disabilities

More Sites for my Blogroll: BABESNetwork Supports Women with HIV, ADWAS Supports Deaf Victims of Domestic Abuse

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2010-11-15 07:59

So this weekend at a local community-service fair this weekend I ran across two great organizations everyone else might already know about but I didn’t.

BABES Network logo - Image cached as a bandwidth-conserving courtesy
BABES Network logo

First, the YWCA sponsors a group called Babes Network, “a sisterhood of women facing HIV together since 1989.” BABES network is Seattle based peer support group. Their mission is to reduce isolation and stigma and to promote empowerment and quality of life for women and families dealing with HIV. So much of what we hear about “women with HIV/AIDS” presents them as passive, inevitably as victims (unless maybe they’re IV drug users), probably straight, probably poor and poorly educated, and generally as living and dying somewhere far away like the Ukraine or sub-Saharan Africa, and so on. This just… might be because despite all the stigma, and despite the terrible impact of HIV once the transition to AIDS is complete, there’s no real way to know if either the presentable young woman at a reference desk, or the shambling elderly woman she might be assisting is HIV positive. And so one tends to assume they aren’t. In fact both might have it. And yet, invisibility isn’t quite the same thing as non-existent.

—-

The old quip “on the internet nobody can hear you scream” comes with its own little helping of privilege. Another invisible-in-plain-sight demograhic is served by the Abused Deaf Women’s Advocacy Services or ADWAS.org which “provides comprehensive services to Deaf and Deaf-Blind victims/survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and stalking. ADWAS believes that violence is a learned behavior and envisions a world where violence is not tolerated.” They also started in Seattle, in 1986, and have spread to 20 communities around the U.S.

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Conversation on Screen: "The (Sex)abled: Disability Uncensored"

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-09-01 22:15

Laurie Toby Edison of Body Impolitic brings word of a 15 minute student film about a very much overlooked but very important subject.

The (Sex)abled: Disability Uncensored video is a superb discussion on the issues. There is almost no conversation about sex and the disabled in our society, making this and the other work these folks do truly groundbreaking.  It’s powerful, positive, direct and personal.

She said it here.

From the film intro page (which Edison also quotes)

(Sex)abled: Disability Uncensored celebrates people with disabilities as sexual beings.
This new 15-minute student film features participants of the discussion panel sponsored by University of California Berkeley’s Disabled Students Union called “Are Cripples Screwed?” The film also features other Bay area community members and comedian Josh Blue (winner of Last Comic Standing) as they share their personal experiences with sex, dating and intimacy. (Sex)abled reveals that while not everyone will choose to be sexually active, everyBODY is capable of being sexual.

Source: SexSmartFilms.com – “promoting sexual literacy”

Sexuality doesn’t vanish easily. As most will discover eventually, some will discover sooner, and some already know very well.

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Research You Can Use

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sat, 2009-04-25 22:14

TheGiantSquid of Research Blogging – All Topics – English says

Men with infected scrotums less desirable to women!

Stating the obvious, but still nice to have the data. Ours being a shallow society, the ‘marriageability’ of somebody with a filarial hydrocele (only click if you’re not eating your breakfast and you have a strong stomach) is probably not that high. The severe impact on sexual function, as well as the obvious cosmetic challenges, make them low on the list of potential suitors for young ladies.

Read the quote in context here.

Despite the light tone of the introduction the post itself is about a serious issue in India and other tropical countries where filariasis (which in extreme cases results in elephantiasis) is chronic.

What the researchers in this study did is ask the community how they felt about people with hydroceles. The results are unsurprisingly sad. 94% of wives of patients were dissatisfied with their sexual life, and that these men are overwhelmingly the ‘last choice’ for marriage. 94% of the patients themselves reported sexual frustration, with 88% reporting severe pain during intercourse. The morbidity of this disease is clearly profound, and most of the sufferers don’t have appropriate psycho-social support groups to help them out.

The illness is a disability. Sufferers, and their partners, have psychological and social issues and not just medical ones.

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Snark of the Week: Maybe Why Amazon *Really Does* Need to Filter "Adult" Content

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Wed, 2009-04-15 07:30

Commenting on a post about the #Amazon(filter)Fail at Pandagon Ms Kate went for the cross-post mashup snark of the week

...sometime ago, an inside contact on these things told me that a big part of this “offensive” content problem is the simple fact that wingnuts buy a lot of “adult content”, and that makes it so that people who buy an item that is tangential – say, a very floridly illustrated bible – get recomendations for all sorts of bondage-themed novels and the like.

It isn’t that the search engines are recommending things that are inappropriate – it is that the people who buy certain things tend to buy certain other things that are solidly adult content.

Ms Kate on 04/14 at 08:01 PM

She said it here.

Ouch! The reference, in case you missed it, being to last month’s red-state/on-line porn report.

—-

I originally meant to stop here but after sleeping on it I realized that minus the delightfully snarky wingnut porn/religion angle Ms Kate’s hypothesis doesn’t sound that far off.

People do order a lot of erotic material online in areas where eyebrows would be raised if local vendors sold it… let alone if local residents purchased it.

I think I’ve mentioned that during the whole eBay craze I had some friends who resold clothes from yard sales. They stumbed across a huge stash of very large women’s shoes from an out-of-business shop and put them online… and they were snapped up almost instantly. They tracked down more such shoes and… they were instantly snapped up. Eventually they actually ordered new extra-large shoes made and for several years did a booming business. It actually took them a while to realize their primary market was midwestern and southern cross-dressing men who socially couldn’t afford to buy them for themselves in local stores.

The other day a somewhat skeptical Rachel Kramer Bussel mentioned a rumor she keeps hearing that Barnes & Noble hates erotica. Which, if true would be funny since I’m pretty sure the big reason for their leap to national prominence over much larger and better-established vendors in the then-mail-order days was that unlike anyone else they included the sort of erotica titles (from “anonymous” Victorians to specialty fetish to Mapplethorpe coffee-table photography) that… you can find in their stores today. (They also, years ahead of their time, carried LGBT titles including LGBT erotica.) Which, again, must have helped lower the reluctance threshhold… or the blunt availability threshold… for thousands or millions of readers.

Anyway, given the possibly natural tendency for the shy and embarrassed to pay “I just read it for the articles,” it’s probably fairly common to order somewhat thematically-similar “straight” titles associated with the erotic materials for “oh there must have been a mix-up in my order” excuse making if I was designing a “you might also like…” or “people who bought this also bought…” feature for an on-line bookstore I’d probably add tweaks to make sure kids who selected the 80’s hit “Indiana Jones” presented with the 80’s schlock-porn hit “Indiana Jane.”

Doh! I just realized why this line of thinking seemed so familiar!

A while ago I ordered a Tony Comstock video, Heather Corinna’s S.E.X, and Pamela Drucker’s cross-cultural adultery report Lust in Translation and Amazon suggested that people who bought those titles also bought… Tracey Rihll’s Catapult: A History (Weapons in History)! Which at the time I saw as completely, 100% random… but maybe not.

I’m not saying that’s what Amazon did, just that I’d probably do that if I was coding out suggested sales. Although evidently unlike Amazon I’d also give users a chance to opt in or out.

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Good news re: #AmazonFail -- Amazon Page Ranks Seem to be Restored

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Tue, 2009-04-14 15:50

As of a couple moments ago both Leslea Newman’s Heather Has Two Mommies: 10th Anniversary Edition (Alyson Wonderland) and Heather Corinna’s S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College have had their Sales Rankings restored at Amazon.com. I haven’t checked any of the other books that were delisted over the weekend but, since I’m pretty sure this really was a language-based rather than a prejudice-based error I’m pretty confident it’s a general rollback.

I’d say “click those links, confirm the ranking is still there, and then help drive their sales ranks even higher… and help make up for sales losses over the weekend… by buying copies.” Except I’d have to add that as an Amazon Affiliate I’d be getting a (fractional) cut. (I’m not saying don’t buy from Amazon in general, at all. I am reluctant to appear eager to benefit financially.)

You can just support the authors and Powell’s Books, instead of the authors and me, if you buy Heather Has Two Mommies here and S.E.X. here. Or you can support the authors and Barnes & Noble, instead of the authors and me, if you buy Heather Has Two Mommies here and S.E.X. here. Or you could check Indiebound.com for an independent bookseller near you and support the authors and a local business.

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Amazon Coughs Up Plausible Story, Offers Credible Apology

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Mon, 2009-04-13 20:25

Blogging reporter Andrea James of the 148-year-old, now all-online Seattle Post-Intelligencer says


Amazon calls mistake ‘embarrassing and ham-fisted’

Amazon.com has offered a response to the AmazonFail fiasco.

Because there’s so much attention to this, I’ll offer spokesman Drew Herdener’s comments unfiltered:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon’s main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we’re in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

She said it here.

There have been a number of conspiracy theories going around the web, all of them plausible. According to actual Amazon people, what happened was an employee was dinking around in code used to filter raw porn (which Amazon catalogues and/or resells) from their more regular fair. The employee, at the company’s French subsidiary, evidently plugged in some keywords that sounded good to him and… since Amazon worldwide is effectively driven by a single database… he wiped out 50,000 plus titles worldwide instead of whatever handful he’d meant to wipe out in French.

Oops.

I learned web programming from a moonlighting Amazon employee. Over the years I’ve worked on commercial websites with several former Amazon employees. And, of course, I’ve developed or contributed to several dozen database-driven websites (including this one) and so… wow, does that local-change-goes-global story work for me.

Add that to their admission, from an official spokesperson, that they were embarrassingly ham-fisted about the whole thing, start to finish. And while I’m not at all above rubbing their noses in it if they don’t clean it up pretty darn quickly, professional courtesy and acute personal awareness of how bloody easy that sort of thing can be when the internal goal is as much interconnection of data as possible means I’m strongly inclined to forgive them. Not forget, forgive.

Because, seriously, it’s not something they, or we, ought to forget. Because this was a nice preview of what happens when you do forget! I’ve been as guilty as anyone of just defaulting to Amazon links, and I’ll make an effort moving forward to remember other book vendors as well as Amazon just because of the perils of eggs in one basket.

But I’m also very inclined to forgive in the technical sense of seeing wrong, or being wronged, but making an affirmative act out of not retaliating for what Occams razor says pretty much had to be a complex to unravel but ultimately simple (and, um, easy to make, though I won’t say how I know except that years ago I caught mine sooner than they caught theirs) error.

I wanna see those Sales Rankings restored though. Soon.

(Via Hortense at Jezebel.)

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Not Looking Good... or Fair... or Reasonable... or Intelligent: Possible Reply from Amazon...

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2009-04-12 18:33

One Amazon.com link I will post, however, is this post from Heather Corinna on her Amazon book page for S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College.


Is this book (or its author) too gay for an Amazon?
3:01 PM PDT, April 12, 2009, updated at 4:41 PM PDT, April 12, 2009
My book, like many, many others, has recently been deranked by Amazon.

In other words, it is no longer listed in the sales ranks with other books of its subject or genre, no matter how good my sales are, or if my sales are above others who are currently listed. As well, my book, as is the case with many others, is not currently listed anymore in the subject heading appropriate to it. That deranking can massively impact us as authors, and also can impact consumers, particularly those who are trying to seek out material on a subject broadly without knowing what books are available by title or author. And with books that serve any sort of marginalized population or subject matter, finding them offline is often tough. Deranking books like mine further marginalizes the already marginalized.

The books this primarily appears to have impacted are those by gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender authors, young adult or children’s books addressing sexuality, some sexuality books in general (including reference books), as well as some feminist titles. Some of the titles recently deranked besides mine include: James Baldwin’s, Giovanni’s Room, Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, E. M. Forster’s Maurice, Various, I Do: an anthology in support of marriage equality, Alex Sanchez’s Rainbow Road, The Advocate College Guide for LGBT Students, Kate Bornstein’s Hello Cruel World, Milk: A Pictorial History of Harvey Milk, Dan Savage’s The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant, The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability: For All of Us Who Live with Disabilities, Chronic Pain and Illness, [Jessica Valenti & Jaclyn Friedman’s] Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape, Ruth Bell’s Changing Bodies, Changing Lives: Expanded Third Edition: A Book for Teens on Sex and Relationships, Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, Toni Weschler’s Cycle Savvy: The Smart Teen’s Guide to the Mysteries of Her Body, Ellen DeGeneres: A Biography and many, many more.

At this time, there is no clear statement from Amazon as to what, exactly, is going on. However, one author, writing in, received the following reply:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Hence, if you have further questions, kindly write back to us.

Best regards,

Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

The trouble with that reply is that there is PLENTY of very explicilty “adult” material which has NOT been deranked, and we don’t need to guess much about if it is or isn’t adult when we simply look at some of the titles: Girls Gone Wild: Girls on Girls, Surrender the Booty 3: The Search for More Arse, Jenna Jameson: Ultimate Collection, Girls Kissing: Volume One, Ron Jeremy: The Hardest Working Man in Showbiz, Candy Girl: A Year In The Life Of An Unlikely Stripper, Hot Babes...

My book is intended for young adults, and is GLBT-inclusive, and penned by me, a queer author. It is not salacious, it is not pornography: it is a sexuality, sexual health and relationships reference book. Heather Has Two Mommies is a supportive and classic children’s book about gay families. Hello, Cruel World is a suicide prevention book (which just happens to be written by a transgender author). That’s a short list, but the point is, many of the books that have been deranked are not adult books at all, nor adult or salacious material, but what nearly all of them, so far, do seem to be are tagged or labeled in some way as GLBT, or as books addressing sexuality in a non-heteronormative or gendernormative way.

To give you an idea of how this deranking has impacted a given subject you’d search for, take a look at the current list for books on homosexuality.

You’ll perhaps notice a prevailing theme, and see that if I were looking for books on how what is WRONG with homosexuality, I’d find exactly what I needed there. But if I were merely researching to topic as a whole — or, horror of horrors, did not want to read what was wrong with me and why I needed fixing — I’d find a strange lack of well-rounded material on the subject, including some of the most cornerstone books on or about homosexuality. Huh.

This obviously isn’t about adult material. It seems painfully clear what it is likely about, and all we can hope is that a) we’re wrong in seeing what we are, or that this is some kind of glitch Amazon will fix immediately, and/or b) that if we’re not wrong in our perception of this event, Amazon realizes that, even for a private business who has the right to discriminate however they choose, this kind of discrimination is wrong.

To keep up with what’s been going on, you can see the twitter feed #amazonfail here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=amazonfail

The following open letter is also very informative: http://booksquare.com/open-letter-to-amazon-regard ing-recent-policy-changes/

I put a letter into Amazon early this morning myself, but have yet to get a response.

Why am I blogging this here? In part because I’d hope, as an author Amazon feels comfortable making a profit from, the least I can do is voice my concerns right here, where my book lives at Amazon. But also, because until this is cleared up, and we all have some explanation and the matter is rectified — and I’ll adapt this post if and when it does — I’d prefer consumers bought my book somewhere else, where we’re all as sure as we can be a company isn’t engaging in sexual discrimination.

Again, not ok at all. If they’re serious, and we’ll see how serious they are, then screw them.

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Amazon.com Delisting Sex-Ed, Disability Sex, and LGBT Books But... Not Girls Gone Wild?

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2009-04-12 18:17


Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that’s me!) Used under a Creative Commons license.

So I’ve been thinking about (finally) writing a book. Weird to think that if I wrote it about how to make money off of date-raping drunk young women my Amazon.com sales rank might shoot up to 1,404, but if I wrote about date rape in the context of the Two Rules of Desire in the no-sex class paradigm my Amazon sales rank might be… well, you might expect it to be a lot lower. Turns out, though, that evidently as of some time today it would more likely be… non-existent! Wiped out. Erased. Expunged.

From Twitter (Links with “twurl.nl” are URLs that are automatically shortened to fit Twitter’s 145-character post limit.)

Audacia Ray: http://twitpic.com/37ur0 – #amazon has dumped sales ranking for “adult” books. and all the info/reviews about Naked on the Internet are GONE

Audacia Ray: It’s not just “adult” themes but also LGBT books. I hope there’s a good explanation, but I fear there isn’t http://twurl.nl/w2y2dz

Audacia Ray: I’m trying to believe that the #amazon erasure of Naked on the Internet has to do with biz of remainders (its almost 2 years old)

Audacia Ray: But books older than mine have listings w/covers/reviews on #amazon even if out of print, like Carol Queen’s 1995 Exhibitionism for the Shy

Audacia Ray: So fucking bizarre. my book’s page is back, its in stock. sales rank is indeed missing. http://twurl.nl/7yd2vz

There’s actually quite a lot of buzz about this (at least a little while ago @AmazonFail was the #2 search item on Twitter.) I’ve singled out Dacia because a) her book is about sex, not a sex book, b) because her posts capture the general sense of surprise so well, c) because she’s pretty cool, and because I’ve been meaning to link to her last not one but two wonderfully reflective posts for a day or two.

(Update Speaking of cool people, see also Heather Corinna’s take on this.)

Other books recently gone missing from Amazon’s Sales Rank and other metrics (gee, wonder why the following links all go to Barnes & Noble pages? Gee, wonder why there are no links to Amazon pages in this post?)

Miriam Kaufman, Fran Odette, and Cory Silverberg’s The Ultimate Guide to Sex and Disability : For All of Us Who Live with Disabilities, Chronic Pain, and Illness unranked on Amazon.com

Heather Corinna’s S.E.X. : The All-You-Need-To-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College unranked on Amazon.com

Audacia Ray’s Naked on the Internet: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration unranked on Amazon.com

The Joy of Sex: The Timeless Guide to Lovemaking unranked on Amazon.com

Meanwhile, over at Amazon.com you can still find sales ranks for Girls Gone Wild: Girls on Girls (2008) Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,404 and other charming works.

About that last one? The “one of these things that’s not like the other ones?” The one that Amazon hasn’t suddenly stopped sales-ranking? Here’s a nice “customer review” of this instructional video

66 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The New Girl-on-Girl – Barely Legal, February 18, 2008
By Jenifer M (Orange County, CA, USA) – See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)
What started out as girls flashing their tits (for a free Girls Gone Wild T-shirt) – has more recently evolved into a bellwether of female sexuality (in the new century) – that captures some of the freshest and most spontaneous girl/girl action you’ll find in any video series today.

These aren’t actresses performing on film – but real girls, being sexy – and doing what just comes naturally. Sure, you’ll still see young women flashing, hiking their skirts, or completely baring their souls (or the physical equivalent) – just for the fun of it! But you’ll also find babes who (instinctively) know their way (exploring) around their friend’s feminine form – and who feel just as comfortable doing so – as they would around their own.

You’ll also find lots of girls kissing (another GGW trademark)

[Quick note about GGW: if you think that last bit was about me being “down on porn” then stop it. Porn’s not the point. This is about consistency, fairness, exercise of sound judgment, commercial competence, and abiding contempt for knee-squeezing twittery. —fl]

Yeah, so if you want to see “documentary” footage of legalized, commercial date rape of drunken “real girls” no problem. If you’re a sexual human being with, say, disabilities… or just in need of honest ideas… and want advice or inspiration? Amazon appears to be snubbing the kind of authors and works you probably care most to read.

I’m sort of hoping the overreactions aren’t called for. But… at the very least it seems pretty awkward. If it turns out to be true I’ll remove all references to Amazon.com from my website (including the book ads in my right-hand column) and swap in links to Powells Books or Barnes & Noble.

Which, if it was just me wouldn’t be a very big deal for Amazon at all. But then if it turns out to be true I’d probably recommend everyone else I know remove their references as well. (Even that might not be such a big deal for Amazon because… while I’m going to wait a little bit a heck of a lot of other people online aren’t waiting to de-link them at all.)

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Sex, Disability, Prostitution, People

Posted by figleaf | Tags:
Sun, 2008-03-02 08:43

One of the arguments that kept coming up during my post suggesting mockery rather than anger towards those who deny or refuse to acknowledge the agency of prostitutes** was how disabled people need to be able to hire prostitutes because… well, perhaps it seemed obvious?

But it actually isn’t. Dig around on the web, though, and you’ll see at least one big divide in the language used about disabilities and sex in general, and disability and prostitution in particular.

Able-bodied people speak in terms of “providing” prostitutes for the disabled, with a sometimes covert, sometimes overt implication that they could find partners no other way. Disabled people seem to surprise! express the question more in terms of agency — not that the government should buy them sex but that they should have the means to buy it themselves. The question often occurs, by the way, in the larger context of the right to have sex experience their sexuality fully and without shame period. [Thanks to Amber for the clearer phrasing. —fl] Which, as frequent commentator Eurosabra pointed out in an earlier post,

Access to sex workers’ services is an issue that disabled-rights groups have raised on their own in the UK, as it is the experience of some young disabled men that reactions to their sexual expression are (across-the-board) demeaning, discouraging, etc. I doubt people would have any respect for it were it not a grass-roots effort, but you hear things like “The health aide won’t leave the room so we can f***” or “The health aide won’t give me a lift so we can f***” from disabled people in relationships ALL THE TIME. And those are people with supposedly-“okay”-in-societal-terms het relationships. Hostility to sexual expression of that type gets conflated with difficulty in partnering-up in some people’s minds, which is possibly begging the question. Certainly the lobbying tends to come from a certain “git ‘er done” constituency, and in reply feminists have chosen to emphasize the “git” factor. We are a long way from Zamyatin’s We or Huxley’s Brave New World, where the Tables match you up, or “everyone belongs to everyone else.” Or, heck, even “Enemy at the Gates”—“We tried to create the new Socialist Man. But some are rich in love and some are poor.”

He said it here.

Anyway, I’m just saying that questions of the sexuality of people perceived to be in social custody instead of being capable of individual autonomy is a big deal.

And at least in this case, while I think it’s really a good idea for people to fan out and find their own avenues into the question of disabilities and sex***, I’d like to point out a tidbit from a BBC News report that

A survey for the Disability Now website in 2005 suggested that 75% of disabled people believed in the legalisation of prostitution, with 62.5% of men and 19.2% of women saying they would use trained sex workers. It’s a situation that exists in the Netherlands where a voluntary group provides just such a service for disabled people. Most clients pay for it themselves but some local authorities subsidise the service.

There is also a group within the UK attempting to put disabled people in touch with suitable prostitutes, but there are those for whom visiting a brothel is morally wrong.

Anna Bowden, of Eaves, a group that helps vulnerable women, including those who have been trafficked into prostitution, recognises that disabled people face “a very difficult situation”.

“Obviously I don’t think the answer is perpetuating a form of violence against women. We reject the view that men have a right to sex.”

And one from Wheelchair Dancer

The newest star is Encarna Conde: “Her first film, Breaking Barriers, is, however, already the subject of debate on internet chatboards and has even had entire pages dedicated to it in the Spanish press. The reason for the fuss is that Encarna is a wheelchair user who has a muscle control disorder called ataxia. She is also president of the Association of Andalucian Ataxia Groups.

The tone of the piece is one of bemused congratulation. Another barrier broken. Another thing those crazy disabled people do — remember the coverage about the criticism of the Danish govt, because it pays for PWD to have sex with professional sex workers?

I’m conflicted.

...

The disability perspective is what bugs me: journalism like this and perhaps even the film itself provides fodder for a rather large community of wheelchair pretenders and wheelchair fetishizers.

She says it here.

The point being that, people with disabilities being people and all, questions about sex, sex work, desire, and being desired are only complicated by disability and not “othered.”

[** Which, in my first iteration, I mistakenly placed on customers alone and not to everyone else who, for purposes malevolent and benevolent, do the same. —fl]

[*** It’s not an abstract question — as the old bumper stickers used to say, at best most people are only only temporarily abled. And if you really enjoy sex now, unless attitudes change there a very non-zero chance that once you reach a certain age or infirmity you might wind up with your arms bound to the bed — in the bad way, not the kinky way — to keep you from doing anything about it with yourself or with anyone else. —fl]

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