After I read Jessica Valenti’s The Purity Myth, I was left wondering about disabled women and sex. She spent a lot of time discussing visible minorities and sex as well as lower income women and sex, but I wondered what she thought of disabled women: how we are portrayed, thought of and treated when it Jessica and I engaged in some banter over email about it and she told me about how disabled women can be ‘fetishized’. Wait. WHAT?
Tracey Cox, sex researcher and therapist, has written about weird fetishes that she has come across in her work and research: fetishes for amputees, fetishes for sermons, fetishes for animals, fetishes for dead people, et cetera. The amputee one struck me as bizarre (as did all the other ones), but Jessica threw me for a loop. I have always felt that I was ugly, undesirable, and unlovable because of my disability. I never thought that there were people out there that would want to fuck me because of my disability. I have a friend who is tri-racial (and gorgeous) who gets ‘exotified’ a lot, and guys want to sleep with her when they want to sleep with girls of different races. But she has a long-term boyfriend with whom she’s in love, so she obviously doesn’t take any offers. I can, to a certain extent, understand why she can be seen as a fetish. But . . . disabled women? Not to say that disabled women are ugly and unlovable and undesirable . . . I just never thought that someone would actually find that attractive in me and want to sleep with me – or other disabled women – on that basis alone.
Maybe I’m just weird.
This was not meant to offend anyone who has a disability. I myself have one.
I just never thought it could be seen as a fetish.
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The intersection of media representations of desirability and what people are attracted to aren't remotely the same. Avoiding having it pollute your thoughts is hard, though.
This is generally true, but applies specifically to what people find attractive looking in women, what men find attractive looking in women, et al.
You're wrong to feel ugly, undesirable, and unlovable. While you expect this, you're unlikely to notice when people think you're attractive, desirable, lovable. (At least, as someone with a lot of this similiar mentality, I know I don't. What to do about it (if anything), I don't know.
But yeah, even though (and sometimes because) you're disabled, there're still plenty of people who find you desirable.
Sometimes i think just about every sort of person there is can be a fetish to someone out there.
Can it really be as general as a fetish for disabled women in general? Disability covers a very, very wide range, physical and non, visible and invisible, etc. I've heard of amputee fetishes, and also fetishes towards people in wheelchairs, but... I mean, I'm disabled myself - I have an autistic spectrum disorder and a speech disorder - and the idea of someone having a fetish regarding one of *those* pretty much breaks my mind. Or, you know, someone having a fetish that entails stuttering and ASDs, wheelchairs, blindness, deafness, chronic pain or fatigue disorders, mental illnesses and everything else that falls under the umbrella of disability.
I'm also not saying that my disabilities must make me less attractive or desirable, but I have severe problems imagining someone having a *fetish* towards one of those things. O_o