Madeline’s Reviews > Strong Female Character > Status Update

“In my teens and early twenties, I frequently had the sense that a madwoman was driving the car of my life while I sat in the backseat observing it and wondering how we ended up here.”

“The use of ‘cunt’ in Scotland is interchangeable with person or people. For example, ‘good cunt’ is an informal term for someone who is an all around great guy. A ‘daft cunt’ is a silly person.”

My American brain is clutching its pearls LOL

“I grew up confident about my queerness. Girls at school made fun of me for it, but autism’s lack of regard for social norms combined with my constant sapphic novel reading had given me confidence and I maintained unruffled. I couldn’t imagine being anything other than bisexual & never thought of it as weird. It took repeated messages over and over and over again to instill a suitable amount of shame in me.”

2/3 - manipulative. They mistake our fact finding missions as prying. Lots of autistic women find eye contact just as uncomfortable as autistic men do, but our social camouflaging leads us to attempt it anyway, and consequently, some of us hold peoples’ gaze for an unnervingly long amount of time. Couple all this with a tendency for society to assume that women in general are scheming and you have a toxic mix of

1/2 “I’ve discovered that one of the most hurtful aspects of crossed wires in a lifetime of dealing with allistic people is that they tend to look for and assume there’s an unspoken agenda in your behavior. When they do that with autistic people, who are the least Machiavellian people on earth and not great at making speedy social calculations, they read our awkward attempts at small talk as cold and

3/3 Hot take on “pick-me girls.” I saw reviews angry about this and, while I disagree with her that this trope is about autistic women, I can see how her experience of not understanding girl code at all could label her as a pick me. Dating her friends’ guy friends/crushes, comparing herself favorably for having more sexual experience, etc. She does come off as a pick me, for sure, albeit unintentionally.

2/3 - by horror, as I added up every feature that matched me. I had a lot of male friends! I said I wasn’t like other girls! And if I didn’t say it, I was always thinking it, but I was never saying it to show I was better than other women. All I wanted was to find out how to be like other girls and it felt increasingly impossible. The pick-me girl appears to me as just another way to dismiss female autistics.”

1/3 “When I first read about the pick-me trope at university, I nodded in agreement, a pick-me girl surrounds herself with boys to get validation, has mostly male friends, and often insists she’s not like other girls. I thought there were definitely women like that, who failed to realize that men would never stand up for them when it came to any kind of fight for gender equality. This thought was quickly followed

“For someone who was a passionate defender of the unborn, toodaloo seemed to hate children as soon as they were no longer fetuses. Still, I enjoyed being around her in a weird way, not because she provided comfort or warmth of any sort, but because her constant disquiet on issues such as morality, etiquette, life, and death made you know where you stood with her. No one else ever said what they meant.”

“It’s weird being brought up to think you’re evil. I believe them when they say that we’re programmed to believe everything our parents say, but I thought being evil would feel more powerful, less lonely. Evil people didn’t seem frightened of anything so why was it that I felt frightened all the time?”