Stim4Stim Episode 3 transcript

ZACK: Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Autism and all the ships at sea, you’re listening to Stim4Stim, the relationship podcast by and for autistic people. I’m your co-host Zack Budryk; who else is here with me today?

CHARLIE: Charlie Stern and Paris Geller Stern, my emotional support animal. He’s a cockatiel.

ZACK: Hell yeah. Hi Charlie, hi Paris. And today we’re honored to welcome our first-ever guest. Her work has been published in the Washington Post, Vox, The Nation, The American Prospect and many more, and she writes the NOSLetter newsletter, please welcome Sara Luterman to the program.

SARA: Hello everybody, it’s nice to be here.

ZACK: It’s great to have you. So just to start us off, in keeping with the theme of the project, Charlie and I represent sort of a broad swath of the relationship spectrum as well. Charlie is single and polyromantic and I am married to a woman. You want to tell us a little bit about what your current relationship status is like?

SARA: Yeah, I think I have a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B going on. So I’m queer monogam-ish and I have been with my fiancée for six years. We just got engaged this summer, which was really nice.

CHARLIE: Yay!

ZACK: Awesome, congrats. So as part of the show, Sara, we answer listener questions as we receive them, and we have gotten a fairly long one this week from a listener who asked to remain anonymous which of course we will do for anyone who asks us to, and as I said it’s fairly long, so we are just gonna… I think we agreed we were just gonna read key excerpts from it?

CHARLIE: Yeah, let’s take it by chunks because my notes and my answer are kind of by chunks.

ZACK: I am gonna skip over this first paragraph just because much of it is identifying information.

CHARLIE: We can say that he has he/him pronouns and he’s an undergrad in college, he’s 20 and he is Jewish.

SARA: Wooo!

ZACK [reading]: Fitting with the stereotype, I like trains! I have been fascinated by New York’s transportation system for as long as I can remember. I know all about the history of the subway system-its subway cars, lines, stations, operations, proposed routes, provisions for future routes, etc. My knowledge about transportation in NYC is encyclopedic. Since 2013, I have edited and created articles on Wikipedia about transit in NYC, and I was featured in the New York Times and on a local news station, NY1.

While some people are surprised when I tell them I have Asperger’s (I don’t tell many people), I have gotten a lot better at dealing with some of the things that come along with Asperger’s, partially through OT/PT, psycholgist’s visits, taking medicine, and just growing older, but am very very socially awkward. If I have known the other person for a very long time, I am somewhat comfortable speaking with them. I was bullied in elementary/middle school. I got a couple friends in high school, and people actually generally liked me for a change. There were several people I was comfortable speaking with, some of whom I would consider friends, but I cannot imagine doing anything with them. When there are certain things in common, such as school, or transit, I can easily have conversations with people. I cannot just approach people and have a conversation with people. I am not comfortable speaking to people I don’t know, and would have no idea what to talk about, since my interests are so niche. Even when I am at events where other people are interested in transit, such as at the New York Transit Museum, I cannot bring myself to speak to people.

ZACK [not reading]: Alright, so, I think that’s a good stopping point for us to start some discussion.

CHARLIE: Yeah.

ZACK: So this is something that I have struggled with as well, in terms of, sometimes it feels like shared interests aren’t enough because there are people who don’t want to talk about shared interests as much as you do, that’s definitely something I’ve experienced. Charlie, do you feel like you’ve been in a similar position?

CHARLIE: Oh, absolutely. And he says later in his email that he doesn’t swear so I’m going to preface my suggestion with that because I want to talk about shitposting groups on Facebook [both Zack and Sara laugh]. I’m so serious that these have been so amazing for me, especially during the pandemic where you can just focus in on one musical artist or one television show and just make like endless, in-community sort of reference-jokes. I’m hoping that he doesn’t bristle at the term shitposting, but a lot of these groups, they’re not going to be named shitposting. Like Simpsons Shitposting does exist, but then the show I Think You Should Leave, that’s just… I think it’s just I Think You Should Leaveposting. And then Nathan for You, it’s Nathan for You Businessposting.

So you’ve just got to look for the suffix of posting. But basically anything you could be into. Literally anything you could be into could have a shitposting group. I know for a fact that trains and transit have multiple, because friends are a part of those, and I have British friends who are in these groups and some of them are autistic, some of them aren’t, but obviously in the UK and all throughout Europe there’s more public transit so you can make international friends by just talking about your special interest on a Facebook group. I could sing the praises all day of a shitposting group. I’m in They Might Be Giants ones, I’m in Kate Bush ones, I’m in all the television show ones.

And I feel like all social skills are incremental, especially for us, and all social skills are a muscle, so once you are in a certain culture and you know how to joke with other posters, that can progress into friendships, you friend each other on Facebook, you send messages back and forth, you send memes back and forth, you send references back and forth, and eventually, you know, you have these friends or social structures and you can maybe date and yeah, it’s all community, you have to find your community.

SARA: I really relate to the guy that wrote in, in terms of being like in college and not having ever dated. I didn’t date until I was a senior in college, so I totally get that fear and discomfort that everyone else around you is dating, so it can be really difficult, because you see other people doing what you want to be doing, but you’re too scared, or it’s too hard, or you don’t know how. I’ve totally been there. So I just want to reassure our contributor that it’s totally normal. It’s something that a lot of autistic people experience and it’s not necessarily forever.

The other thing I wanted to say, just about trains…

CHARLIE: YEAH!

SARA: So I actually went on a double date once with another couple when the Silver Line opened in D.C., we ended up riding the whole Silver Line, it was really fun. I’m not like into trains like in a serial number kind of way, but I really, really like riding them, a lot. There’s always people who share your special interest. They might not be as into it as you, they might not relate to it the same way, but that kind of mismatch is actually kind of nice, because you end up learning about how someone else enjoys something that you love, which I think kind of folds into having a special interest in the first place.

ZACK: Yeah, and going off of that, my experience is not universal, but I think that… it’s an oversimplification to say that confidence is a cure-all, but I do think that, speaking from personal experience… if you find someone with whom you can really talk about something like trains, for instance, in shitposting groups like Charlie referenced, I think that you will eventually get to a point where you’re just more comfortable talking to that person in general, even if the subject veers away from something like trains.

SARA: Also, my parents gave me some really good advice when I was younger that’s probably been some of the most helpful advice of my entire life, especially when it comes to dating: dating someone isn’t that different from having a friend. It’s a little monogamous and heteronormative, so we’re coming at it from that perspective, but they say that the person that you date should be your best friend that you also like to smooch, which is adorable and also, I think, true. I think that realizing it wasn’t that different from making a friend really helped me in terms of getting comfortable talking to people. I think also it helps to be okay with things not working out or just being friends… if you don’t put so much weight on the outcome, it’s a lot easier to be confident and to be comfortable.

ZACK: Definitely.

CHARLIE: I will say that as a queer, polyamorous person, I am often dating my friends, or oftentimes partnerships look like friendships because they are much more committed because we say they are. It’s not a failure if someone you’re trying to date becomes your friend, because either way you’re going to have a friend, but also you can date your friends. And it might even take years. I’m entangled with someone this year and over the previous year who was my friend and mostly my online friend, for many years. So yeah, I’m going to echo the same thing of don’t focus on the result, just see what happens, and either way you have someone.

SARA: I also want to say I actually personally haven’t had a lot of luck with stuff like Facebook groups but basically everyone I’ve ever successfully dated I met on dating websites. I think dating websites are really good for autistic people for a few reasons, Number one, everyone is really upfront about what they want and why you’re there, so you don’t have that situation where you don’t know if it’s a date, you don’t know what the other person’s looking for. I’ve totally been on things that I thought were dates but the other person didn’t before, and this really helped circumvent that problem.

The other thing that’s really great about dating websites and apps, I guess, is that people talk about their interests and sort of put that out front. So you can find people who share your interests and that’s a good way to have a conversation-starter. Obviously you don’t want to totally jump on the person because that can be really overwhelming, but it can really help make a connection with a stranger if you share an interest and you can just sort of chat about it casually.

CHARLIE: Yeah, and even search terms, like on OKCupid, you can just like look for all the Jewish people, you just check off a box. There are so many aspects of the Internet that are so accessible. And my life is different than it was when I was in college, when I was like 18, because even Uber and Lyft didn’t exist back then. If you traditionally wouldn’t be able to drive yourself to a date, you can now go on a date, because everything is through apps, and it’s so incredible, the progress that has taken place over the last decade is incredible.

ZACK: One hundred percent. And we were talking about this a little in sort of our icebreaker period before we started recording but I do think that COVID has sort of been the great equalizer as far as that goes, because, you know, a lot of us are forming connections from behind a screen at this point, and even if socially you feel like you’re at a disadvantage, a lot of people are sort of limited in the extent to which they can physically go out into the world and form these new relationships, and that’s okay, that’s the hand we’ve been dealt right now, and you’re not falling behind anybody else if that ends up being what’s easier for you.

[Music]

SARA: So this is our questioner. [Reading] While I hope to get into a relationship sooner than later, I feel resigned to the fact that I will never get into a relationship, given my niche interests, and other requirements I have, e.g. being Jewish (or willing to convert), liberal/progressive, kind/caring person, smart, someone who wants to make the world a better place, thoughtful, etc.. I hate parties and social gatherings and go to bed early, limiting my ability to meet potential partners. In addition, at college, I spend all my time doing schoolwork, and I chose not to dorm (despite being able to do so for free) since I just cannot live on my own (I am very close with my family, cannot do some things other young people easily on their own or have a hard time with them like buying things-I don’t go shopping much, cooking, laundry, prefer to be with my cats which limits my contact with my fellow college students. I plan on going to Grad school as I hope to become a transportation planner, and once I get into my career I will likely become a workaholic, further limiting my ability to find a partner.

SARA [no longer reading]: Don’t feel resigned to the fact that you’re never going to be in a relationship, it’s not necessarily. I totally remember feeling like I was just too weird to love, that I was just too weird and too gross and too intense for anyone to actually date me. And it turns out that’s not true, I have dated a lot of people since then! Not like a ridiculous amount but it’s been more than one. You’re so young. Sometimes I think it’s important to remember that autism is a developmental disability, sometimes it just takes us longer to do things everybody else does. It doesn’t mean we’ll never do them, it just means it might take a little bit longer for us to figure it out.

I do want to give one word of caution about understanding what requirements are dealbreakers and which you can live with, because you’re not going to find someone who checks off all of your boxes. You can find someone who checks off most of your boxes, and it’s really important to know which ones are the ones you absolutely need and which ones are the ones you can live without. I actually think dating itself is really good for that because you can date people who meet some of the requirements and then if it turns that the ones that they don’t have are actually a dealbreaker, you kind of learn through trial and error, so don’t give up. I’m not being Pollyannish here, I totally remember being 20 and just thinking I was going to die alone, and it’s not true, I’ve been with my fiancée for six years and he’s my best friend and we just love each other and it’s gross and ridiculous and I never thought I would have this, but it’s totally something you can have. It doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to happen, but it’s definitely not impossible.

CHARLIE: Yeah. And I want to say that … he’s got his eye on grad school, and his self-discipline is already very grad-school-like, because he doesn’t allow himself partying and fun and he goes to bed early and he does all of his schoolwork, and I’m hearing the requirements to be like an agent for change and good in the world, and I’m like “Oh! You should date a social work student!” Like, someone getting their MSW, they’re also not going to have time to date, and you guys should date, because I think that would work really well.

SARA: I went to grad school and I didn’t really drink a lot, I didn’t go to parties, and somehow I still ended up in a relationship.

CHARLIE: There you go!

SARA: Like, those aren’t actually things you need to do. All the things that you think everyone else is doing, aren’t necessarily things everyone else is doing, they’re things most people are doing. And so if you find someone else who has similar habits, then it’s going to work a lot better. Like when I went on my first date with my fiancée, I kind of got an impression that it might work, because we were both 15 minutes early [all laughing]. Like we both showed up early and that’s just something about both of us. You don’t have to change who you are. It’s okay to hate parties and not be into that stuff. It doesn’t mean you won’t find somebody.

CHARLIE: Yeah and partying… one of my points, I’m just going to launch into the point about partying, I have been straight-edge since high school and I went to a women’s college with a lot of wild culture and a lot of debauchery and lots of troublemaking and sometimes that involved people drinking and of course I was left out when people were associating a fun time with alcohol and then not thinking of me, because they weren’t inviting me to bars, and they weren’t inviting me to all of these other things for example, like to go secretly smoke weed, but when you have so many rules for yourself, and especially being sober and straight-edge when other people are drinking, they start to think you’re cool. Because they start to think you’re like, stronger than them. So even though you don’t have a beer in your hand, and that’s not a big deal to you. People will notice that you’re not drinking and if you explain to them that you don’t drink they’ll be like “Yeah! I should do that!”

And there’s this weird sort of clout that sort of happens when you’re the sober one. You can still have fun or you can be really rigid and rules-oriented but either way that’s kind of your thing. Like you go to a social situation and you have these things about you and that becomes your thing, and people know you. And you don’t have to get drunk and do a bunch of drunken stuff to make memories like getting blackout and taking off all your clothes or peeing in a bush. But yeah, there are so many ways to be social at a party, for example, or with other people who are drinking, that don’t involve you also drinking or being intoxicated in other ways.

ZACK: And if I could take another aspect of this, both where he mentions that a couple of the boxes he’s looking to check are someone who is either Jewish or willing to convert or someone who’s liberal-slash-progressive, I don’t think it’s unusual or unreasonable to specifically be looking for a partner who shares your values, I think that that’s generally what neurotypical people do as well and they manage to do it. There are ways of finding spaces where you’re specifically likely to encounter those people as well, be it through social media or narrowing your field on dating sites. For example, I met my wife in a student activist group and I totally agree with what Sara said about how sometimes you’re going to be surprised by how the person for you isn’t going to be someone who meets all of what you thought were your non-negotiable criteria but I think it’s probably human nature to have shared values be among the less negotiable criteria, so I think that that would be a good place to start if you want that to be your foundation.

CHARLIE: Yeah and you and Raychel went to church together, and it’s totally reasonable to join a progressive temple and talk to your fellow worshippers or congregants and develop relationships from there. You can just find a leftist, progressive, queer-affirming if you want that, schul and just go to schul, and keep going to schul, and then people know your face, and then boom, you have a community.

SARA: I grew up going to an Orthodox synagogue and I went to Hebrew day school for a while, and the other thing I would say is, I thought the person that I’m with had to be Jewish and it turns out that wasn’t actually a dealbreaker. I’m in an interfaith relationship right now and it’s great. Actually, it works out really well because we don’t have to split holidays. So like he comes to my family for all the Jewish holidays and I go to his family for, like, Christmas.

CHARLIE: YEAH!

SARA: I didn’t think it was a thing that I would be okay with and it turns out that I am, because I took a risk.

[music]

CHARLIE: I want to say some more about drinking and intoxicants in general in social situations. Some things, those included, it is not okay for anyone to coerce you about. No one should be coercing you into drinking or smoking weed, or for that matter having sex, but there are certain safe things where people should be allowed to pry you out of your shell. You should allow them to pry you out of your shell. When I was a first year in college, the seniors would invite me to sit with them on the school grounds and just sit and chat, and that’s a good type of coercion. Hanging out and being social, but not anything that happens in a social situation for example, drinking, smoking, having sex, all that stuff. And I think that dovetails nicely into a very important thing Sara’s about to say about coercion, rules, and a very… a “scorge,” a scourge, how do you pronounce “scourge?” Upon dating, and a scourge upon the community in general.

SARA: I don’t know how hip it is anymore but I think it is still a thing, pick-up artists.

ZACK: We don’t know what’s hip.

CHARLIE: Yeah. [laughs]

SARA: I don’t know, we’re all old, I don’t know what’s going on anymore, I need to make some oatmeal and lie down. So pickup artistry can seem really appealing to a lot of younger autistic men who want to date and have sex and do all of that stuff because it gives you really clear rules. It kind of turns dating into a video game, but in a bad way, where there’s achievements and certain boxes you tick and then what you want happens. And the problem with that is, number one, it’s kind of awful, and number two, you’re never going to get something long-term and sustainable that way. I actually ended up dating a pickup artist by accident one time. I was in my mid-20s and I met this guy at a friend’s house and he seemed… he wore a lot of colorful clothing and I thought he just had a cool sense of style, and it turns out that’s like, “peacocking,” in quotation marks with my fingers.

CHARLIE: Oh no [laughing]

SARA: And like he’d talk about his job a whole bunch, which I thought he was just really interested in his job but apparently that’s “demonstrating value.”

ZACK: Oh God.

[Charlie laughing]

SARA: So we went on a few dates and we did hook up and then it just kind of fizzled because it turned out under all that surface stuff, he was really, really boring. Like deeply boring, probably one of the most boring people I’ve ever met in my entire life. He was really interested in like nutriceuticals.

ZACK [laughing]: Oh GOD.

SARA: And doing situps and not really anything else. It can seem like that sort of pickup artist stuff works but it doesn’t work if you want to have a meaningful relationship with a woman. Or anybody else really. It’s really appealing because it gives you these really clear rules about how to do a thing but the problem is that real people don’t work like that.

CHARLIE: Yeah. They’re trying to push buttons to make sex come out.

ZACK: Mmhmm.

SARA: Yeah. And sometimes the people you date will be clueless like me and it might happen but it’s not sustainable because it turns out no amount of colorful clothing or talking about your job makes up for being deeply boring.

ZACK: And I think that’s one of the biggest lessons to learn while dating or seeking a long-term relationship or whatever you’re trying to do. Think of it less as this exact combination that you have to unlock and more about the fact that there is no magic key to predicting human behavior, and to date or to seek relationships with people is to accept that and maybe on some level find the beautiful side of that.

CHARLIE: Yeah, and in general this podcast is not necessarily trying to get you laid. We’re not a pickup artist podcast, we’re not guaranteeing results, we are very anti-Jordan Peterson, that whole thing. We’re not going to tell you to spray yourself down with Axe but I’m going to encourage hygiene, and I think perfume and cologne are really interesting to nerd out about, but I’m not going to tell you what body wash to use that’ll get you pussy. We’re not in the business of doing that.

ZACK: Yeah. And we were discussing this off-mic but we, you know, we like the idea that it becomes easier to find a partner if you figure out how to find people who get you in general. And that’s not guaranteed to find you a partner, obviously, because nothing is, but it is likely to at least help you make some pretty good friends as well, and I don’t think that’s anything to sneeze at either.

CHARLIE: Yeah. I think community is always a plus. I think if we can work on being less isolated ourselves and help our listeners be less isolated, that’s beautiful, because everybody needs friends, everybody needs support.

ZACK: Sure. Sure. And it’s unfortunate that so much of the stuff that we are warning against holds so much appeal for young men in general, and I think that that is sort of a consequence of the fact that we don’t talk about men’s minds as like this unknowable quantity in the same way as we talk about women’s minds or nonbinary people’s minds, and I think we need to first and foremost stop granting that premise, that these are all different species and you need a decoder ring for them.

CHARLIE: Yeah.

ZACK: Because we’re all people.

CHARLIE: And it’s all about communication. It’s all about learning how to communicate with other people and reach out beyond your own brain and beyond your own person.

ZACK: One hundred percent.

SARA: Women are people, not Martians, although if they were Martians that’d be really cool.

ZACK: Hell yeah.

[Sara laughing]

CHARLIE: No, wait, men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Right?

ZACK: I think that’s what it is. I just got the image of a woman as Dr. Manhattan in the “Watchmen” panel going “I am tired of this earth, these men, tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.”

CHARLIE: I mean, true, though. I also want to say, autism is so gendered, and there is such a gendered experience of being autistic. I wasn’t diagnosed as a child because I was raised as a girl and there are certain coping mechanisms that I’ve had to learn, and I’ve had to learn how to become a good salesman and a good negotiator to obtains afety in a world that views me as a woman. Part of this is maybe masking, part of this is just the world is really shitty and hierarchical, but there are different gendered experiences of autism and also at the same time, sometimes men and autistic men can come across as threatening. So we kind of want to focus on minimizing that, minimizing harm, minimizing someone’s perception fo being harassed by you. Like don’t be a reply guy, for example, but try to genuinely become someone’s friend and be a part of a community.

For me, for example, if I were to reply to a woman’s tweet or reply to a nonbinary person’s tweet, that’s not going to be… that’s not going to give off the threat alerts to that person, but if you are a young autistic man and you don’t yet know how these social mechanisms work, replying out of the blue to a woman who may share the same interests as you, that’s going to come across as threatening, or at least very rude.

ZACK: Sure. And I was actually just discussing this with someone the other day, I think we mentioned earlier the idea of not knowing whether you’re on a date, but I think it can be helpful about wanting to be forthright about wanting to know whether you’re on the same page as well. I went on a couple of dates with a woman I met early on in college that I felt like we really hit it off and around the end of our second date, I decided to point-blank ask her “Do you see this going anywhere long-term?” and she let me down really easy but said “not really” and that that’s not really something she was looking forward to, or not looking forward to but not looking to do, and I was okay with that and she was someone I, as a person, enjoyed talking to a lot, and as a result we have been really good friends the entire time. So it might have seemed like there was some short-term pain in, I guess to use the parlance of our times, shooting my shot like that, but I’m very glad I did, and it kept things… things could have been a lot more awkward and a lot less amicable if I hadn’t.

CHARLIE: Yeah. And I love asking questions and I love anticipating a no, and I personally don’t’ kiss anyone without asking them if I can kiss them, and I ask with the possibility in my mind that they will so no, and I want to give them that out, I want to give them that option for saying no. So I love talking too much about things and I love asking too many questions. I don’t think you can do a lot of harm just asking too many questions.

ZACK: Sure. And I really understand from personal experience just how nervewracking it can be for an autistic person, just the idea of something where there are no guarantees, has always terrified me as an adult, just the idea that I could do everything right and still not guarantee that I come out on top, but you know, that’s always going to be the case, particularly with relationships, and sometimes I think that part of the goal is to just get to a point where you’re able to accept that and respond to “but what if I fail” with “but what if I succeed.”

SARA: That’s actually one of my favorite quotes from Star Trek, because I’m that kind of nerd…

ZACK: I know exactly what you mean, yeah.

SARA: So Captain Picard says “It’s possible to commit no mistakes and still lose, that’s not a weakness, that’s life.” And he’s totally right.

CHARLIE: I love that.

SARA: There are some things you can learn from Star Trek. Probably don’t learn EVERYTHING from Star Trek, because sometimes the gender politics are outdated, but there are things you can learn from Star Trek.

ZACK: More than you can learn from the cast’s Twitter anyway.

SARA: Well, everyone except William Shatner’s great. He’s the anomaly.

CHARLIE: William Shatner hates autistic people, right, is that the thing?

SARA: Yes.

CHARLIE: Doesn’t he also hate queer people?

SARA: He’s really crappy to trans people and…

ZACK: Wasn’t he like specifically in a flame war with specific fandom ships for a while?

SARA: Yeah, I think slash-fiction peeves him off…

ZACK: You’re in the wrong neighborhood, buddy.

SARA: He’s just like if the “old man yelling at cloud” meme was a person, or I have a friend who calls him “Space Trump.”

CHARLIE: That’s actually brilliant.

SARA: But yeah, you can do everything right and it still might not work out. That’s just real. And being okay with it not working out is just super-important. I used to think that if I went on a date and it didn’t work out, I’d really beat myself up, like “this is my fault, there’s something wrong with me, I’m gonna die alone in a ditch somewhere and no one’s going to care” and the things is, you can always date another person. If it doesn’t work out with someone, you can always date another person and maybe it might work out with them. There’s just tons of different people who are all different and want different things, and if it doesn’t work out with one person that doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you.

CHARLIE: Yeah, I actually wrote in my notes verbatim, “You’re not broken, but you have to practice.” That’s how I feel in my life, honestly.

ZACK: And similarly, you never cross the finish line of being a person, I guess is how I would put it.

CHARLIE: Wowww, that’s actually brilliant. Can you say that again? Because that’s blowing my mind.

ZACK: Sure, you never cross the finish line of being a person. You’re never old enough or accomplished enough that you have done everything that you are intended to do to have your full experience as a person, or know everything that you need to know.

CHARLIE: Yeah. There’s no winning and there’s no losing, and that’s very freeing.

[Music]

CHARLIE: I want to talk about special interests where being weird is okay, because if you have a cat or you have a dog and you’re really intense about them, that’s kind of weird, but I have a bird and there’s so much special knowledge that… well, you don’t necessarily HAVE to know all the special knowledge, but it’s very fun to find out all this stuff and then talk amongst your community about this stuff. Like different perches, different heating pads, different plants they might like, different feeding schedules, you can’t cook with Teflon pans, you can’t have candles, you can’t have incense, you can’t smoke, you can’t really choose your bird’s personality, you just have to problem-solve every step of the way. Like, he’s such a weird little guy [Zack laughing] and there’s so many things that could kill him but there’s also different levels to unlock in terms of his happiness. Like, he showers with me. So we are very weird. We are a nightmare Tinder date. But it’s funny.

Like, there’s someone out there who I met on Hinge who probably didn’t have a good time at our house but it’s funny because I’m really obsessed with my bird and I couldn’t take a break from being obsessed with my bird to fully interact with a human. And like if you’re a tarantula guy, if you’re a chicken guy, if you have lizards, if you have snakes, you can be such a nerd and know all of this esoteric stuff and you can monologue at these people and it’s cool, because you’ve got these little demons running around your house and you get to explain them to people and it’s so different than being intense about a cat because I think it’s very offputting to people to be very intense about cats and dogs.

SARA: Oh no. [laughing] That’s a problem for me…

CHARLIE: I’m sorry.

SARA: I’m someone who wants to be intense about dogs.

ZACK: I mean, you’re not like a “Best in Show” person.

CHARLIE: Oh yeah, “Best in Show” loops around to being cool again.

SARA: I have feelings about schnauzers.

CHARLIE: Well, yeah there’s definitely a way to be intense about dogs in an uncool way that loops around to being cool. Because if you are into show dogs and you’re into coiffing your dog, I think that is so repulsive that it’s now cool again. But you know, the short story “Cat Person,” there’s such baggage related to cats, or being a cat lady, or being a cat guy, and having six cats. You can have six birds and you can have six snakes, but once you have six cats, it’s like “what the fuck is wrong with that person?”

ZACK: Charlie, did you watch “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”?

CHARLIE: No, I have friends of friends who wrote for “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”, but I never… TV shows are such a project for me, I have to be all-in to the canon and all-in to the world and I couldn’t commit that time to “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.”

ZACK: I get it. There’s just an entire sequence where she decides that she is done with dating so she has to buy a fuckton of cats instead and there’s an entire musical number called “A Fuckton of Cats.”

CHARLIE: How many cats?

ZACK: I don’t think they specifically say, they just say “a fuckton of cats.”

CHARLIE: Oh, okay.

ZACK: And then there’s these Jim Henson-looking cat puppets in the background singing about how they’re not actually that friendly and they’ll probably make a person more lonely.

SARA: You also might find someone who also wants to have six cats, though.

ZACK: Sure.

SARA: One of my good friends and his boyfriends have a LOT of cats [laughing] so there’s someone who’s into the same kind of weird, probably, somewhere.

CHARLIE: Yeah. And you can totally foster with your partner and stuff, I’m just saying that a single person, six cats versus six iguanas, you know? I’m just very pro-exotic pets, I think it’s really cool, and obviously I just monologued about it, it is my special interest to have birds, and I have a sweater that I’m looking at right now that has hand-stitched parrots. So I’m all-in. But me talking to a cat person, I’m like a little turned off when someone’s like really intense about a cat or a dog. I don’t know. But anyway, all that is to say, there are certain special interests that as a 20-year-old college student who is single and trying to date, there are more accessible special interests than others. And if you were a nerd about skincare, for example, or a nerd about cologne, people will view you more favorably, and that’s not something to abide by and frame your life around, but think about the wideness of community and, looping around again, Facebook. Facebook is great for finding these groups for your special interest.

[Music]

CHARLIE: So I want to address living with one’s family. Personally and I’ve talked about this before, I grew up in a violent home and even after college I chose to be homeless as opposed to living with my abusive parents, and I don’t recommend that but the danger was so great that… and I was in the throes of sickness and couldn’t work… that homelessness was the better option and not only the safer option but the one that provided the most freedom. I bring that up to say every autistic person is different and every autistic person has a different relationship with their parents and with their family. I know that a lot of our listeners are going to be queer autistic people, and sometimes our parents aren’t that great. So we’re kind of trying to decide, should we tell you to live alone and try moving out of your parents’ or should you not, so I’m just going to open that to Zack and Sara, because we had a little conversation off-mic and now we just want to kind of mull the question around.

SARA: So… and this is a concept from the broader disability rights movement, I think that independence is an illusion. I think that we’re all very interconnected, nobody’s actually independent unless they’re living in the woods and growing their own corn and pooping in a bucket. We all rely on each other because some people have skills other people don’t have and vice-versa. I do think it’s perfectly fine to live at home if you need that kind of support. I just want you to keep in mind that when you’re dating, you should not be looking for a replacement for your mom. It’s okay to need help doing things but you can’t expect a person you date to do those things for you. Later on, as you get older, you might choose to move out, there’s other ways you can get support, you can hire a cleaner, you can get help organizing, it’s okay to need that, but you shouldn’t expect your girlfriend to be Mom Number 2.

ZACK: And this is just going back to my experience again, but I think that the thing about the extent to which you are comfortable living independently, much like the other criteria you have, you know, everybody’s different but I think with the right person it may surprise you. I hadn’t really thought about living independently at all but when I moved in with my girlfriend and now wife, it just made sense, because she was like the first person that I had ever been comfortable doing that with. It may sound a little cliché to say never say never but again I do think you never want to completely shut the door on a possibility based on an idea you have in your head, and I know that for autistic people in particular this can go beyond “I don’t want to,” it’s something deeper than that, but at the same time I think there are circumstances where we surprise ourselves.

CHARLIE: Yeah, and you may find roommates who become your chosen family and you could live with your chosen family forever. And there could be an interdependence where all of you help each other and that could be totally different from the situation you live in and you can’t even imagine it at this point. You never know.’

SARA: And it is okay if the person you’re living with helps you do things, it just shouldn’t be an expectation. My fiancée Gavin does the vacuuming because I am like a cat or a dog and I am kind of scared of the vacuum noise.

CHARLIE: It’s so loud!

SARA: It’s so loud, I hate it! And so Gavin does the vacuuming and that why I don’t have to deal with the vacuum and our house is relatively clean. But then there’s other things that I can do that Gavin can’t do, like Gavin’s legally blind so I can drive, so I bring that to the relationship. So it’s okay to be able to do certain things and not others, you just shouldn’t expect the other person to do things for you.

CHARLIE: And again, it’s so gendered. It’s absolutely so gendered. And whether or not a young man is autistic, maybe there are some things he wasn’t taught that maybe his sisters are taught. This is a thing in immigrant families, where boys are babies and girls or people raised as girls are sort of auxiliary parents.

SARA: It was like that for some people in my family to be honest. I think that a lot of neurotypical men specifically are also looking for Mom 2 and that’s just not a good idea.

ZACK: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. And we have similar division of labor based on what we might particularly have specific difficulties with, Raychel and I do. I am generally in charge of the dishes and the cats’ litter boxes and Raychel is the driver in the family but obviously in an emergency we’re not bound to that, for instance we’ve decided that I’m going to learn to drive after the election just so the burden isn’t entirely on her. But again, this is very case by case, and at the same time, it’s okay to have things you don’t necessarily feel like you’re prepared to do for reasons like the ones Sara presented, but there needs to be a happy medium between that and just expecting things to be done by somebody else, obviously.

SARA: And it’s okay to not be able to do something, but sometimes you might be able to do it. Especially for, I think disabled men, like autistic and otherwise disabled men, they’re not expected to try. You might be able to live independently, you might not, and either way it’s okay. I don’t think it would get in the way of dating.

ZACK: And I think it’s going to be a recurring theme on this podcast, the idea, in general, you might surprise yourself, in terms of what you think you are not capable of.

CHARLIE: Yeah. And growing up is a process and it’s totally not linear.

SARA: Especially for us.

CHARLIE: Yes. Like we said on our last episode, we were still preteens until very recently.

[Music]

CHARLIE: I just want to introduce our segment for this episode, “What’s Pissing You Off This Week?”

ZACK: I’m actually sort of still putting my thoughts on this into the word but I know Charlie came to the table with something very specific as far as this goes.

CHARLIE: I came prepared, because this is something that I devoted too many hours to. So I watched all of “Emily in Paris” and I’m so fucking mad. And I watched so many response videos on YouTube, mostly about her fashion. “Emily in Paris” is about this basic bitch from Chicago who goes to Paris as a replacement for her boss and she’s not prepared, she doesn’t know Paris, she doesn’t know French, but it’s like a French marketing firm. I’m not going to talk about her fashion too much because I’m not an expert, but she looks stupid at all times. And he’s always wearing a fucking little jaunty hat to match whatever outfit she’s in and she looks so stupid, but I’m not going to talk about that. I’m going to talk about the fact that it’s such an American, and Americanized, series, and the French characters are so Americanized, because this show was written by Americans.

Nothing anyone does makes sense. And mostly my point as a queer nonmonogamous polyamorous person is there is a love triangle, and the love triangle doesn’t need to exist.

SARA: Just date each other!

CHARLIE: They would all be fucking instantly. They would all be having threesomes every night. And the thing is, this is a spoiler, but she falls for her downstairs neighbor and then she meets a girl at a flower shop who is really cool, and this girl kisses her on the mouth, and Emily thinks it’s an accident but the girl is like “No, it wasn’t an accident.” And her neighbor and this girl are dating and Emily feels like she’s betraying this girl for having feelings for the guy but this couple brings her on dates. They would be dating her. And they should, like, in this universe, They should all be dating each other. They should be inter-dating. There is a plot point where a client for the marketing firm has a mistress but also a wife, and that’s very French. The French are like that. And half my family’s French, so I have a very specific gripe about this show. Not even me as a polyamorous person, me as a realistic person who knows that the Untied States is not the only country in the world and I’ve seen European cinema. They would all be fucking each other. There would be instant, constant threesomes. And so that’s my gripe. The end.

ZACK: I have not watched the show but that makes sense to me, everything you’re saying, and if it’s alright if I go next…

CHARLIE: Yeah!

SARA: I’m still thinking about my thing.

ZACK: My thing is also related to a Netflix production. In this case it is the Aaron Sorkin film “The Trial of the Chicago 7.”

CHARLIE: Oh wait, can we just say, we’re not mad at Netflix, but this podcast that you’re listening to right now was made in spite of and in response to Netflix’s “Love on the Spectrum.” So anyway, we don’t hate Netflix but we do hate Netflix.

ZACK: Yep. Give us a show.

CHARLIE: Give us a show!

SARA: Do better!

Zack: So this may surprise some of our listeners but I do not hate Aaron Sorkin, I think that he is good at what he does even when that’s annoying as hell. I think “The Social Network” is one of the best movies of the last decade even though it is way more like an Aaron Sorkin fantasy than an actual historical document about Facebook. But that being said, this is kind of my same problem with this movie, “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” which, for those of you who are not aware, seven radicals who were arrested for protesting during the 1968 Democratic National Convention were put on trial by the Nixon Justice Department and they were all convicted or, no, the five of them were convicted and the convictions were later overturned. And this is Aaron Sorkin’s take on it and it is very much him ignoring the actual radical politics of the people involved to project West Wing liberalism onto all of them. Like you got Abbie Hoffman, the founder of the Yippies and the author of “Steal This Book” giving this courtroom testimony about how he thinks the institutions of American democracy are inherently noble and he is just trying to hold the U.S. government to account on those. They basically turn Tom Hayden, who was a leader of Students for a Democratic Society, into very much a mouthpiece for Aaron Sorkin’s politics, so that they can present him as in conflict with Abbie Hoffman in a way that he really wasn’t. There’s a scene where another one of the defendants, David Dellinger, who was a conscientious objector to the point that he didn’t fight in World War 2, punches a bailiff. It, again, it would be a good fictional movie but it’s so obnoxious in its flattening of the actual politics of the people involved that… it almost reminds me of, there’s an episode of “The Sopranos” where Paulie says he hates the Russians because of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Christopher realizes for the first time that the Cuban Missile Crisis was an actual thing and not something made up for a movie. And I think that a person could watch this movie and think that these were fictional characters that Aaron Sorkin made up.

CHARLIE: Yeah, especially Abbie Hoffman being so muted, that’s why I won’t watch it.

ZACK: And Sacha Baron Cohen, who to be clear is incredibly good as Abbie Hoffman, he just deserves a script that gives the historical figure justice.

CHARLIE: Would you say that Borat is more radical praxis than Sacha Baron Cohen as Abbie Hoffman? Would you say that Borat is more of a radical?

ZACK: I mean I think that Borat does what the Yippies wanted to do, which is to heighten the contradictions of American democracy.

CHARLIE: Oh, that’s so true. Fuck. I mean, that was really a sophisticated thesis.

SARA: I’m just trying to think of something that bothers me that isn’t horrifying… it’s 2020 and we live in a hellscape, so there are a lot of things that really bother me and a lot of them are probably much heavier than stuff that happens in a movie. In terms of petty grievances, I recently wrote an article about the return of the telethon.

ZACK: Oh God, yeah, that was really good.

SARA: Oh, thank you. SO basically Jerry Lewis, who’s, for the young’uns, was a comedian back in the day, used to do this long fundraiser on TV with the Muscular Dystrophy Association and it was just campy and trashy and total pity porn. Basically it was fundraising based entirely on getting pity, like these kids are gonna die soon so you should give us money to cure muscular dystrophy, which hasn’t happened yet despite $2 billion going towards the fundraising efforts, according to TIME magazine. So they decided to bring it back this year because I guess they’re having difficulty getting fundraising, and it’s hosted by Kevin Hart. And I’m just annoyed. I thought that we as a society had progressed beyond telethons. I thought we all just agreed that this was bad and we shouldn’t do it, that pity porn to raise money is disrespectful and maybe we shouldn’t, but apparently I was wrong. There’s just all these celebrities that signed up to do the telethon. I don’t know if any of them even have disabilities… the only person who’s mentioned who has a neuromuscular disability is Jillian Mercado, the actress, and she was really ambivalent about being involved, I don’t know if she ended up doing it or not. It’s just… I’m so frustrated. I thought we were done. It just won’t stay dead. The telethon won’t stay dead.

ZACK: Yeah, and watching the discourse on Twitter around this… I saw that Dan Levy from “Schitt’s Creek” was one of the people who promoted it on Twitter and a ton of disabled people who are huge fans of his were trying to explain why this was bad news. It feels kind of like when you would find out a celebrity supported Autism Speaks a few years ago.

SARA: Or like… well, not quite. Yeah, it is more like Autism Speaks. I was thinking of when you find out a celebrity is transphobic, but that’s more of a choice whereas I think a lot of the time people don’t understand the underlying politics of Autism Speaks or the Muscular Dystrophy Association are not bad people, as opposed to people who are transphobic, who are just assholes.

ZACK: I think especially in terms of disability, from the perspective of non-disabled people, the level of self-advocacy that existed, I don’t think a lot of non-disabled people know to look for that, to find out whether something like the telethon is problematic.

SARA: Yeah so I guess my petty grievance is that in our year 2020, as the world burns because of forest fires, the election’s coming, oh God, oh God, I think there’s a listeria outbreak in Florida, I don’t know, everything’s terrible but I’m annoyed by this fundraising strategy [laughing]

ZACK: Sara, we ran down your highlights in the intro but is there anything you want to plug before we go?

SARA: Like, I want people to hire me.

ZACK: Hire Sara.

SARA: Please hire me. I hate freelancing. I would like to have like benefits and stuff, so yay! I’m good at things, I promise.

ZACK: She is, Sara is great at things, look at how well she’s done in this episode alone.

CHARLIE: Seconded!

ALYSSA: Thank you for listening to this episode of Stim4Stim, a relationship podcast for and by people on the autism spectrum. Special thanks to this week’s guest, Sara Luterman. Stim4Stim is hosted by Zack Budryk and Charlie Stern and edited by Alyssa Huntley.