In his recent article on the bugbear of autism, a trashy journalist Michael Hanlon mentions that Simon Baron-Cohen is a cousin of the comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen. I don’t know, in my opinion Simon is such a great comedian that Sacha must find it very hard to compete.
Simon Baron-Cohen’s most recent theory on the horrible and terrifying rise of autism is so hilarious that one can use it to entertain people at parties for years. As an autistic who is always on the look-out for material to discuss at social gatherings, I, for one, feel grateful to Baron-Cohen for his latest exercise in idiocy.
Baron-Cohen begins his comedy routine by introducing the concept of a “male brain.” If you think that a male brain is a brain possessed by a male, think again. Something so straightforward and logical wouldn’t be funny, and Baron-Cohen never allows reason to stop him when he is trying to fashion his latest theory. In the bizarro land this comic inhabits, a male brain is that of an autistic. Even when the autistic in question is female.
Real autistics have “extremely male brains”, whatever that means. For Simon Baron-Cohen, “male” and “extremely male” are terms that stand in lieu of everything positive. Which means that “female” and “extremely female” . . . I’m sure you can continue this simple thought on your own.
You don’t have to be an autistic genius with an extremely male brain to figure out where this comedy routine will go next. The next step down this road is, of course, blaming feminists for women getting smarter and upgrading their stupid female brains in the direction of becoming male. Or even, oh horror, extremely male.
I just imagined a woman’s brain growing a penis and realized that Baron-Cohen is a comedic genius of an incredible range.
So imagine what will happen if two owners of extremely male brains marry. Wait, is gay marriage legal now? That would be good news. Until that happens, though, maybe we should have the courage of our society’s anti-gay convictions and prevent the owners of extremely male brains to marry, what do you think?
And then, the real horror takes place. The owners of extremely male brains can end up reproducing. Baron-Cohen searches valiantly for the best term to describe the abomination such two folks end up creating. Soon, the word is found: it’s an autistic, of course! The mystery is solved. Evil feminists conspired to rob women of their well-deserved position of subservience, and the world has been punished as a result by the advent of all those horribly damaged autistics.
Hanlon finishes his article with,
It is a fascinating theory and we await the results of the new study with interest.
I couldn’t agree more. Baron-Cohen should sell this stuff to a cable network and get a weekly comedy show. Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien never came up with anything even remotely this funny so effortlessly. Baron-Cohen, however, churns out these theories like hot cakes.
Thank you, marc2020, for bringing me this great link!
Clarissa's Blog 
That’s really good writing, especially the punchline, “Evil feminists conspired to rob women of their well-deserved position of subservience, and the world has been punished as a result by the advent of all those horribly damaged autistics.”.
I think that until we finally admit we are apes or baboons, and bend over to show our red backsides, the world is going to go to hell in a hand basket.
I would take Simon Baron-Cohen’s ideas even further, so that they don’t apply only to women (those he condescends to call “feminists”). I think we need to give up the idea of an organised economy or “society” and start foraging for food — as nature intended.
The other important point is that we should try to grow hair on our bodies again. Nature knows that there is no such thing as a hairless ape, and I believe we are going against our genetics in developing skin without hair.
This hairless turn of events has already led to many catastrophic disasters — such as the appearance of Simon Baron-Cohen.
I’m really for turning back the clock if you are.
All those in favour say “aye”.
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Hilaroius! 🙂 We have to say this in favor of SB-C, he spurred a lot of good jokes right here on this thread already. And the post is still just a couple of hours old. 🙂
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The “history” lesson on women’s progress in that article was rich. And by rich, I mean I didn’t realize you could randomly pull a bunch of facts out of your ass and try to pass it off as authentic history.
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I especially liked the part where “pilots used to marry stewardesses and now they marry pilots!” The possibility of pilots / flight attendants marrying people from non-related professions isn’t even being discussed.
And somebody got paid for writing this article. Sheesh.
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What more can one expect from the Daily Fail?
I also noticed how they conveniently glossed over the fact that when it first came out, they were the biggest trumpeters of the “vaccines cause autism” myth and didn’t back down from it for a long, long time.
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That’s exactly what it is, the daily fail. 🙂 What is it with these people and their obsession with autism? I don’t believe that autistics are all that interested in all these discussions about “causes.”
Such articles make me feel like an insect being dissected by a clumsy first grader.
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In fairness to the article, it sounds to me like it’s arguing that men’s reproductive selection is what has been altered by feminism (rather than the baseline female brain itself).
That said, the theory still sounds stupid. First of all, if a tall man and a tall woman get married, do we necessarily expect their child to be “extremely tall,” or do we expect some regression towards the mean? Why shouldn’t we expect the same for “brain masculinity”? Moreover, the salient point about the pre-feminist days wasn’t that female doctors and lawyers had difficulty attracting a mate; the salient point was that there were no (or, at least, very few) female doctors and lawyers. Presumably there were millions of women with perfectly good, “systematizing” brains who had to spend their lives breeding children instead- which means that, even if we accept Dr. Baron-Cohen’s premise, we probably should be seeing a drop-off in the number of autistic children, rather than an increase, since “male-brained” women are now too busy with their careers to produce as many children.
Finally, I’ve just got to say that given that I am an autistic, trans-feminine, theoretical physicist, I’ve always found the “extreme male brain” theory faintly ridiculous. I suppose I should, at some point, read some of Simon Baron-Cohen’s actual publications (I find that the mass media can’t be trusted to accurately report on scientific matters). Does anyone know whether he actual backs-up his “male brain” assertions with something somewhat empirical (i.e. neurology), or does he just base it on stereotypical behaviours?
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Lately he’s been doing a string of studies using data on amniotic testosterone levels from a whole bunch of children whose mothers all had amniocentesis at one particular hospital in Cambridge. He’s been looking at these children, trying to see if there is any relationship between amniotic T levels (which he is using as an indicator of how much T they were exposed to in utero … there are pros and cons to using amniotic fluid levels, as opposed to cord blood or venous blood from the mother, as that indicator, and none of these possible indicators is perfect) and whether the children are later diagnosed with autism, or show various autistic/”systemizing” traits.
The results have been hit and miss; some things show a relationship, others don’t; often, there is only a relationship within one sex (usually male). If I’m remembering right the hits have outnumbered the misses, but even when there is a hit, the effect sizes aren’t all that big. So I’d say there’s some empirical support, but also that the jury is still out.
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That article is indeed ridiculous, but I think most of it resides with the article’s author.
Namely, Time magazine ran a story about Baron-Cohen a few weeks back and it wasn’t nearly as ridiculous.
Here is the link to the Time article.
What is it with these people and their obsession with autism?
FWIW, and of course this is only my opinion: I think what terrifies people are the severe forms of autism, where the child is unlikely to ever live independently or be integrated into the society. I think that’s what the obsession is about, in part that’s what people see in mainstream media as the face of autism (in TV shows, for instance). I doubt most people realize how wide the spectrum is or that they probably already know some successful high-functioning autistics.
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