April 2nd, 2010
The United Nations has declared today World Autism Awareness Day. Excellent!
I had the opportunity to work with a group of young adults on the Autism Spectrum, and in order to get ready, I read everything I could get my hands on. Autism has been described as a form of “mind blindness” by British psychopathology professor and researcher Simon Baron-Cohen … as a lack of function in the mirror neurons that help us empathize with each other. I thought, huh, will I be meeting people who are on the other end of the spectrum from me?
As it turns out, autism isn’t that simple, and I didn’t find complete mind blindness in my Spectrum friends. Rather, what I saw was a group of people who were dealing with incredible sensory stimulation, both from the outside world, and from their own brains. This often created a great deal of emotional turmoil, as you can imagine, but because there were so many communication and socialization deficits, it was hard for my friends to deal with their often intense emotions. Some would completely withdraw, some would engage in “stimming,” which is a repetitive action that brings them some sense of peace and control, and others would lash out. It is not a fun condition to have!
It is also not a concrete condition, which is why it is referred to as a spectrum disorder. There are many possible versions of it, and each person on the Autism Spectrum is an individual, just as we (who are called neurotypicals) are. I love the term neurotypical. It makes us sound boring, which we often are!
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March 24th, 2010
The short answer is, no, men are not less able to feel emotions. Men may even feel emotions more intensely than women do, because they’ve been socialized to view themselves as unemotional, and may feel that their emotions are somehow strange or out of place. Also, in general, men are not socially permitted to express emotions or chat with friends about them as women are able to do, which leaves them few outlets for their emotions. In our social training and our social myth-making, we’ve created a pretty rotten situation for most men!
Wow, I’m reading the book Pink Brain, Blue Brain by neuroscience professor Lise Eliot, Ph.D., and in it, she writes that the differences between the brains of males and females are actually quite small at birth and throughout childhood. The old saw about men being less emotional or less able to feel emotions is not true. The old saw about men having smaller corpus callosums than women (the corpus callosum carries information between the left and right hemispheres of the brain), Dr. Eliot shows, was based on a study of just 14 brains, and has since been disconfirmed. But people hold onto this falsehood, and repeat it constantly, and write books and make whole careers around it, while men suffer silently with the emotions they clearly feel, but aren’t allowed to understand.
Dr. Eliot notes that there is some difference in verbal ability (girls are sometimes more verbal, but not always), and some difference in activity level (boys are sometimes more active, but not always) but not so much as we’ve been led to believe. In fact, there is more difference between girls in these traits, and between boys in these traits, than there is between the sexes. Wow.
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March 17th, 2010
I just found out that a sociological study I co-authored with Janja Lalich, Ph.D. (see her books here) has been accepted for publication by a peer-reviewed journal. Yow! It’s so exciting!
It’s a study of the lives of gay, lesbian, and questioning ex-Jehovah’s Witnesses. When Janja first told me about the study, I laughed and thought, “Why not do a study on green-eyed male writers from the north-side of Chicago who don’t drink coffee?” The group seemed ludicrously specific, and I wondered what I could ever learn from studying them.
But as I delved into the life stories of these people, and coded and re-read their stories (nearly 700 times before I was finished), I realized that this group presented a pitch-perfect example of triple stigma — which is something that the great sociologist Erving Goffman had not completely considered in his classic 1963 book Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity.
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