In 2013, responding to the demands of disability activists in France who were fighting for the removal of barriers to their sexual expression, including institutional support for sexual surrogacy, a member of the French National Ethics Committee which earlier that year took the position that surrogacy was an “unethical use of the human body for commercial purposes” argued that sex cannot be seen as a right that belongs to all citizens of France, for if it’s a right, then the government has a responsibility to protect and provide for its expression.
This isn’t possible, since paying someone to engage in, apparently, any kind of sexual contact is unethical and degrading.
You can hear her thoughts in a New York Times video that accompanied an article (which itself had more than a few problems) about the French debate. Whatever you think of the arguments being made, it is a nice change from discussions among politicians in the West about sex, which are practically non-existent.
And I thought it offered an opportunity to dig a bit deeper into questions of rights, sexuality, sexual surrogacy, and disability.
Is Sex A Right?
The statement that sexuality or sexual expression is a human right may seem, at first, benign. It’s something that sexuality professionals say all the time in arguing for funding and access to comprehensive sex education and the legitimacy of sexual counseling and therapy. And it seems intuitive if we think about sex as something “natural” and essentially human.
Often when we talk about rights we are talking about something we imagine to be universal.
But the idea that sex is a right is considered problematic, and not only by those who think all sex work is degrading. Disability activists have challenged the language of rights, questioning whether or not it is helpful in increasing access to full participation in society.
Judith talked about the frustration she has with people telling her that she should fight for her rights to sexual expression. She pointed out that if those rights were human rights, then they should be hers by birth, and instead of fighting for them she should be living them.
Others argue that only saying someone has a right, when they are denied access from birth, makes the language of rights something that erases inequality and injustice. What’s the point, the argument goes, in saying that everyone has a right to sexual expression when some people are denied access to partners, to the freedom to pursue relationships they choose without violence, to basic information that will help them make informed choices about sexual expression, etc…
Even if those rights are established in international documents, if they are not also made concrete in laws and in everyday practice, what good are they?
This isn’t a question with a simple answer or with a single answer, but it’s an important question for all of us to think about and ask ourselves when we use the language of rights, who is serving?
Should There Be Disability Sex Specialists?
An issue that isn’t raised explicitly in the French debate, but flows from it and needs to be talked about is whether or not it makes sense to have surrogates with “special training” to work with people with disabilities.
One way people defend the practice of sex surrogacy is by saying that the training includes “special” information about working with people with disabilities. For me there isn’t much of a middle ground on this point. The idea that one needs special training to have sex for money with someone with a disability is essentially ableist.
I agree that anyone who is having sex for money or whose work involves intimate sexual touch or even sexual counseling or education should have some training in how to do that work. Sexuality can be a site of great pain for many people and because so few of us are well educated around sexuality, training is required. But if the training is done well, it doesn’t need to be different for people with disabilities. Of course it’s true that most of the time that training isn’t done well. Professionals are trained to work with only a small number of people who can match their communication and practice styles.
But there’s a difference between acknowledging that professional training excludes lots of people, including many people with different lived experience of disability, and saying that professionals need special training in order to accommodate disability. The first acknowledgment puts the responsibility on the professional, where it belongs.
What all clients need is to be asked the right questions, supported in figuring out the answer that works for them and then listened to. The idea of specialized training seems to reinforce the notion that people with disabilities are passive and can’t participate as fully as non-disabled people in sexual interactions. This is a common belief, but also a false one.
To be clear, I do think that surrogates and all service providers need to be trained about disability issues, particularly about the impact of ableism on an individual and a community. And this is as true when we’re talking about sexuality as when we’re talking about employment or housing or anything else. What I’m arguing against is the idea that there is something fundamentally different about being disabled that makes it useful or even possible to offer specialized training for working with disabled people. I think that leads to more marginalization and poorer services.
Sex Work, Surrogacy, Or Sexual Facilitation?
Pascale Ribes, who founded the Disabilities and Sexualities Group, an association defending sexual surrogates in France is quoted in the New York Times article explaining that talking about sex surrogacy as prostitution is a red herring;
“Prostitution is a fake debate; the goals are different… Sexual assistance is about allowing a disabled person who can’t access sexuality in a satisfying way to reconnect with the body.”
The discussion of whether sex surrogacy is the same as sex work is an old one. Most sexual surrogates make a point of saying they are not sex workers, sometimes by putting down sex work and sometimes by explaining the relevant distinctions (which include things like training, working in collaboration with a therapist, and having clearly defined goals and end dates for the work).
One of the nice ways the Times article complicates the issue is by presenting various views and in doing so raising the question: who decides what an interaction means. Setting aside legal definitions, does it matter if you are engaging in sexual contact with someone for pleasure, to learn something about your body and your feelings, for distraction, for novelty, or for some other reason? If we are interested in people and their experience I would say yes it does. It’s also important to admit that in any sexual interaction lots of things are happening. Intimate or sexual contact is never about just one thing. This is true whether or not money is exchanged.
It was nice to hear at least a few perspectives in the article, and that one of the perspectives came from someone providing sexual surrogacy. It made me think about how rare it is for us to hear sex worker perspectives, and I wondered if the somewhat more clinical mantle that comes with the term sex surrogacy is what in part made it easier for this perspective to be included.
Personal Support Workers and Attendants
A final point that stayed with me was actually about the poor representation of personal support workers and attendants in the piece. For many years I have been involved in training support workers around issues of sexuality through something called the Sexuality and Access Project. Through this work, and through my relationships both with people who use attendant services and with people who provide them, I’ve learned just how complicated these relationships are.
Often they are difficult and are not what either person would consider supportive of healthy. Sometimes they are just the opposite. One line that I always have in my head was from one participant in the project who talked about her attendants as people who sort of live your life with you. They are there first thing in the morning and at the end of the day. They are part of you living your life, from eating and using the bathroom to going to school, dating, breaking up, dealing with grief, experiencing joy, and more.
Because they are meant to be in a support role, attendants are often not considered fully present in a space. They may be in the background, but that doesn’t make them any less human, and their presence is felt. Sometimes in good ways, sometimes in bad ways, and often in ways that no one notices. But they are there, and the relationship is worth attending to. One of the many ways that the opening paragraph of the article put me off was that it contrasted a lover’s touch (as desirable) with an attendant’s touch (as undesirable). It’s a dramatic comparison that is the stuff of non-disabled people’s fantasies of what living with a disability must be like.
