"In real life, women, queer people, and people of color can be autistic. But as Matthew Rozsca writes at Salon, an autistic individual onscreen is “nearly always as a white, heterosexual male.” Often, autism is effectively treated as a kind of accentuation of (white, heterosexual) male traits. In The Accountant, for example, Ben Affleck plays a hyper-intelligent, emotionless assassin. His autism just makes him a more James Bond-y James Bond...
Sam’s autism is presented in gendered terms as an inability to read women. So any time he treats women badly, the show presents his actions as a symptom of his autism. Sam goes to one girl’s room to have sex, then panics and hits her. He tells his girlfriend that he doesn’t love her and breaks up with her in front of her entire family, right before prom. He sneaks into his therapist’s apartment—but when she is upset and confronts him, the show portrays her as unprofessional and cruel. When Sam treats women badly, it’s never his fault...
“I think in stories about autistic men and women a common theme is autistic people failing at gender in some way,” Ne’eman says. “Unfortunately, a lot of stories about autistic people focus the narrative on how to overcome this by best fitting into the gender stereotypes around them.” Thus, Sam is presented as a nerdy male, and the goal of the show is to move him towards a more normative masculinity, including a girlfriend and sex."
This is also why I disliked" The Rosie Project".
FB: "In the show’s reading, Sam isn’t atypical. He’s everyman, struggling to interpret the bizarre signals put out there by those confusingly emotional women."
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