there's probably some conditions in which this is true. maybe we could give em funny clothes to wear or call them, idk something to distinguish them. but only if it matters, which for 99% of things it doesn't
and vice versa, by symmetry
I appreciate it, but I'm sorry to say that I don't understand what you're saying at all; could you please elaborate? Where what (exactly) is true? Give who clothes? Distinguish them from what? I don't mean to be rude; I would like to understand.
That may be a result of aphantasia, or an inability to visualize things in their head. The rates of aphantasia amongst autistics are much higher than in the general population (see Dance et al. 2021 archived below)
Maybe, but definitely not to a degree that it'd be the source of the problem. You don't get stuff like My Little Pony Hypnosis or Tulpas without visualization (chaos and/or ceremonial magicians in both of those communities, not coincidentally—keep reading this post to see why). Out of the probably thousands of autistic fetishists I've known, few-to-none of them seemed to have problems with visualization.
It also means that autistic people struggle to imagine the future, specifically their own future. They may have a harder time picturing themselves out of time and space, and this can affect their level of motivation. If you can’t visualize something like, say, you and your spouse standing in front of a newly purchased home, it can be difficult to pursue such a thing. Why do you think normies like “vision boards” so much? It’s a way to reignite one’s sense of motivation. Autistics often lack this capacity, and, combined with their apathy towards social measures of success, can sit around doing nothing for decades at a time.
It's true that they have these problems; that being said, I'd ascribe that more to being too "locked in". Their attention is too focused; their brain is graphite; they're in the clouds and can't touch down—they can't ground themselves in a way where they feel their lives as actually happening to them; they're shielded from their own intuition by a wall of calcified thought. They can't prioritize the mental resources necessary to plan the future, because those resources are being used to run a virtual machine on top of the hardware.
I think a simpler way to say this would be, “autistics spend a lot of time online so their sense of self is rooted in their online persona”. If you don’t have a job or IRL friends, who will know you as Joe Blow? If you stream on Twitch, make furry porn, and have some caché in a remote Internet community, then you have a bunch of people referring to you as Lily Alice Athena Romanov III. Autistics may lack the social awareness of neurotypicals, but group consensus does affect them. If everyone you know treats you like XYZ, why wouldn’t that affect your self-concept?
That's also a real effect, but it's unrelated to my point. That's a good insight, but a separate phenomenon. I'm talking about innate attention-regulation problems and how they impact a person's sense of self and reality.
You can think of autistic people as though they're constantly playing a game that they're deeply immersed in. That's why they always either seem like they're half somewhere else, or else they're LARPing as themselves. To use a computer analogy, you could say that they run their operating system on a virtual machine, without access to the real hardware.
In the past I've been able to access the hardware in brief flashes after waking up, before the virtual machine boots up and the brain calcifies. There's a few moments of emotional and intuitive lucidity.
You can also think of it like your brain is a swimming pool, where the water is attention/dopamine. You're in an inner-tube on top of the water; if you let the water-level drain by staying away from dopaminergic activities and stimuli, your feet can touch the ground.
Scientists have tried to do this chemically by giving autists MDMA.
As for fetishes… well, that’s complicated. I’ve seen lots of psychoanalytic breakdowns of fetishistic behaviour, and those can wax pretty poetic.
Edit:
Regarding your overall point, there's definitely things people do because it's easier or limits competition. You're describing a very real thing, and I want to acknowledge that because I re-read my post and I realized I hadn't done that. I just think fetishism as a whole is much broader than that, however much overlap there might be. /edit
Fetishism is poetry. It's all initiatory symbolism; remember the magicians I talked about? It's religious psychology collapsed into the lizard-brain; it's the reduction of mysticism to the sex drive. I don't like Foucault (obviously), but he understood this ( you can read about his
Scientia Sexualis in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1). Obviously, the average furry gooner doesn't know he's tapping into this—but neither does the average tulpamancer, who thinks he's just using a "brain-hack".
There are infinitely many forms fetishism can take, but it's all ultimately about creative potency—whether for creation, or for destruction (gravity tending towards the latter). Sexuality, creativity, and religion all use the same grammar. That's what fetishism exploits. It's all symbolism. I'll give an example:
If you want to know the ultimate fetish, it's a man's penis being transformed into a serpent and hypnotically mind-controlling him. I think the specific tag is "snake_penis" or something. It's the fetishization of a man's appetites totally possessing and controlling him. That's what's at the bottom of the well. It's some real evil stuff.
Even the goofiest fetish subculture has at least one guy who can lead you deeper to another circle, until you're at the bottom and it's naked invocations of Satan—they identify him with the rush of energy that comes from the transgression of boundaries and submission to the appetites. You don't even have to go very far. They say they don't believe in it, until they're past the point of backing out. It's a "It's ironic until it's not—it's not happening, and if it is it's a good thing" kind of situation, same as all grooming.
This isn't speculation—this is spelunking. Incidentally, and on-topic, those places are absolutely swarming with trannies.
Honestly? I think that evolutionary psychology is the best explanation of this sort of behaviour in male autists. I know evolpsych has been bastardized by midwit cunts looking to rationalize why they want to fuck barely legal blondes, but that doesn’t render the ideas stupid post-hoc. The fact that females have higher reproductive fitness than males means that the men have a good incentive to find visual shorthand for “available vagina”.
What makes evopsych stupid (not saying that you're being stupid) is that it's post-hoc modern myth-making. It's just making up a plausible-sounding story about cavemen bonking each other on the head, in lieu of any deeper understanding. If you want to understand fetishism—or any psychological process—you have to get into the phenomenology. You need to get into the guts; get your hands dirty; put in some elbow grease.
If you couldn't see yourself getting turned on by something, then you don't understand it. You have to be careful, though—once you wrap your head around something, the seed is in your head. Attention causes it to grow, positive or negative—a plant doesn't care if you're smiling or frowning when you water it. This is why "ironic" fetishism is such an effective recruitment tool, as are cringe compilations. It's probably why a number of mods here troon out.
The key is to wrap your head around it, but not allow yourself to think about it nor interact with it. That way, you don't habituate. Very dangerous; I don't recommend trying unless you have a very good reason.
I think that, from an evolutionary perspective, going after a girl with a more divisive appearance helps the man to limit competition. If most men and women concede that your girlfriend is “cute”, then there’s a world of potential threats. If half the male population goes, “ew, she has tattoos, yuck!” then you have half the competition you would have otherwise. I always assumed that the obsession with “big tiddy goth gfs” was rooted in the belief that such girls are unappealing to “chad” - males they can’t compete against - but amenable to nerds like themselves.
It's because they have aura. I'm pretty sure all men find the dark, lunar female aesthetic attractive, but in the case of simps it's because they worship women. They want to be conquered by Artemis. They need a lunar hunter-goddess; they want to see Diana naked and be transformed into the stag. You may enjoy the book "Eros and Magic in the Renaissance", which goes into this regarding Queen Elizabeth.
You also might want to look into
René Girard (specifically regarding sexual practices, especially BDSM and the need for the humiliant—I'm coining that word right now—to be insulted and denied in order to reinforce the image of the humiliator as a god). I think a lot of his "scapegoat" anthropological talk is bunk, but his sexuality stuff seems to be gold from what I've read in secondary sources.
As for female autists, I think the
Tumblr Sexyman fits this theory well. They see a bunch of cartoons where the skinny beanpole boy with a metrosexual haircut is the nice, accessible guy… and then wonder why
so many other women want to fuck Timothy Charlamagne or
Jughead or whatever. They’re looking for visual cues, but troll themselves by focusing on representations of reality rather than reality itself.
Those guys are typically powerful in some way, on top of being confident and "charismatic". They're a young girl or autistic woman's understanding of what that would be like in practice—which is what makes them funny
—but the appeal is understandable.
And those would be? Post on my profile or DM me if you think it’s off-topic.
Anything and everything involving a bell-curve: autists need to understand the actual rules, not tabula-rasa platitudes that obscure the realities of human behavior. This is especially important regarding differences in the ways that men and women think. If you want evidence that there's intentional dishonesty around the tabula-rasa question, check this excerpt out from a textbook I had lying around. Here's the source for the block-quote:
Hagen, E. (2005).Controversial issues in evolutionary psychology. In D. Buss (Ed.), The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 145–176). New York: John Wiley & Sons
Edit: if you read nothing else from my long post, I want anyone passing-by to read the above image; here's the text:
“More worrisome, EP challenges the foundations of crucial enlightenment values, values we undermine at our peril. Perhaps the mix of secular and religious values on which the priceless institutions of democracy rest are like a tablecloth that can be quickly yanked out, leaving everything standing on some solid, though as yet unknown, base. But I wouldn’t bet on it. We are at a crossroads. A vibrant science of human thought and behavior must always be able to question its own premises and is thus utterly unsuited to be that solid base. Yet, if we discard the secular, quasiscientific notion of the blank slate, or even subject it to genuine scientific scrutiny, we may threaten institutions far more valuable than a science of human nature. The vital question is not, as most critics seem to think, whether EP is correct, but whether any real science of the brain is prudent”
He said, "more valuable than a science of human nature".
This is one of the most disgusting things I've ever read. What could possibly be more valuable than an understanding of human nature? To anybody? To stand in the way of self-knowledge is to stand in the way of knowledge of others; to make love in any real form impossible. How many elections are the soul worth? One of the more hideous things I've ever read.
This is how you get tranny dogma, by the way. By intentionally obfuscating human nature.
" like they're talking to a baby or a cat.
