Strong Female Character

Strong Female Character is a memoir written with the express purpose of illuminating the often overlooked female autistic experience, which Brady believes to be crucial for understanding larger societal issues. In Chapter 1, she writes, “I began to realize that an autistic brain could provide an escape route from the traditional paths laid out for women. In turn, the problems experienced by autistic women sparked wider conversations around how society views women generally” (38). This realization is indicative of how the misogyny and ableism that Brady has experienced throughout her life are intertwined and mutually dependent on one another.

Brady’s inability to get an autism diagnosis until her mid-thirties, despite having a personal intuition that she might be autistic, is one of the book’s foundational examples of how misogyny and ableism converge. Recalling an early encounter with a doctor in which she tried and failed to get a diagnosis from a doctor, Brady writes:

I knew I had it. I knew it better than I knew anything about myself. But the psychiatrist had said that I couldn’t possibly have it because I’d had boyfriends. Either he thought that all autistic people are unattractive sea monsters with no interest in forming meaningful relationships or he mistakenly assumed that the men I dated were capable of picking up on my autism rather than seeing it through a ‘manic pixie dream girl’ lens (18).

Medical professionals’ prioritization of Brady’s relationship history as the most important information about her, rather than other aspects of her personality and experience, is based upon the broader sexual objectification of women in misogynistic society. Furthermore, the tendency of male romantic partners to flatten her neurodivergent presentation into the “manic pixie dream girl” stereotype indicates that men outside the medical field are viewing her in similarly sexist ways. The absurdity of the way Brady is treated in this moment is compounded by the fact that the premise of the doctor’s misogyny—that girls with autism cannot have boyfriends—is completely scientifically unfounded.

As Brady grows up, she finds similar overlap between sexism and ableism in nearly all sectors of life. For example, she notices that people are uncomfortable with acknowledging the large percentage of sex workers who have autism. Citing a documentary by journalist Louis Theroux that handled the subject cursorily, she writes, “the programme-makers lazily pedalled the same old substandard narrative of ‘sex worker with low self-esteem’. The idea of the autistic sex worker is so much more interesting and explains the motivations so much more clearly” (202-03). Brady interprets this “lazy” approach as part of a larger societal tendency to degrade and devalue female sex workers rather than criticizing their clientele, which frequently consists of wealthy men. She finds this form of misogyny to be rampant in the comedy industry as well; colleagues are unreceptive to her attempts at writing humanizing portrayals of strippers. From grade school through to her success, therefore, Brady is faced with the joint force of misogyny and ableism.