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Notes -
To the same sex!
Earlier in the month I had to vent a bit about how the rent in the apartment my partner and I are renting has gone up by 35% year-over-year, but because my partner really doesn’t want to move (and will make up actually ridiculous reasons to convince me/herself to not move, things like “the main road in this suburb is too wide”) we have in the end decided to just stay in the same place, paying nearly $900 extra each month. Who did I complain to? Other men (mostly)!
Don’t do this, please. You’re trying to build consensus about how your experience is the normal/right one and that finding men more pleasant conversation partners is somehow indicative of a defect. We could turn this around:
Would that be an appropriate conclusion to draw out or to say?
I suppose I should add a bit of my own experience. I personally find women somewhat easier to talk to (even with that stereotype of women being more on guard around men — clearly men aren’t playing on “lovecraftian horror story difficulty mode”), and women tend to make the conversation experience more pleasant, but talking to men in-depth (which is rarer) tends to be much more interesting, especially when things get more abstract. I also find it difficult to believe that men on the spectrum are better to talk to than normal men, at least of similar intellectual caliber and interests, having interacted with many men on the spectrum myself, since childhood.
I do personally think it says more about you — your interests and personality, if not your biases or your approach to conversation — that you find talking to women and autistic/artsy men more interesting, though I also don’t think that’s really much of a positive or negative, and I share some (but not most) of your intuitions here, especially around women being easier to “talk to”. I just don’t think it’s appropriate to draw normative conclusions and values out of this.
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