
It is impossible to have any empirical discussion about sex differences with a constructivist who holds an axiomatic belief in patriarchy. If even the most egalitarian liberal or socialist countries around do not serve as a control group for the absence of extrajudicial patriarchy, there’s simply no way to demonstrate its presence anywhere!
In other words, if men and women are socially rather than materially defined, you can’t say anything about sex differences that doesn’t register as prescriptive. If I say e.g. that men are less emotional than women, which is true in that on average women experience more varied emotions and express them more often, it seems like I am making a value judgment with misogynistic implications. Even if I frame it as a positive thing, I risk accusations of benevolent sexism from women whose own experience is sex-atypical. Postmodernity is impossible!
If at any point while reading, you find a generalizing statement objectionable, please just add the phrase “on average” in your head. I await your feedback via email if you still disagree.
You have to look this person up. Her digital footprint is hilarious. (If you’re reading this, Asa, I’m interested in your critique.)
Clearly the explanation for why most people are decidedly heterosexual is evolutionary, not social; humanity would not exist if this were not the case. Homosexuality is no more inherently political or elective than it is “unnatural” or wrong. It either confers an evolutionary advantage or incurs no species-level disadvantage, either of which is sufficient explanation for its superficially counterintuitive existence.
I wanted to address this essay in detail, but almost every part of it exemplifies what I’m talking about. Consider it supplementary reading for the topic at hand.
I aim to return to this question seriously with SQ/EQ data, if I can find it, comparing autistic women with non-autistic men and women. Transgender cohort studies will likely provide key insights in the future, too.
Frankly, you already know the answer: why would the neurological system be the only one in which biological sex is not a relevant factor? If variation in primary or secondary sex characteristics can occur within sex categories at all, or if boys can act naturally “effeminate” or girls “tomboyish” regardless of sexual orientation and prior to sexual maturity, how could a spectrum of “brain masculinization” within each sex not be real?
Your hypothesis is very interesting, and as a biologist I do find it mechanistically plausible. I used to be a blank-slater myself, I confess, and it took me a long time to give it up because I had a significant emotional investment in it. I suppose I was afraid that by accepting the existence of meaningful, biologically-based psychological differences between men and women, I would impugn myself as an emotional thinker with fundamentally inferior capacity for reason, and as doomed to be best-suited for child-rearing amongst all possible pursuits - a thing of which I wanted no part. That is, it would mean that anything anyone I considered sexist had ever said about/against women would be true.
You've put words to something which I believe is a common feeling. There is something in the gut of well-adjusted people which rejects full-on "therapeutic constructivism" as unrealistic and unhelpful. Check out Warriors and Worriers by Joyce Benenson.