Is he autistic, or is he just an asshole?

Status is protection in a world that punishes difference.

Imagine the rudest rich guy you know. He’s inappropriate, blunt and stubborn. He tramples on everyone’s boundaries. He’s irresponsible with his own power. He gets away with it because he’s too important to risk upsetting. That could be a description of any number of spoilt narcissistic babymen who think caring about other people is for soyboys. Or it could be a description of an autistic person who is truly so blind to social cues that he doesn’t know he’s doing damage.

There is a difference between neurodivergent behavior and entitled male bullshit -it may not negate the damage done, but the distinction still matters. For one thing, the Department of Health is not currently trying to find a cure for misogyny. But autism and assholery are increasingly confused, and that confusion creates a lot of problems. Especially when it’s deliberate.

Greg Wallace is a household name for the slice of society that knows he exists. He used to present a popular BBC cooking show. He used to enjoy a lucrative parasocial relationship with a lot of people’s parents. He used to be famous enough that - in case you hadn’t guessed where this is going - the recent allegations of 17 years of workplace sexual harassment have made headline news for months. The worse it got, the wilder the excuses for behavior which apparently included, exposing himself to a runner. At first, Wallace brushed it all off as as coming from ‘middle class women of a certain age.’ You know -only the people who watched his show and paid his salary.

This fist-gnawing failure to read the room is strong evidence for the disgraced presenter’s claim to be ‘a little bit on the spectrum’. Some well-meaning friends tried to defended Wallace to the press on that basis. He’s just a goofy weirdo. He’s socially awkward. He can’t help flashing members of staff, because his sensory issues prevent him from wearing underpants. This was a genuine excuse made for an adult man’s attitude to women in the year 2025.

Last week, the report into Wallace’s behavior upheld the majority of claims against him, and he was sacked. He didn’t go with dignity. Instead, he spaffed out a furious statement that seemed to link the allegations to his recently-diagnosed autism. He fumed that his former employers had failed to “investigate my disability” or “protect me from what I now realise was a dangerous environment”. Dangerous, yes. But for who?

The takes came in hot and chaotic and wrong. Was Wallace actually the victim here? Are we being ableist? Is it unfair to expect autistic men to be able to interact in the workplace without assaulting people? Or is he faking being disabled to dodge consequences? On one of the nation’s top news podcasts, respected BBC presenter Emily Maitlis seemed to accuse Wallace, who has an autistic son, of making up his condition. After all, if he was really properly autistic, how could he hold a job? Maitlis then guided her guests into a kvetching sessions about how all these trendy new diagnoses are just grievance culture. Meanwhile, Autism charities, who already spend most of their time trying to chip away at stupid stereotypes, pleaded with the public not to start associating autism with sex pests, but were drowned out on all sides by the anti-woke mob who couldn’t decide if the problem was feminism, snowflakery or some ghastly avalanche of both.

All of this is madly offensive to autistic people, most of whom don’t have enough privilege to protect us from adult consequences. I understand what it is to massively misconstrue a social situation. I know the ice-cold dread of discovering how badly you’ve ballsed things up when it’s already way too late. I don’t know what it’s like to be ‘a little bit on the spectrum’, though because I’m not ‘a little bit on the spectrum.’

I am a lot on the spectrum. Robustly autistic was how the doctor put it when I got my boxfresh NHS diagnosis. I also have ADHD so flamboyant that every time I go to one of those medical appointments where they check for ‘drug seeking behavior’, I walk out being asked if I’m absolutely sure I don’t want to seek more drugs. Oh, and I’m dyspraxic. Multiply neurodivergent is the term. I, too, find that most underwear makes me want to claw off layers of skin, and I’ve spent a fair chunk of my adult salary sourcing wearable thongs. I, too, struggle to understand social cues. And yes, I send the wrong signals all the time. I once got overexcited in a coffee shop and accidentally picked up an entire barista. I thought she just really wanted to hear more about the political implications of immersive game design.

And yet, somehow, I’ve managed not to spend my entire career sexually harassing my colleagues. So let's nip this in the neck right now: asking men to treat women with respect is not discrimination against autistic people, not all of whom are, in fact, male.

Actually, autistic people are more likely to be victims of sexual violence than they are to deal it out. Being blind to social hierarchy can be dangerous- although if you’re at the top of one, the danger is mostly to other people. You can do a lot of damage entirely by accident if you forget that someone’s job or home or safety depend on not upsetting you.

There are, however, are some rules that are extremely easy to understand. ‘Don’t get your tackle out in front of studio guests’ is one of them. Even in our parents’ generation, whipping it out in public was widely and, indeed, legally frowned upon. And these days getting harder and harder for any man who has been on the internet at any point in the past decade to plausibly plead ignorance of the rules around how women and girls would prefer to be treated. Being blind to social cues doesn’t mean you can’t understand social rules. You can literally look them up. The issue is whether or not you respect them.

Because there’s another, equally important set of dumb normie social signals at flashing about here - the ones that determine who gets the break the rules. Class and status are often broadcast by flaunting unspoken social codes. That’s why the work experience boy doesn’t get away with dropping trou in the green room, but the presenter just might. Holding important men accountable means challenging class and status - challenging them in a way that makes everyone uncomfortable. And some cultures would rather shuffle up and make room for cruelty than tolerate a moment’s discomfort. I know this because I’m autistic and British. Ask me how that’s going sometime.

The BBC, to its credit, has not tried to pretend it wasn’t aware of Greg Wallace’s behavior. It’s clear from the report that the guy was enabled on an epic scale. Well-known BBC personalities, after all, have got away with far worse for far longer, not because of any disability status, but because it’s one of many institutions where talent is pandered to at all costs as long as it packs a penis. Wallace was not allowed to get away with inappropriate behaviour because he’s autistic. He got away with it because the safety of women on set - and the risk of another BBC scandal - were weighed against the risk of making a fuss and found wanting.

Autism doesn’t excuse asshole behavior. But - here’s the thing - society is far kinder to assholes than it is to autists.

Lately I’ve been thinking about who, exactly, gets to be weird in this world. A backlash is building against the neurodiversity movement, in no small part because so many newly-diagnosed autistics are women, girls and non-binary people who, like me, were missed in childhood. The standard explanation for this is that women and girls are ‘better at masking’. We did such a good job of pretending to be nice, normal girls that we fooled everyone, which means the medical system gets to tell us that it was all our fault we were written off as difficult, toxic, embarrassing, insane, denied the help and understanding afforded to men and boys.

Not long ago, experts still talked about autism as ‘extreme male brain’ syndrome. Men are still far more likely to be diagnosed and receive essential early care than women. And the small number of cultural reference points we have for autism- a diagnosis that now incorporates what used to be called 'Asperger's'- are almost exclusively white, Western, mathematically- minded men and boys from well-off families. Sometimes that character is played for comedy- Sheldon Cooper- or for tragedy- A Beautiful Mind, Rain Man. Awkward, brilliant men whose contributions compensate normal society. They are tolerated because they are talented. But talent is only tolerable depending on your demographic.

Gender, class and status all affect your experience of what it means to be neurodivergent. The same behavior that gets excused or celebrated in privileged heterosexual men can be a social death sentence for everyone else. Women who are socially inappropriate tended to get yeeted out of the room like roaches. Women who make other people uncomfortable are swiftly dealt with, because autistic women and queer people are still expected to put other people’s comfort above our own. A well-spoken white man who can't read the room or pick and doesnt respect authority might be a charming eccentric, a rebel, or just a rowdy boy who'll grow up one day; for Black and brown men, being unable to code-switch is actively dangerous. In the United states, Black autistic men are eight times more likely to be murdered by police.

This means that autistic people’s chances of thriving don’t just depend on ‘how autistic’ they are. It depends on how ‘default’ they are in every other respect. In places like Britain - where the worst thing you can do is make a spectacle of yourself or act like you’re special - obvious eccentricity is only tolerated in wealthy white men. That’s part of the reason most of our positive cultural models for people who read as neurodivergent are white men who solve crimes with science. The more likely you are to need the understanding that might come with a diagnosis, the less likely you are to receive one.

These men get to have a problem. The rest of us? We are a problem.

Social norms and gender norms aren’t separate. Normal gender rules are designed to produce conformity - and neurodivergent people often struggle to play that game. In the 1930s, when Hans Asperger studied little boys with what would later be known as Asperger’s Syndrome, part of what was considered disordered about these boys was that they failed to live up to the standards of masculinity and boyhood that were so prized in Hitler's Nazi europe.

Today, strange, sensitive little boys still get viciously bullied. I know plenty of autistic men who have never quite recovered from the isolation and humiliation of their school years- humiliation that was wrapped up, as most things are at that age, in sexual shame. From a young age safety, status and acceptance get wrapped up with ( hetero)sexual success - and women’s boundaries seem to structure the social violence of your young world. Women’s boundaries become elided with everyday ableist oppression. Women and girls, after all, are already saddled with being the normie police, expected to manage and mitigate men’s behavior, given all the responsibility for enforcing social norms and none of the power. It’s not hard for outsider men to imagine themselves in an eternal battle with repressive normie culture where women are both the enemy and the prize.

The ascended nerd, the outsider who goes from loser to legend, who makes monuments to his own brilliance and sleeps on a mattress made of models and money - that’s a core myth of modern culture. That story gets told over and over again. It gets told because on some level knows that the way culture treats people with cognitive difference is deeply fucked up, and culture wants to forgive itself in advance. So it tells itself a fairytale where strange and difficult people nightmare meritocracy if they just try harder to be rich and famous, or both.

Too many nerds buy into that myth. Because it’s true, isn’t it? Status is protection in a world that punishes difference. So it’s easy to believe that if you hustle hard enough you’ll get to delivered a howling prefrontal fuck-you to everyone who tormented and excluded you when you were small and weak and lonely. Revenge of the Nerds is a decent film - until the ultimate revenge turns out to be nerds using their cleverness to rape and violate the pretty, popular girls who once mocked them.

This sort of story ought to be a classic villain arc. In a culture that struggles to imagine any other sort of justice for outsiders, it’s a hero’s journey. The Ascended Nerd myth is almost exclusively male - but it excludes an awful lot of men. Men who would rather just have friends than rule the world.

Again, I know plenty of autists. Of course I do. I’m a goth. And a tech writer. And a larper. And autistic. And most of the neurodivergent men are not supervillains-in-waiting. Most of them are shy, intense people who worry a lot about getting things wrong - because they often do. Because modern masculinity is a complicated set of contradictions that even the most winsomely neurotypical boy can’t always clever his way through. Because heterosexuality is a collapsing heuristic we’re all trapped inside. How is a person who can’t read social cues meant to know if he’s making unwanted advances? With extreme damn difficulty. But then again, how is a person supposed to be clear about her boundaries when her whole body knows how dangerous it can be to directly refuse a man?

Most of the autistic men I know - yes, even the white, straight ones - just want the information they need to treat other people better, and a bit of patience while they try. Most of the autistic men I know deal with the scars of social violence with quiet dignity. Most of them manage to process their rage at an ableist society without pointing it at women and girls.

If anything, the neurodivergent men I’m closest to tend overcompensate. They do this because autistic behavior often reads as asshole behavior. Even when it’s innocent. And that works both ways. I’ve seen too many autistic men stifle themselves for fear of upsetting the women and non-binary people around them - and there usually are non-binary people around them, because, yknow. Autism.

My heart cracks every time I hear a gentle neurodivergent man stutter and go silent in the middle of excitedly explaining his special interest, because he has remembered that he mustn’t be mansplaining. I think about those men, and how hard they try, every time I hear another privileged autistic tosspot trying to excuse his behavior on the basis of autism rather than tosspottery. Coming out as autistic can be an act of courage and solidarity - but not if you wait until the moment you’re accused of something nobody should get away with.

When an actual abuser tries to defend himself on the basis of neurodiversity? When he claims he didn’t understand the damage he was doing when, actually he didn’t care to learn? Or didn’t care at all? I’ve seen too many communities try to protect those men, out of compassion for the pain of exclusion. Because we want to be a safe space for weirdoes, even if that means including creeps and predators.

But that compassion, that inclusion, usually comes at the expense of women and girls. Even after #metoo, I’ve seen too many of the same communities fall over themselves to protect abusers ‘because they didn’t know better’ - while shutting out neurodivergent women whose only crime is that they didn’t mask hard enough. Women dare to take up space or who simply forget to follow the pointless, confusing rules of normative gender performance. The social consequences of being an actual rapist are still rather softer than the social consequences of being a woman who is a bit annoying.

Autistic people deserve a break. And that means all of us. Tolerance should not whether or not you’ve ever been on the television. If only high-status men can count on autistic acceptance, that’s not acceptance at all.