"Healthy Sexuality": Opposing Forces? Autism and Dating, Romance, and Sexuality in the Mainstream Media
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Autism and romance occupy a space of discomfort in mainstream media conversation. Employing post-structuralist textual analysis, I explore themes arising from mainstream media representations of autism and dating, sexuality, and romance through eleven feature articles from major American newspapers. The United States mainstream media applies a medical model lens to autism, associates immaturity and a lack of empathy with autistic people, and positions autistic sexuality as disruptive and dangerous. Because autistic sexuality representation counters conventional concepts of romance, autism and romance are positioned as opposing forces. The mainstream media portrays autistic people who date through supercrip narratives. Rather than showing the vast diversity of autism communities, mainstream news articles present autistic people through a heterosexualized, gendered, and whitewashed lens. As a disability studies scholar and autistic writer, I advocate for mainstream news coverage that takes a social model approach to autism, incorporates multiple identities, and provides accurate reflections of autistic people as loving adults, as well as disability rights activism that addresses underlying sexual ableism in American society.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it