Autism & Gender: Mexie Identifies as Autistic… and a Feminist.

because i feel like sometimes i come across like i have this real air of confidence and in some ways i do but in other ways i'm just like really broken inside that's a topic for a video but honestly i will have body dysmorphia for the rest of my life and it's not just about my weight it's about so many other things uh so many other features and now aging yeah i just thought you know there's there's no problem i'm just really healthy and just really into working out and i realized that my autism actually contributed very negatively to my ed uh girls with autism are apparently more prone to eds and the way that my brain functions and the way that i can fixate on things really took things to another level so i got botox several years ago and uh i think i had you know managed to move on from the body dysmorphia that i had of my body maybe even my nose and i moved on to my crow's feet and just how horrible it was that i was aging because gross and uh i was in an esthetician's clinic's office because i would go there to get laser facials which themselves are very invasive i mean if you had seen me after getting one of these laser facials or micro needling i guess the laser facials well some of them were very invasive like i mean my face would just be like beet red after the micro needling there's blood there's blood on your face so it is very intense and that is also kind of anti-aging stuff but anyway i was asking you know uh was this gonna help like around my eyes and they said no because it's so intense that you can't do it around your sensitive eye area so they offered me some deal on botox and i was like oh god no like that sounds too intense and invasive and whatever and they were like no it only lasts for three months so if you don't like it then it'll wear off and i was like oh okay so i went for it i was devastated uh i guess i must have gotten too much or something but i just felt like i could not emote at all from my eyes um i actually i filmed a video at that time and i remember just being like i cannot post this i won't tell you which video it was but i was like i can't post this like people are gonna notice um but i was also really worried about what my partner would think because we had not been dating for that long but i was absolutely head over heels for him and he is a comrade he's an anti-capitalist a proletarian feminist just fantastic politics and i thought that he was just going to think i was so vain and ridiculous and insecure and that's not you know what i wanted to project because i feel like sometimes i come across like i have this real air of confidence and in some ways i do but in other ways i'm just like really broken inside [Music] i'm going to tell you a short anecdote that seems at first to be irrelevant to the topic of this video but give it a whole three minutes it's profoundly profoundly relevant to what the real issue is what the real problem is with mexi's approach not just to this topic but to politics to philosophy to life and it's a problem millions of people struggle with every day their whole lives long young and old i used to live in a tiny war-torn poverty-stricken landlocked country called laos was a communist country the lao people's democratic republic nothing democratic about it let me tell you and the explanation they had for their own poverty the explanation every single one of them believed in was that thailand was flat whereas laos was mountainous and just this geographic fact the mountains locked them into poverty forever and ever this wasn't propaganda this was something they really truly believed and with every single person i spoke to about it face to face you could tell i was the first person to have ever challenged this assumption to have ever said to them in their whole lives you know there are some countries that have mountains that are wealthy and there are some countries where the mountainous area is the wealthiest part of the country not the lowlands not the flat land in this way no one had ever challenged them no one had ever pointed out to them that switzerland and luxembourg are among the wealthiest countries in the world no one had challenged this logic which they had they had internalized you know would be like this kind of left-wing verbiage about internalizing oppression you know it was something they really live with as a belief that shaped their view of the world and if you just challenge them to think through can you come up with some examples of countries that have no mountains that are quite flat and that nevertheless are locked in poverty and can you think of some countries that are mountainous and that are wealthy and successful can we start to think about what the challenges really are can we start to overcome this thought arresting cliche when you're talking about gender roles when you're talking about sexuality when you're talking about body image when you're talking about oppression are these problems unique to heterosexual women can we say that some of the same problems are experienced by heterosexual men can we say that some of the same problems are experienced by gay men in hypothetical scenarios at least where this issue of oppression and oppressed and the male gaze being contrasted to the female gates where actually this whole complex ideological framework no longer makes sense and yet there are gay men and there are straight women who struggle with the same problems if you can start to challenge your own presuppositions in this way when you blame things on straight white men or when you blame things on capitalism really challenge yourself to think through and just talk through to speak through examples to the contrary do some of the same problems exist amongst women do some of the same problems exist in african countries where the vast majority of people are black do some of the same problems exist in non-capitalists societies if you're blaming capitalism whether you think back many centuries to feudalism whether you think of examples of feudalism that exist in the world today or whether you think of communist societies it's so easy to blame your poverty on the mountains because you can see them every day and it's so easy to blame your oppression on capitalism because that is what you can see in front of you like the mountains on the horizon every day and as a heterosexual woman it's so easy to feel that all the problems in your life are caused by heterosexual men and it's so easy to be blind to the extent to which heterosexual men may struggle with some of the same problems and heterosexual men might have it even worse and gay men might have it even worse and that actually what you're doing is pointing at the mountains on the horizon and you're imagining a relationship of cause and effect you're imagining a relationship of oppressor to the oppressed when what we're really talking about is a self-serving self-pitying delusion