Most people assume that if you’re disabled, the greatest barriers to sexual expression are physical barriers. How do you get in the “right” position? How do you touch the “right” places? How do you masturbate if you can’t move your hands? The list goes on. This may be the most common misunderstanding of what is difficult about sexual expression when you live with a disability.
The truth is that everyone can figure out a way to be sexual, and almost all of us can find a way to have sex that works for us, if we want to. Mobility impairments may feel insurmountable, but they are rarely the biggest barriers to sexual expression.
If you have lived experience of disability, you probably know that the impact of ableism in the world in general, and other people’s attitudes in particular, get in the way of finding sexual partners more than anything to do with the way your body moves or the way your mind works.
Tom Shakespeare, an author and disability activist, once put it this way: “When you’re disabled, the real problem isn’t how to have sex; it’s who to have sex with.”
Of course there are many single, non-disabled people who also have a hard time finding a partner. It’s true that the norms of desirability and beauty affect most of us negatively. But there are specific ways that disabled bodies are singled out as not sexy and not worthy of dating and this exclusion has more to do with societal norms than it does with the potential of any individual to give or receive intense sexual pleasure.
Standards Of Beauty And Desirability
In every community and culture, there are norms about who is considered attractive and desirable and who is not. These norms are not random and they are not universal or “natural”. Often, but not always, people who are identified as disabled are treated as undesirable, unlovable, and unsexy.
Even though most of us will have some experience of feeling undesirable and not attractive enough, it can be hard to imagine what it’s like to be told all the time in subtle and direct ways that you simply won’t ever be considered sexy by anyone, and that you actually aren’t even a sexual person.
Over time, these messages take their toll, and people can come to believe that they are not sexual, that they are incapable of giving or receiving sexual pleasure, that they are in fact not fully human. This is one way that an idea that comes from outside can eventually feel like an idea that you have on your own, or like “the truth”.
Finding Sexual Partners, Resisting Ableism
The kind of advice a lot of people give in this situation is to say that you need to smile more, or just “put yourself out there”, join a community group, join a club, and be positive.
This advice is double-edged. On one hand, it’s true that if you never go out, you’re less likely to meet people. And it’s equally true that if you are depressed or negative when you do meet people, they may be less interested in you as a sexual partner.
But there’s another side to it. Only being happy and smiling a lot won’t change the way society judges people with disabilities. And the idea that you should just get out there ignores the ways that people with disabilities are excluded from public spaces because of access issues. We need to acknowledge that it isn’t actually about you as a person. You are judged before you get to connect with people. You are judged not for what you have to offer but for what others assume are the things you lack. The advice to just try harder or smile more subtly reinforces the idea that you need to change yourself and everything will be fine.
Advice to get out there and be nice may not be completely off base, but the cheery tone of the advice can feel ignorant and insensitive.
Instead, let’s try to talk about things as they are. If you use a wheelchair or crutches to get around, if you don’t walk or talk the way people expect you to, if you can’t make eye contact or hear someone shouting at you in a crowded bar, it becomes much more difficult to find partners. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. You need to know that it is possible, at least for most of us, to find people to hang out with and date and be sexual with. If you have a disability, you do have more barriers in your way. So where do you start?
There isn’t an easy answer or simple guide to follow. But here are three things you can do if you’re looking to date or hook up or somehow connect with someone romantically or sexually.
Name it
Start by thinking about and hopefully resisting the idea that you are the problem. If you don’t already notice all the little ways people exclude you or treat you as non-sexual, see if you can start to notice and name them. This can be painful. But if you currently think that you are the one and only problem, you aren’t being honest with yourself, and making change may be harder. Naming it might just be something you do in your own head or it might be challenging people around you. Whatever it is, identifying how discrimination actually gets in the way of you getting laid may be a useful start.
Think about what you want
You may stop yourself from fantasizing about sexual interactions and sexual expression, but if you want it to happen you’re going to need to know what it is that you want. Are you looking for a date just for fun? Do you want to find someone to have casual sex with? Do you want to find a relationship? And who is it that you want to be with? If you’ve never been told this before, you should know that it’s your right to have any kind of sex and sex partner you choose (as long as they choose you too). You don’t need to want to be married, or be heterosexual, or have intercourse, or anything. You can define your own sexual terms. If you’ve never had sex before, these may change when you do, but you have to start somewhere, and knowing what you want will make it more likely that you’ll get it.
Ultimately, if you’re looking to be sexual with another person, you’re going to have to meet that person. But you don’t need to be social in ways that feel unsafe or unlike who you are. Think about how you prefer to interact with people. If you like meeting people face-to-face, then you can try getting out to places where there are both opportunities to meet people and spaces that will be a little more accessible. If you like online communication, there are plenty of online spaces (and of course dating websites) where you can meet others. We’ll all do this differently, so it’s hard to offer general advice that won’t sound superficial.
