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How to Become ‘The Perfect Girlfriend’? Mask Until You Drop.
The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang is a pretty formulaic romance novel. The premise is a reverse Pretty Woman with a neurodivergent twist: an autistic woman in her late 20s wants to learn how to date and have sex men will like, and believes the problem to be in herself, rather in the fact that she keeps choosing terrible men. She hires a male sex worker to practice sex and dating, and you can guess what happens next.
It’s a cute premise. Unfortunately, the male characters are all terrible people, and most of the women are, too. The plot holds no surprises. The sex is good for the characters but hilarious for the reader. So, on a base level, I can’t really recommend it.
But, the main character is an autistic woman, being written by an autistic woman, and y’all, I saw so much of myself in her, it was embarrassing. And heartbreaking.
The book has been rightfully critiqued for promoting a form of gender essentialism, in which women do not exist for ourselves, but for men. Thus, we women should behave and dress and function in life to please men. Obviously this is bunk, and folks are correct to call it out.
But let me talk about this view in terms of being autistic, for a moment. Part of growing up autistic, especially presenting as a woman, is masking: that is, working…
