I'M autistic in the literal sense. It's pretty common for us ASD folks to read social scenarios incorrectly. "I just stayed away from girls after that" is an extreme reaction.
Identifying flirting when you're autistic is hard. I did an extra-cirricular in highschool that involved regular travel for tournaments. One time while on one of those trips a girl on the team knocked on my hotel room door and asked if she could sleep in my room because her roommate was being loud, so I let her in and she slept with me in my bed. I mean slept in a very literal sense; I took her at face value and thought she was just trying to get better sleep for the tournament the next day. I did not understand that she was flirting with me until years later when the roommate who was "being loud" that night tore into me for rejecting her and destroying her self esteem. The kicker is that I was into her, I just had no idea she liked me. It seems very plausible to me that anon is/was that bad at identifying flirting
Identifying flirting when you're autistic is hard.
Honestly, identifying flirting in general is hard. One time I spent half an evening cooking with a friend while she wasn't wearing a shirt, just a bra. I thought that was a pretty strong hint that she was into me, but she seriously wasn't
We don't have context but unless she and he were talking to each other for a while anon wanting to help and being turned down not with a 'no, just need him, thanks though' but by being sworn at is extreme behaviour
The parts of the brain responsible for social behavior don't fully develop until adulthood, and the brain gets rewired substantially during puberty, around middle school age. So, a middle schooler is seriously handicapped when it comes to social behavior.
Pareto principle works here too. It's like 20% are decent, 60% sit on the fence depending on context, and 20% are always awful.
These ratios are more strictly 20/80 the older the sample sets, ie roughly 80% of people over 65 are toxic, in most cases, even when their behavior hurts themselves.
Half feels right. The moral median is forever moving up. I can trust most people in a room to avoid murdering, robbing, raping, or engaging in political conversation with me, so that’s my rationale.
Whenever I ask myself why kids shoot up their schools instead of CEOs, eventually I think back and remember what middle school was like and withdraw my curiosity.