Meme Autism and the Sin of Pride (in Girls)

The similarities between 4channers and preppy girls

I wrote about this in Notes the other day, but I’ve decided it deserves its own post:

People who are noticeably intelligent to peers but struggle with the nonverbal elements of the interpersonal (meme autism) often develop a coping mechanism of arrogance to deal with the peer rejection they experience.

This is obvious in men - there are basically no “heterodox” male writers who don’t display this pattern in some fashion.

It also manifests in women.

Imagine it. You’re a girl, and you’re young, 10, 11. You are blunt, awkward, strange. You’re uninterested in many of the interests of the girls around you but you want them to be interested in you. Figuring out the rules of a culture and following them so you don’t get forcibly evicted or quietly abandoned is not in your skill set, not when you’re still working on talking at the appropriate volume most of the time. The girls around you feel uncomfortable about how all of this shapes your interactions with them, but they aren’t sure what to do about it.

When you hear them laughing about the social foibles of a person you know it feels personal, like something someone might say about you, because you are blunt, awkward, and strange. You don’t know whether they say these things about you when you’re not around, and you can’t understand why they wouldn’t if they don’t. It feels like a moral imperative, given your own experience, to police these negative discussions about others who aren’t present. All of this makes you the elementary school girl equivalent of a resist lib scolding edgy 4channers for saying the N-word. You become immediately, viscerally uncool, and while you may struggle with what is unsaid, you feel this shift.

You’re often quite smart, and you cling to this. The opacity of the social protocols around you makes these rejections by other girls feel capricious and arbitrary. Your grades and your standardized test results do not.

You grow up a little. Puberty hits. It’s kind of awful and then it’s really not. You grow into someone who can attract men, and suddenly it all makes sense - you were just better than those other girls all along, and they’ve only been mean to you because they’re jealous.

Men generally don’t give a fuck about your social skills beyond not embarrassing them (a low bar that grows ever lower the better looking you are). Men are all too eager to agree that you’re better than all the other girls. Men are the first people to show you what feels like a reliable social acceptance - it’s much clearer to you that the rules involve tolerating a little rhetorical roughhousing than it ever was when you hung out with the girls. Helpfully, their willingness to call women sluts even if you’re in earshot doesn’t make you twitch the way girls giggling about Kaitlin’s awkward poem in English class did - the girls’ behavior is what triggers you into histrionic scold behavior, while the boys’ does not. This will make you feel superior to these girls and ease the pain of their rejections.

You see it all clearly now: these girls envy your easy rapport with men; these girls envy the ways you’re not like other girls. These girls seem to have much more trouble with boys for all the reasons that you had trouble with them.

It never occurs to you that you resent their rejection and are coping with it by focusing on the ways you’re better than they are.

Additionally, your mild immunity to social cues makes you unaware that signaling different personality traits is as much a game of *how* you say things as *what* you say. You notice that other people talk about themselves, or talk about how they’re outliers in this or that way. You assume it’s more or less the same thing for you to start talking about how much better you are than other girls.

You start getting negative feedback about it, though, so you change your assessment. No, it’s not the same thing, it’s that you are more honest about your excellence than anyone else is. Again you assume that this is driven by envy - after all, you *are* smarter than lots of people and boys *do* often like you more than they like those other girls.

You do not really consider that being conceited the way you, specifically, are doing it has any real negative effects that make it worth penalizing socially, whether it’s earned (by being genuinely good at something) or unearned (by being bad at a lot of other things at the same time).

Other people dislike talking to individuals who make direct and constant references to things they’re good at. They dislike it much more if you make direct and constant references to things you *think* you’re good at that you are actually probably 68th percentile at. They’d even dislike it if all you did was talk about your self-loathing (there are those who suffer from meme autism who default to this pattern rather than self-aggrandizement). The last is a hint towards motivation - none of these reactions are necessarily jealousy.

Fundamentally, other people are not interested in you outside of close ish relationships. This lack of interest includes how good you are at math or how many boys like you. Bragging is a tax on other people to validate you or set you straight, the same way that berating yourself is. Other people require a fairly high bar of connection to you to be interested in hearing about what you think about yourself at length, whether it’s positive or negative.¹

This will not occur to you, in part because your model of what other people are interested in is built on an inaccurate assessment of available data. Talking to people for you mostly means listening to others talk about stuff they care about and you don’t. You develop a model of other people and especially of conversation that assumes people just share what comes to mind, feels salient, or interests them as individuals, rather than with the needs of the people around them in mind. Because their efforts to shape conversation to listeners don’t work on *you*, you assume they’re not doing it at all.

You naturally do the same - share your own experiences, your own interests, and what seems most salient to you, freely with others. A lot of what interests you is yourself. So you talk about that. A lot. People do not like this. It’s easier for you to assume that this is because your (very real) exceptional qualities make them envious than it is to engage with the idea that people find hearing about you boring and off-putting and a break with a social compact.

But take heart: you may well grow out of this. You will start listening when girls disparage other girls in front of you and learn that you can avoid their criticisms by changing your behavior, just as you did with the boys who complained about sluts or feminists. You will gain enough experience to notice that even the people you admire most are rarely fretting about whether other people acknowledge their superiority. You may even realize that people who are exceptional at just about anything do not have to announce that they are exceptional at it. You start to consider the idea that talking about how good you are at something is going to be extremely embarrassing for you if you are not as good as you say you are, and that people will notice these disparities and punish you for them. You abandon your efforts to talk about the fact that you’re exceptional and learn how to talk about *what* you excel at. You make exceptions sometimes, indulging your bragging impulses with good friends whose grace you have earned.

You might carry around some resentful arrogance the rest of your life, too. Impossible to say.

1. The major exception here is voyeurs, most commonly found on social media. One hopes you do not have to learn the downsides of feeding these firsthand.