A tweet went viral this month, nearly 19
million views. It said, "Want a happy
relationship? Get you an autistic
girlfriend." and had this video attached
to it. Can I go and get some snacks?
Sure. But can I get this? Sure. I'm just
going to get some water.
It's a hot day.
Huh?
Sorry.
Yeah.
We need to talk about this. But first,
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let's talk about why TikTok has decided
that autism is a dating category. This
is the TikTok that was attached to the
tweet.
Can I go and get some snacks? Sure.
I know we came for snacks, but can I get
this? Sure. Really? Yeah.
>> Okay.
Do you like these? Okay, first thing.
Why is this filmed from above? Is her
boyfriend really 7-ft tall, or is she
being supervised by a CCTV camera in
Tesco's? It's cuz these are my favorite.
Yeah, they're delicious. Good.
Do you want to pick one?
Sure. Which one do you want? Sour Patch
Kids? Sour Patch Kids are pretty good,
but only if I can eat all the blue ones.
Deal.
I'm going to get apple juice. I I know
you said that I shouldn't drink more
water, but I'm just going to get some
water.
It's a hot day.
And she's asking if she can buy juice,
juice from a shop, as if she's on a
school trip and forgot [laughter] her
packed lunch money.
Do you remember Bluey? Yeah. I think it
was my favorite.
I actually have this. I know you do.
>> Yeah, how many times have I asked you
this? I think you have.
Do you want to get a Minecraft Lego set
that we can build together? That was
awesome. Okay.
This one?
Sure. Thanks for going with me. I'm
excited to build our Lego. Yeah, me too.
And look at the basket. Someone on X
pointed this out, and I think it's
genuinely worth showing you.
Candy, juice, toys, the entire basket is
catered to childhood. The entire basket
looks like what you'd buy a 7-year-old
at a service station on her way to her
nan's. The original content creator's
bio even says "Autism awareness and
advocacy."
Awareness of what exactly? That autistic
women enjoy juice? Groundbreaking
science that. I also enjoy juice, by the
way, and nobody's filming me buying it
from a [laughter] from a helicopter
angle. The whole thing looks less like a
relationship and more like an escort
mission in a video game. You know, like
in Skyrim where an NPC is just stopping
you
>> [laughter]
>> and you're just like, "Move out of the
way." Because this TikTok was picked up
by a guy on X called @willattract,
and we'll come back to him. And his
tweet says, "Want a happy relationship?
Get you an autistic girlfriend." and he
attached the TikTok that we just
watched.
And nearly 19 million people saw this.
To put that into perspective, that's
more than the population of the
Netherlands. 19 million people watched a
woman ask permission to buy juice and
thought, "Yeah. Yeah, that's
relationship goals." Oh, and there is a
community note on this tweet. Nobody
reads community notes, but you should
read this one, and we'll come back to it
later because it's uh it's a plot twist.
Anyway,
I went looking because that's what I do.
I went down a rabbit hole expecting to
find maybe a couple of articles and a
Reddit thread. What I found was worse.
This post is from r/autisminwomen,
roughly mid-2025. The title is, "What is
this trend of saying that you're looking
for a low-key autistic girl on dating
apps?" These women were noticing the
pattern before it went viral.
The top comment with 1.2 thousand
upvotes says, "The manic pixie dream
girl archetype is nothing new. This is
just a rebranding for them. Odds are
high that they would actually hate being
with an actually autistic woman."
And the reply underneath, "They'll love
it until they're held accountable for a
sense of justice or equity, or until
being quirky is inconvenient."
That one hit me because that is the
pattern, isn't it? That people really
loving a quirk or calling it calling
cute or adorable or whatever up until
the time that it actually costs them
something. I don't want to bore you, but
I I have so many stories
from jobs, from friendships, from
relationships
where where people think, "Oh,
that's an adorable trait."
>> [laughter]
>> And then a little while later, it it's
not so not so fun. And so, here are the
actual Hinge profiles. Real screenshots.
Like, "I go crazy for slightly autistic
women." or "Looking for a woman with a
touch of autism." A touch of autism.
Um eau d'autisme, like it's a fragrance,
you know, available at Boots.
"I go crazy for women with just a
sprinkle of autism. Not too much." Just
like a seasoning, a little bit of
mustard. Like a paprika on a chip. Or or
just enough autism to make it quirky,
but not enough to require me to, you
know, actually try and support her. The
Prospect journalist who collected these
said the sheer amount of slightly
autistic women on Hinge profiles was
also shocking,
and I believe her. This story has been
covered already by multiple outlets now.
Dazed ran a piece in October 2025 called
"Why are men fetishizing autistic women
on dating apps?" They spoke to Milly
Evans, who's an autistic sex educator,
and said something that I think is worth
hearing. She said that men who express
this preference either don't know what
autism is or want to attract someone
that they perceive as more vulnerable.
An absurd number of men on dating apps
are saying that they're looking for a
slightly autistic woman or a mildly
autistic girl, some variation on that.
I've been using dating apps since I was
18, and I've noticed there's a group of
men who every couple of years choose a
different condition to use as their
quirky little Hinge prompts. And a few
years ago, it would have been things
like personality disorders, anxiety, low
self-esteem. The last couple of years,
they've been looking for girls on
sertraline, and this year it's shifted
to looking for slightly autistic women,
whatever that means.
>> Crystal Callow, writing for the Bristol
student paper Epigram, said she saw
slightly autistic women so often on
Hinge that it went from feeling novel to
feeling like cultural regression. Her
headline was, "My autism should not be
why you want to date me." which, yeah, I
mean, that about covers it, right? Tism
res, if you like, sort of started as a
community in-joke. It was autistic
people going, "Yeah, I accidentally
charmed someone by info-dumping about
marine biology for 45 minutes, and
apparently that was attractive." It it
was a self-aware joke, it was funny,
it was part of the community. And then,
neurotypical men found it and went,
"Ooh, I'd like one of those." and turned
it into a category on a dating app, a
bit like ordering from a menu. So, this
has been building for months. Autistic
women spotted it first, journalists
documented it, and a pickup artist
blasted it to 19 million people.
But what does slightly autistic mean
when somebody puts it on a dating
profile? Because I think that's worth
translating
before we get to the the juicy bit.
When someone writes slightly autistic on
their dating profile, here's what
they're actually shopping for, and I do
mean shopping because this is
transactional. They want directness, but
they read that as no drama. Now, I'm
direct, most autistic people I know are,
but it's not because we're easy to be
around, it's because we don't
necessarily have the processing
bandwidth to lie to you and then to
remember the lie later. They want
loyalty, intense focus on the
relationship, and many of us do that. A
relationship itself can become an
all-encompassing passion, a a so-called
special interest. When we care about
someone, we can really care. The she's
not like other girls. And of course,
she's not like other girls because she's
autistic, mate.
Okay? So,
they also want social awkwardness. Now,
this is because they read it as an
innocence, a a childlike harmlessness.
This is actually darker than it sounds.
What they're actually selecting for is
low social power, fewer friends who
might tell her that she deserves better.
Does that make sense? These are the
things being selected for.
And here's the things that they're
selecting against. Why not? Because they
don't want to deal with meltdowns and
shutdowns. They don't want to deal with
sensory overload or executive
functioning difficulties, or someone in
chronic burnout, visible stimming that
could be embarrassing to them, perhaps,
or someone with strong boundaries or
resistance to coercion, and anything
that requires actual patience, actual
effort, or actual accommodation.
They want the bits that benefit them,
and they don't want the bits that cost
them anything.
Remember what that Reddit comment said
earlier? They will love it until being
quirky is inconvenient.
That's what inconvenient looks like. And
that's literally the list. Slightly
autistic doesn't mean I understand
autistic women, it means I want a narrow
curated version of autism that benefits
me. They are creating something akin to
a software specification for a power
imbalance. So, who is spreading this to
19 million people? His handle is will
attract as in
will attract women. His bio says, I'll
either teach you something or piss you
off. His pinned tweet uses the word
frame, which if you're not familiar is
red pill language. It's pick up artist
terminology. His content is pick up
lines, song lyrics as seduction tools,
and how to control the dynamic with
women. This isn't some random bloke just
sharing a cute video of his girlfriend.
This is a pickup artist. His whole
account is how to attract women using
psychological leverage. He just packaged
autism as a dating hack for 19 million
people. And when autistic people pushed
back, which some of them did, the
replies filled with people saying this
is infantilizing, that this is
dangerous, and this is not what autism
looks like. If any of you watched
recently Louis Theroux's Inside the
Manosphere documentary on Netflix, it
hit number one in the same week as this
tweet, and you'll recognize the
playbook. Women as commodities,
vulnerability as an attractive feature.
One of the influencers in that
documentary called a woman that he
claims to love in his living room is
dishwasher. That's the culture that this
comes from. It's an audience of young,
impressionable men being told that this
behavior is normal.
And here's the thing that makes it
worse. There's a vacuum because almost
no healthy sex-positive male voices
online are talking about relationships.
So, where do young men go for guidance?
To pornography, which is mostly
unrealistic fantasy, or to the
manosphere, which is exploitative by
design. And this tweet sits perfectly on
that intersection. X users added a
community note to the tweet, and very
few people seem to read community notes,
but you should absolutely read this one.
And it says, and I quote, "This is an ad
for a sex work page, not autism." If you
look on her TikTok, it promotes her
Instagram, which promotes her OnlyFans.
So, her bio says autism awareness and
advocacy. The community note says it's a
sales funnel, right? So, TikTok promotes
her Instagram, and her Instagram page
promotes her OnlyFans. The autism
awareness is just marketing, okay? It's
just packaging. It's autistic-colored
wrapping paper.
No puzzle pieces.
Just um
I don't know, nudes. So, my video that I
made last summer called the sex talk
that autistic adults never got, it was a
blesser collaboration, too. And
actually, YouTube demonetized that
because apparently being openly
sex-positive about intimacy products is
unsafe for advertisers and means the
video doesn't get seen by many people.
But meanwhile, a pickup artist even on
YouTube can tell millions of people to
get an autistic girlfriend, and that
that's okay.
>> [laughter]
>> Make it make sense. Make it make sense.
Uh I have linked the sex talk video
below because it's still one of the most
useful things I've ever made, and I
think it deserves a few more eyeballs.
But it gets worse. A woman performs
autism as a childlike aesthetic to
funnel traffic to her OnlyFans.
A pickup artist amplifies it to millions
of people as dating advice. Men on Hinge
have been writing slightly autistic in
their profiles for months, and the
audience replying to this content is
writing things like [ __ ] girls are
the best. Apparently, this isn't even
new. One of the replies said, "Is faking
autism going to be the new trend for OF
girls since the Down syndrome one didn't
go over well?" And believe it or not,
that was an OnlyFans trend for a while.
It is a it's a absolutely a pattern.
It's disability performed for sexual
content. And this is where it stops
being cringe and and starts being
dangerous. This is where the channel
slides into advocacy here because I need
to show you some numbers. I'm going to
cite my sources, and I I always do, but
I'm particularly going to do it here
because you deserve to check these out
yourself because the numbers are really
bad. A French study by Compagnone and
colleagues in 2022,
I think it was, surveyed 225 autistic
women. 88.4% reported sexual violence.
68.9%
reported rape. And for context, the
general population figure for women is
around 30%, which is 30% too high, but
big difference. We are looking at
roughly three times the rate of sexual
violence. And a separate study found
that 61% of autistic women experienced
sexual violence compared to 34.5%
of non-autistic women. And Douglas in
2024 reviewed the broader evidence and
concluded that up to 90% of autistic
people may experience some form of
interpersonal abuse across their lives.
Now, these aren't one-off studies from
the same lab. They are different
research teams in different countries
using different methods,
and they are all converging on the same
picture.
Nearly nine in 10 of us experience some
form of interpersonal violence. And I
want you to hold that number in your
head
because
this is why I'm making this video. When
you frame a group of people as
childlike, naive, and dependent, you do
two things. You make their boundaries
appear to be negotiable, and you make
them easier to exploit. And that
mechanism has consequences. And there is
a term for this in disability studies.
Michael Gill calls it sexual ableism.
It's the system that decides who counts
as a legitimate sexual object based on
ability, appearance, and conformity.
Disabled people get sorted into two
boxes. Either you're too innocent to
want sex, or you're an erotic exotic
novelty whose consent matters less.
Autistic women get it from both
directions. Desexualized as innocent
children who couldn't possibly want
intimacy, or hypersexualized as quirky,
exotic others whose boundaries aren't
taken seriously. There is no middle
ground in the public imagination, and
that is the ground that the slightly
autistic girlfriend trend is built on. I
want to be careful here because I refuse
to do the thing I'm criticizing. I'm not
saying that autistic people are
inherently naive or incapable. Okay?
That's infantilization talking. What the
research shows is that certain traits in
certain contexts can be exploited by
someone who knows what they're looking
for. Direct communication can make it
harder to detect manipulation. Trusting
nature and desire to belong can lead to
crossing your own boundaries.
Delayed processing of social threat
cues, not recognizing coercion until
after the fact.
Sensory overload impairing the ability
to respond assertively in the moment.
Now, I really want to be clear. These
are traits, not deficits. I know some
people will look at that and go, "Ooh,
that's a symptoms list."
But they're just traits. They're neither
good nor bad. They're part of how a lot
of us experience the world. And
honestly, in the right context, some of
these things are genuine strengths. I've
built a career on directness and
hyperfocus. But in the wrong hands, in
the hands of someone who went on Hinge
specifically shopping for a slightly
autistic woman, those same traits become
attack surfaces. I've been in situations
myself where my tendency to take people
at their word has cost me, and I've had
to learn it the hard way. I I I'm very
concerned that
when you see people selecting for
slightly autistic on a dating profile,
just remember that selecting for and
against list, it it's not a you know,
oh, I preference. Because if it was,
they would say, "I value people who are
direct. I value people who are loyal,
etc., etc."
But it might just be a predator's
shopping list, which just has a a Hinge
prompt wrapped around it. What does a
healthy relationship actually look like?
And I've talked about this before on
this channel, and I think transactional
analysis
gives us the clearest answer. I've
talked about transactional analysis
before on this channel. If you've
watched my video on dealing with
manipulation and games, you'll know
about Eric Berne's ego states. And I'll
link that video here and in the
description because it goes deep into
this. Quick version for anyone new,
Berne's model says that we all
communicate from one of three ego
states. Parent is your internalized
authority figure. It's the you should
voice. It can be nurturing, or it can be
critical.
Adult is your rational, present moment
self. It processes what's actually
happening without any emotional baggage,
and child is your emotional, playful, or
compliant self formed from early
experience. So, in that video, I talked
about how social games work, repetitive
social patterns with all those hidden
rules, and how autistic people often get
caught in them because we're playing a
different game to what everyone else is
necessarily playing.
Now, the same thing happens to
relationships. Healthy ones are mostly
adult to adult. They are two people
meeting as equals. Unhealthy ones drift
into patterns of parent to child, and
that's exactly what we're looking at
here. Adult to adult means two people
meeting as equals, negotiating their
needs, respecting boundaries, neither
one managing the other. The autistic
girlfriend trope scripts the opposite.
It's parent to child. One person
decides, guides, supervises, and
permits. The other is asking, they are
complying, they are performing cuteness,
they are staying small, they are not
taking up space. If you remember the
game, now I've got you, you son of a
[ __ ] from the last video, think about
what happens when somebody who's been
cast as a permanent child decides one
day to assert an adult boundary.
They will be immediately punished for
breaking character. That's the trap. And
the TikTok we watched is literally this
dynamic. It is filmed. It is shot from
above. It is asking permission. It is
choosing items coded as childhood. It is
the camera itself puts the viewer in the
parent's position. You are looking down.
She is looking up. That's not an
accident. Now, I'm playful.
I collect things. I stim. I get
unreasonably excited about marine
biology and cameras and video games. I
have 15 cats. 15, that's not a typo.
That's free child. That's me choosing to
be joyful as an adult with full agency.
Nobody's filming me from above while I
do it. Nobody is asking me to perform it
for their content. And if they did, I'd
tell them to get lost, which according
to that hinge list makes me too much
work.
>> [laughter]
>> I'm not slightly autistic. I'm autistic
AF, right?
Being filmed from above, asking
permission to buy juice, performing
cuteness for someone else's camera and
their 19 million viewers.
Someone else is positioning you as a
child because the power gap benefits
them. They're doing it on purpose. In TA
terms, that's adapted child. You know,
this parent-child thing, controlling
parent to adapted child.
As as literal adults, as legal adults,
and they're acting as controlling parent
to adapted child. That's not cute.
That's a red [ __ ] flag. One more
thing because the timing of all of this
is really worth noting. There's
something in the water in March. I don't
know what to tell you. Because the same
week that this tweet went viral, a
leading autism researcher, Dame Uta
Frith, gave an interview to TES saying
that the autism spectrum is now
collapsed
and become,
in her words, completely meaningless.
She said that masking has no scientific
basis and she suggested that
late-diagnosed autistic women might be
better labeled as hypersensitive rather
than autistic. I could cover Frith
separately if you think it's of any
value, let me know in the comments
below. The reason I'm bringing it up
really quickly is because the timing
matters because in the same week in
March 2026,
one side of the internet tells autistic
women that their autism is cute and that
they want to date it, and the other side
is telling them that their autism isn't
real. Now,
both sides do exactly the same thing
from different directions. They tell
autistic women that their experience
isn't theirs.
Isn't theirs to define.
It is, end of. My friend Meg at I'm
autistic now what made a brilliant video
recently about misinformation coming
from inside the autistic community on
TikTok. She looked at autistic creators
making bad generalizations, spreading
myths, that sort of thing. Go watch it.
It's really good and I'll link it below.
This video is the other side of that
coin. So, Meg covered what happens when
misinformation comes from inside the
community. This is what happens when
people outside the community look in and
decide that their autism is an aesthetic
that they can consume.
If you are autistic and you've seen
these dating profiles or you've been in
a relationship where you felt more like
a project than a partner,
more managed than met,
help me come up with a good
alliteration, please.
Uh language autists, it drop it in the
comments. What other things can you
think of?
You're not imagining it, by the way. The
pattern is very well documented. The
research backs it up and and you deserve
adult-to-adult relationships
in all of your relationships and you
always did. If you're a man and you're
watching this and you've ever thought
that you want a slightly autistic
girlfriend,
I'm not going to dunk on you.
I'm going to ask you something instead.
Would you still want her if she came
with meltdowns,
um burnout, and sensory issues, you
know, sensory overload,
strong boundaries? Maybe she's super
sensory seeking.
>> [laughter]
>> What if she told you no and meant it?
And if she needed the lights off and
couldn't go to your mate's party? If
sometimes she couldn't speak and just
needed you to sit with her quietly for
an hour?
If the answer is actually uh probably
[laughter] not, then what you wanted
wasn't a partner. It it it's a character
in a story about you.
And and autistic women are people,
obviously, with the same right to be met
as equals as adults that everybody else
has. Romantic relationships are based on
stable adult-to-adult [music]
communication.
That is a base requirement for intimacy,
for true intimacy. [music]
And on that note, don't forget the
blessed giveaway. The link is in the
description and the pinned comment.
Everyone who enters wins. Stim the
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The Scratching Post Discord community is
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And if this video helped you understand
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and I'll see you in the next one. Bye
for now.