Manager said they had a new thing: Female employees can have a male escort to their cars due to vagrants loitering in the lot. I declined. Autistic me or Alpha me?
Many years ago, before I began realizing I’m autistic, I landed a gig proofreading for a marketing-type company located downtown in a seedy area.
The parking lot was right beside the building. In the office I pretty much kept to myself proofreading, occasionally overhearing a woman, Catie, joking around about the latest drunken episode of her boyfriend.
I’d think, That’s nothing to joke about – your stupid boyfriend drinking himself into a stupor. What’s wrong with you? You think that’s funny?! He obviously has a drinking problem and could die from alcohol poisoning!
Needless to say, I never had small talk with Catie. I was also the new kid on the block, the one who didn’t feel integrated with the several other women in near proximity.
I also never quite felt a connection with the woman who hired me; let’s call her Taren. She wasn’t someone I could ever feel comfortable small talking with.
You know how at any given workplace, there’s always one or two people whom you feel at ease chitchatting with? Well, Taren wasn’t such an individual.
But I had to pretend there were good vibes because she’d bring me the proofreading projects.
I somehow landed this gig through a temp agency, and it paid well.
One day a woman approached me in the parking lot as I was heading towards my car, asking for spare change.
I said I didn’t have any (and I don’t recall if this was true or not). She had stood a little too close, but went away after my response.
I thought nothing of it; it was a seedy area.
Not too long after, Taren approached me inside the office and explained that, due to vagrants loitering in the parking lot and making female employees uncomfortable, I could request a male employee to walk me to my car at the end of each day.
Now, to many women, this would be a great idea. Many women would welcome this, for understandable reasons.
However, women should also have a right to decline this offer without being scrutinized or feeling like they’re being judged for being different from most women.
I said to Taren something like, “Oh, well, I’ll pass on that,” or something to that effect.
Right away I could feel or sense the vibes from her turning sour – not that they were ever sweet, but I guess you can say that the sour volume went up a bit.
The look on her face – a mixture of flatness and surprise, if that makes any sense – told me that she must’ve thought I was arrogant or that I saw myself as above the other women who had surely told her, “Oh wow, thank you, Taren! I love that idea! Oh yes, for sure I’ll be having one of the guys walk me to my car!”
She got an unexpected response: a decline. Taren’s head was too entrapped in a template setting, in which ALL women should respond the exact same way to any given circumstance. Shame on her for not being more open minded.
None of the male employees were approached about this option! There were men there who looked as though they couldn’t throw a punch to win a million bucks.
Meanwhile, my lifestyle included pumping heavy iron at the gym; I had no problem hoisting around those 45 pound water jugs for the water cooler.
Autistic vs. Alpha Response
Why did I decline? Why didn’t I feel comfortable with a random male employee assigned to accompany me to my vehicle?
I don’t know how much my autism played into this or how much of it was my Alpha personality.
Certainly, at any given time, there are Alpha neurotypical women who would’ve declined such an offer.
They may have declined for any number of reasons. We can’t assume that every single woman in any location in the U.S. would’ve accepted such an offer. There’s always going to be, for lack of a better term, outliers.
But in my case, I had suspected that I was the only outlier in that company. That made me the oddball out.
One of the turnoffs of this whole thing was that if I were to request it’s time for a man to walk me to my car, I wouldn’t know whom I was going to get.
It’d be like plucking a chocolate out of a box of mixed chocolates. It’s a gamble. Will you get a delectable chocolate mint or chocolate fudge, or will you get a dud filled with something that tastes awful?
I didn’t want to put myself in a position where I felt obligated to initiate or respond to meaningless small talk with some man I normally would not have any interest in chatting with.
It would’ve been incredibly awkward if I got stuck with someone incompatible, such as a man who thought he was God’s gift to comedy and was trying to make me laugh on the way to my car.
And if I didn’t laugh he’d think something was wrong with me and likely gossip about it to coworkers the next day. Yes, that is exactly how “office politics” works.
At this company, I had the same workplace station, with other women nearby, and periodically I’d hear or see men coming through, but never paid much attention.
This just wasn’t an environment where I felt connected, and hence, rarely engaged with the other women, and certainly never with Catie who thought it was humorous that her boyfriend would pass out from drunkenness.
So this first reason for declining the offer seems very much tied to my Autism Spectrum Disorder, for which I was clinically diagnosed in 2022.
The second reason, however, seems more tied with my Alpha persona.
To have some man, whose physical prowess I didn’t even know, walk me to my car, in the name of protection from vagrants, would be to voluntarily rank myself beneath him.
It would mean putting myself in a position of – almost like a subservience, an “I’m less capable than you are” status.
I was a grown adult. I didn’t need a bodyguard to escort me across a parking lot.
I know that some people have bodyguards: namely, celebrities who’d otherwise get mobbed. But jeez, this was a simple walk from the doorway of a marketing firm across a parking lot to my vehicle.
Apparently, at least one female employee had reported to Taren that she’d been approached by a beggar and felt intimidated.
I don’t know what had happened. Had he threatened her? Had it been his looks that frightened her? Or had she simply felt ill-at-ease at the idea of someone asking for money?
Perhaps she hadn’t been approached and instead had simply observed a vagrant or two loitering nearby and felt scared.
At any rate, I wasn’t afraid. I just wasn’t. Why should I have had a man accompany me if I hadn’t felt the need?
And why wasn’t this option offered to male employees? Isn’t a vagrant capable of assaulting a man, too?
And it’s almost always the other way around: Vagrants or homeless people are far more likely to be victims of crime rather than perpetrators.
Taren’s offer wasn’t an issue of “safety in numbers.” It was…quite frankly…rather sexist.
There was no way I was going to rank myself lower than some randomly assigned man to “protect” me. It’d be an admission of being a scaredy cat – which I wasn’t.
I truly, truly did not have any fear about traversing that parking lot. I could’ve easily flipped a beggar.
We shouldn’t be stereotyping homeless or down-on-their luck men and woman as likely dangerous.
This doesn’t mean I don’t have eyes in the back of my head or lack alertness when in seedy areas. In fact, I’m alert and carry myself as an Alpha wherever I go. Assaults can occur even in the “best” neighborhoods as well as inside ritzy hotels and high-end business buildings.
So we now have an Autistic and an Alpha reason why the idea of a man “protecting” me was not palatable to my brain wiring.
And from that day forward, I had sensed that Taren’s soured vibes had remained in that slot. Not long after, there was suddenly no more work for me to do, and the gig ended. Coincidence? Makes me really wonder.
I’m not saying that most autistic women would’ve declined a similar offer. But in my case, my ASD definitely played a role. And that is my right.
