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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. It's a hot day. Huh? Huh? Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. We need to talk about this. But first, this video is brought to you by our friends at Lelo. Lelo are running a giveaway with me where everyone who enters wins. Yes, including you watching this video. You 
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can get either a free toy or a gift card towards one. No purchase necessary, no strings attached. Last time we ran this, gift cards and free good vibes went out to quite a lot of you. So, let's do it again. If you saw our first collaboration, you'll know that I actually took one of these toys into the sea. Lelo tell me that their devices are waterproof. Well, I know where there's some water, so let's go test it out. Fully submerged, full power, salt water, the lot, and it survived. Without a 
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scratch. These things are genuinely well-built. The charging cases also look like something you'd keep your sunglasses in, and the packaging is so discreet that your postie won't have a clue what's hiding inside. Lelo also have a wide range for all kinds of body types, with toys for women and men and a dedicated LGBTQ+ section. It is genuinely inclusive, which on a channel about neurodiversity, feels right. Lelo have also sent me their new Halo 2. It can be a couple's toy, it can be a solo toy, but it's 
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designed to be worn during intimacy. It is stronger, quieter, and longer-lasting than the previous version, and the whole point of it is that both partners benefit at the same time. Relationship goals, am I right? The giveaway link is in the description and in the pinned comment. Go sign up, treat yourself, and let's talk about why TikTok has decided that autism is a dating category. This is the TikTok that was attached to the is the TikTok that was attached to the tweet. Can I go and get some snacks? Sure. 
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I know we came for snacks, but can I get this? Sure. Really? Yeah. 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. but only if I can eat all the blue ones. Deal. I'm going to get apple juice. I I know 
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you said that I shouldn't drink more water, but I'm just going to get some 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 
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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 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 
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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 in Skyrim where an NPC is just stopping you >> 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 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 
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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. 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 
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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 
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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 from jobs, from friendships, from relationships where where people think, "Oh, that's an adorable trait." 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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 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 
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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 
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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. 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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that's okay. 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 
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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 
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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. 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 
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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 and they are all converging on the same picture. Nearly nine in 10 of us experience some 
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form of interpersonal violence. And I want you to hold that number in your want you to hold that number in your head 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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 this channel, and I think transactional analysis gives us the clearest answer. I've 
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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 voice. It can be nurturing, or it can be critical. Adult is your rational, present moment self. It processes what's actually 
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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 
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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 
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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. 
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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 
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to that hinge list makes me too much work. 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 
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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 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 
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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 
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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 
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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 
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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 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. sensory seeking. >> [laughter] >> What if she told you no and meant it? 
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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] stable adult-to-adult [music] communication. That is a base requirement for intimacy, 
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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 subscribe button if you haven't already. The Scratching Post Discord community is linked below. The Patreon's there, too, if you'd like to support the channel. And if this video helped you understand something or gave you some language, perhaps, for something that you've been feeling, please share it. That's the single most useful thing you can do to help the channel. Thank you so much for watching. Take care of yourselves and I'll see you in the next one. Bye 
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for now.