Being obsessed with pop culture is cringe because pop culture is overall reactionary. And not only is it reactionary, it will also influence your politics as well. How many people in the 2010s fell for the manic pixie dream girl bullshit? I’ve said this numerous times here before, but people need to ultimately divest from pop culture and find better hobbies. Your investment in pop culture should just be enough that people don’t clock you as some weird ascetic climbing out of your cave to incoherently rant about why Disney movies are fascist before returning to your hole.
As far as autistics are concerned, I don’t see them as somehow more obsessed with pop culture than NTs. Some autistics might be obsessed with pop culture because it’s their special interest while NTs are obsessed with pop culture because they want to fit in and because of FOMO. The respective reasons might be different (special interest vs wanting to fit in), but the result is still the same: they get brainwashed by reactionary slop. Since the manner in which they become obsessed with pop culture is different, the manner in which they can divest with pop culture is also different. If anything, it’s easier for the autistic to divest because it’s just a manner of finding a new special interest that’s not tied to pop culture while NTs who find social value in pop culture can never truly divest from pop culture.
Autistics aren’t born with their special interests just waiting to be discovered within them. The special interests are cultivated through their experience in society and exposure to that special interest. Since special interests are externally acquired rather than internally discovered, if a special interest proves to be deleterious for whatever reason, a new special interest can be acquired to replace the deleterious special interest.
I’m not saying it would be easy, but it’s at least a path forward compared with NTs who continue to consume pop culture slop because their entire social group does so too.
Since special interests are externally acquired rather than internally discovered, if a special interest proves to be deleterious for whatever reason, a new special interest can be acquired to replace the deleterious special interest.
I spent close to 20 years trying to force myself to stop being a furry because mockery from other people made me so ashamed that
CW: suicide
there were times when I literally wanted to kill myself because I thought I was so horrible I didn’t deserve to live.
Guess what? It didn’t work. I’m still a furry today. The only thing that helped was learning to accept it as part of who I am.
Ultimately, the final judge of whether a special interest is deleterious is the autistic themselves. I personally wouldn’t find being a furry to be particularly deleterious. The community is full of ND and queer people on top of having pretty progressive politics. I’m merely pushing back the idea that special interests can’t be criticized or are entirely immutable. People can add or drop special interests. A special interest can also evolve over time so how a person experiences and understands their special interest as a 10 year old is different from how they experience and understand it as a 40 year old even if the actual special interest itself is still the same.
But it’s not something that can - or should - be dropped because some Chapo dickhead thinks it’s “cringe.” Chapo is always going to find an autistic cringe, we are defined by how we annoy and inconvenience allistics, that is what gets pathologized as arrested development.
Media can and should be criticized, as I keep bringing up, but that isn’t what is happening here. The very act of hyperfixation is what is being moralized here, that doing so makes you fail to be a man, that doing so makes you a reactionary (which was exactly what I had called out, because leftists still use autistic caricatures to talk about chuds), that someone here literally cannot connect with someone who is into Family Guy of all things because the idea of being into something in a way that even resembles autism is seen as abberant and creepy.
Now, I don’t listen to CTH, but my guess is that this treat and slop meme had a lot more to do with talking about the bad shit people actually do to protect creature comforts at the expense of others like ignoring the pandemic to crowd into theaters. If you’re losing that focus to just complain that people act and talk weird, like yeah the people who are always going to be treated as weird are gonna push back on that sort of reaction and call it out for what it is.
There’s nothing shameful about being a furry but I don’t know what that has to do with autistic special interests. I’ve had several come and go over the years.
Being obsessed with pop culture is cringe because pop culture is overall reactionary. And not only is it reactionary, it will also influence your politics as well. How many people in the 2010s fell for the manic pixie dream girl bullshit? I’ve said this numerous times here before, but people need to ultimately divest from pop culture and find better hobbies. Your investment in pop culture should just be enough that people don’t clock you as some weird ascetic climbing out of your cave to incoherently rant about why Disney movies are fascist before returning to your hole.
As far as autistics are concerned, I don’t see them as somehow more obsessed with pop culture than NTs. Some autistics might be obsessed with pop culture because it’s their special interest while NTs are obsessed with pop culture because they want to fit in and because of FOMO. The respective reasons might be different (special interest vs wanting to fit in), but the result is still the same: they get brainwashed by reactionary slop. Since the manner in which they become obsessed with pop culture is different, the manner in which they can divest with pop culture is also different. If anything, it’s easier for the autistic to divest because it’s just a manner of finding a new special interest that’s not tied to pop culture while NTs who find social value in pop culture can never truly divest from pop culture.
…
Autistics aren’t born with their special interests just waiting to be discovered within them. The special interests are cultivated through their experience in society and exposure to that special interest. Since special interests are externally acquired rather than internally discovered, if a special interest proves to be deleterious for whatever reason, a new special interest can be acquired to replace the deleterious special interest.
I’m not saying it would be easy, but it’s at least a path forward compared with NTs who continue to consume pop culture slop because their entire social group does so too.
I spent close to 20 years trying to force myself to stop being a furry because mockery from other people made me so ashamed that
CW: suicide
there were times when I literally wanted to kill myself because I thought I was so horrible I didn’t deserve to live.
Guess what? It didn’t work. I’m still a furry today. The only thing that helped was learning to accept it as part of who I am.
Ultimately, the final judge of whether a special interest is deleterious is the autistic themselves. I personally wouldn’t find being a furry to be particularly deleterious. The community is full of ND and queer people on top of having pretty progressive politics. I’m merely pushing back the idea that special interests can’t be criticized or are entirely immutable. People can add or drop special interests. A special interest can also evolve over time so how a person experiences and understands their special interest as a 10 year old is different from how they experience and understand it as a 40 year old even if the actual special interest itself is still the same.
But it’s not something that can - or should - be dropped because some Chapo dickhead thinks it’s “cringe.” Chapo is always going to find an autistic cringe, we are defined by how we annoy and inconvenience allistics, that is what gets pathologized as arrested development.
Media can and should be criticized, as I keep bringing up, but that isn’t what is happening here. The very act of hyperfixation is what is being moralized here, that doing so makes you fail to be a man, that doing so makes you a reactionary (which was exactly what I had called out, because leftists still use autistic caricatures to talk about chuds), that someone here literally cannot connect with someone who is into Family Guy of all things because the idea of being into something in a way that even resembles autism is seen as abberant and creepy.
Now, I don’t listen to CTH, but my guess is that this treat and slop meme had a lot more to do with talking about the bad shit people actually do to protect creature comforts at the expense of others like ignoring the pandemic to crowd into theaters. If you’re losing that focus to just complain that people act and talk weird, like yeah the people who are always going to be treated as weird are gonna push back on that sort of reaction and call it out for what it is.
There’s nothing shameful about being a furry but I don’t know what that has to do with autistic special interests. I’ve had several come and go over the years.
Yeah, so have I. Some come and go, others stick around, and I’ve never had any real control over which ones do and don’t.