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Originally Posted by Serpentine Leaf
I know first-hand how much it hurts to have set something up and then nobody else attends. I wouldn't wish that experience on anybody. I felt like a speck of dust that everybody else had trod into the ground.
I'm a female but experienced embarrassment on my own part, and disgust and shaming from others, about being a virgin until I was 30. But it's so important not to have sex just to have it. Your first experience so often shapes how you view sex, and yourself, for a long time. One example is young gay males whose first experience is something empty and anonymous, and they come to think real love is never possible for them. They end up thinking the "cruising" life is all they deserve, and engage in some really risky behaviors, all because their first guy dictated the terms of the encounter and made it about his own gratification. Straight women can be that nasty to straight men too, so please be careful.
The people you have heard those horrible messages from were not speaking any version of truth, Lundi. Please don't believe them, and please don't think that all people are like that. They feel small and insecure and handle it by going on the attack rather than tackling their own brokenness. A quote may help you here: "Genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite of the moral spectrum." I forget who said that one.
It hurts the worst when you hear those messages from family members, especially if you feel you're outnumbered, or that it would be wrong to speak back to them. I have no advice to give on that one, save to hold to your own truth no matter what they say. A lot of people in these modern, unstable times are feeling lost and insecure, that the world is shifting beneath our feet and we have so little to hold onto anymore. Ripping other people apart is how some people boost their own egos. It sucks, but it's about them, not about the targets of their aggression. That's a lesson that took a long time to sink in with me, and I absorbed a lot of the negative messages I heard from other people. Not only that, but I repeated them to myself and smashed apart my own self-esteem. Please don't repeat my mistake! You're an awesome person and deserve to tell yourself that.
You're certainly right that it's hard to compare different people's particular difficulties. The arm or leg amputation is a very apt analogy. Everybody, no matter their specific struggle, would do well to remember that suffering is universal, no matter what form it takes. We can't fall to arguments about which group of people has suffered the most. That only invalidates everybody's pain.
You're certainly right that just because someone is a scientist, does not mean they live by reason or good character. Mengele and Ishii are not the only ones of their line, nor will they be the last. Intelligence, education, and training are all nothing more than tools, and it depends on the person's integrity whether those tools are used to improve people's lives or to destroy them.
It might be good to do some searches for conferences and such for people with ASD. I can't think of any specific names right now. FB probably has something, but I don't know, I'm not on that platform. Meetup.com is, as we have discussed, designed for the over-the-top extroverted NTs. Some people who consider themselves super open-minded have their own specific biases that they refuse to acknowledge. I see this first-hand all the time. I work as a custodian at a university and see how professors behave who consider themselves open-minded and free of bias. They'll be perfectly friendly to a black or Hispanic custodian, but rude to one who is white or Asian unless that person is an immigrant. That shows their racism: they consider the job appropriate for someone black or brown or an immigrant, but a native-born white or Asian person is supposed to have achieved more, and if they "failed" to do so, it's because they're lazy/stupid/etc. And some display open disgust and contempt to anyone in a working-class position there, as do the middle-class white students.
ASD is highly stigmatized in a culture that demands effortless, tip-top social skills as a measure of human worth. STEM careers are usually touted as a good path for those on the spectrum, but that discrimination exists in those fields too. All I can suggest is to find your niche, and don't listen to those trying to rip you down. You're going through a rough time right now and they're only making it harder. I really think you will flourish once you find your place of belonging. That's something we all need. Keep looking forward to your further schooling! You could find your right people and environment there.
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It is especially crushing when seeing that not only the number of attendees decreases, but also that the attendees are also just as rude and judgemental as any other person here. I eventually just went to the bar alone, a meetup of just one person.
That is unfortunate that you suffered so much stigma for being a female virgin. It seems that virginity has always been a negative trait, and that as time passes by this stigma is becoming more extreme rather than receding, which is also very unfortunate. It is impossible to influence society by trying to teach people to have open minds and be less judgemental, given that there seems to be a growing trend to berate others for their alleged "weird" characteristics.
I see what you mean about the first experience. On the forum, I see quite a lot of virgin males that are so embarrassed about their status, that they have to for example go to Amsterdam's Red Light District and "get it over with" as fast as possible, just to say that they have done it. I would never do something like that. I know that a lot of virgin men feel like they need to almost get rid of their virginity so that they can stop being in a stigmatised position in life, but I just cannot do that for the sake of it. Just to rush like hell to "get it over with" meaninglessly to please society is not worth it.
Over here this is a part of what is called a "social resumé". Just like a CV for job applications, one's social resumé means have you completed certain tasks and or have certain traits to be considered "normal". On your social resumé it is unspoken, but generally accepted that in order to be accepted by one's peers, it is imperative to not be a virgin adult under any circumstance, but also have had a list of ex-partners plus numerous sexual experiences as "proof" of your "normalcy". Then you can carry around your "social resumé" with good reputation. In this way, someone like I who is still a virgin has a poor social resumé. It would be comparable to having a record on your CV that you had been fired from your previous job for blatant incompetence, and thus is a black mark on your resumé. That would be approximately how virginity is treated in socialising here. So I am basically like an outcast. At least, according to societal norms. I have to ignore these as much as possible.
I think the worst part about extended family insulting due to being a virgin is that you expect blood relatives to be at least somewhat sympathetic no matter what since you are directly related to them. The ones whom you think would help you also shun you. So it is this type of reaction that makes me think that a lot of people really believe that being single and virgin is something very shameful.
It might take a while for me to find specific groups for ASD and such here. I think that just any sort of socialising is geared more to the "normal" people, and that even the nerdy things like tech are considered as given a reprieve from being called "odd" since here is the IT capital of the world. Anything that is nerdy that is not tech/coding/IT is not well received. Foreign languages like my interest is not really considered as interesting. It is basically seen as a useless waste of time that could be spent partying or going out to meet others. Sex is considered a very popular thing. I am not sure if I had said this before, but just like Los Angeles, San Francisco are an important hub for the international porn industry. Just a few miles away from where I live is a dungeon doubled as a porn production studio used for BDSM films to distribute to an international audience. And not to forget that the free love sentiment of the late 1960s and all of the 1970s was born here in San Francisco. I am not sure exactly what caused this obsession with sex, but I can say that one's sexual status and history is very closely tied in with someone's worth as a person. This is a very skewed way of thinking as you say, and one must be cognisant enough to reject this mindset, no matter how much peers try to influence you with this mentality.
I never knew that people in academics were like that. I do get shunned in social settings, for being from a working class background, for not making six figures or more, and of course for being single and virgin. I have a lot of traits that would count as negative points on what I had called the "social resumé".
I am not sure where you are exactly, but your profile says Mid-Atlantic, which I presume is somewhere like Pennsylvania or West Virginia. But here in West Coast California, especially the Bay Area, there is a lot, and I mean a lot, of judging others. Judging others is almost like a pasttime; people will openly roll their eyes at you, turn their backs on you, pretend that you do not exist, gossip with their hands over their mouth whilst pointing at you and whispering to other people, plus other ridiculously blatantly rude things. It really is strange. This city is known to be "accepting", yet I think that it is the most unaccepting, judgemental city not only out of all major cities in USA but also in Europe and other places.
I do see how ASD is shunned especially when social expertise is more or less a prerequisite to be accepted in society. I do see it in STEM fields, but in their own weird way. Here, for example, where there are countless tech people, I notice that a lot of people in tech generally act like teenagers. Saying "bro" and "dude" when they are in their 30s and 40s is common. It is as if their brains were stuck at age 13 and never matured properly thereafter. Attitudes about sex are often held to the same standards to those of people in high school. That is, saying things like "ew virgin loser", which a select few of women have told me over the years, is quite common, no matter that they are in their late 20s or 30s or 40s. What is really annoying about gossip is that it affects how other women think of me.
In the past when people knew about it, another woman could find out through gossip. Losing my "dateability" due to this virgin stigma easily spread, and that was quite depressing.
I think that when I studied in the past, most of my fields were very male-heavy. I studied mathematics, biology and chemical engineering. My classmates in mathematics and chemical engineering were almost all male. I think that the percentage could easily be over 95% male in those fields. In biology, it was a bit more even. However, due to studying too much, I almost never thought too much about dating. I was very focussed on academics. I had no social life. I think that after all of this studying, it stunted my social skills, and by extension, my dating skills. It would not be a lie to state that a 13 year old probably has better social and dating skills that I do.
I take solace as well that I plan in the future probably within the next year or two to study medicine, my lifelong dream that I had insofar been unable for various reasons to fulfil. If I understand correctly, in almost all faculties of medicine in any university, there are usually more female students than male students in this course. Obviously I am not studying medicine just to date the women. But it could help by coincidence that the gender ratio is not horrifically skewed towards males, such as some fields like the notorious computer science/IT field, where it is common to have the entire year's class be 100% male. Perhaps female students of medicine, by the virtue of the subject manner, would be more compassionate, since they are by default aiming to treat ill people. Surely this experience would instill a sense of understanding and a less judgemental attitude. At least that is what I hope. It was what drew me to this field in the first place, the good feeling that one gets from helping people. I know that over here it seems like this mentality is lost on a lot of people, but I would hope that this would offer me a bit more of an opportunity. Over here, I have met a few female acquaintances who had studied medicine but acted very judgemental, especially when they found out about my virginity. But as you say, just because one is in a certain field does not mean that they are going to have compassion or empathy.