If you’re single and on the dreaded dating apps, the likelihood is, you’ve come across a flurry of men with prompts seeking out ‘slightly autistic women’ or ‘mentally ill girls.’ I mean at least they aren’t going on about their ideal Sunday being a walk and a roast dinner, but I’d also rather not have my disability fetishised.
To the trained neurodivergent eye, we can see that these men are under the impression that neurodivergent women are the embodiment of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope; whimsical, quirky and most importantly, overly trusting, naive and incredibly easy to manipulate. Unfortunately, as much as I do enjoy The Smiths, I am not Summer Finn from (500) Days of Summer; I have sensory issues, can’t hold eye contact, have awful emotional regulation and executive functioning and, most importantly, I’m real.
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope was first coined by Nathan Rabin whilst watching Kirsten Dunst’s character in Elizabethtown. He criticised the trope as being one-dimensional and existing solely to teach the male protagonist a lesson or provide emotional support whilst receiving nothing back. These characters have reduced actual neurodivergent women to merely a character trope in a film, which is incredibly dehumanising. Yes, we can be full of interesting information from our special interests and hyperfixations; yes, we stand out and we’re different – but how do these men fare when they come across a meltdown or severe burnout or when we stop masking?
The idea of being only ‘slightly autistic’ gives the impression that only the more socially acceptable symptoms of very real and often debilitating disabilities should be tolerated and desired. The symptoms that make us a little bit eccentric, impulsive and – dare I say – ‘not like other girls.’ Seeing men talk about us and our disabilities in this manner is unsettling and off-putting because we know we’ll spend the entire first date either being infantilised and belittled or heavily objectified and sexualised, instead of listened to and given any chance to be understood.
It’s incredibly important to note that women who have learning disabilities, or who fall under the neurodivergent umbrella, are at a significantly higher risk of being victims of domestic violence or abuse within romantic relationships than our neurotypical counterparts. Studies have shown that autistic women are two to three times more likely to be victims of sexual violence, according to Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience. Many neurodivergent women are being people-pleasers, desperate to be accepted and often quite credulous, which is the perfect recipe for abusive partners to actively seek out – particularly when the partner is aware of traits and symptoms that they can exploit to gain more control.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a surge in ADHD diagnosis’s particularly amongst women, peaking at 158.6% above the expected rates in those aged 20-24 years in the two years following March 2020, according to a UK study. Research into ADHD and autism have typically excluded women and girls from their studies, further resulting in gender biases and the notion that only men and boys can be autistic or have ADHD. Whilst this has created a generation of ‘invisible women’ who have spent their entire lives crippled with a disability that no one would validate or take seriously, times are now changing, and women and girls are finally beginning to receive the support and accommodations their mothers and grandmothers didn’t have access to before.
The growing trend of desiring a neurodivergent woman has prompted mass discussions on social media, but very little input from the men who have been fetishising us. The patriarchy has always put women of all types in a position to be viewed as objects, so this isn’t surprising at all.
