Reply to comment

www.sinsinvalid.org/index.html

I stumbled across this website courtesy of www.feministing.com.

On a separate but related note, one thought I had concerning the discomfort people feel in linking disability - especially physical disability, since that's the area in which people get the testiest, most defensive, and most confused - with acts expressive of sexuality and sexual nature is that perhaps it has a lot to do with the definition of disability. Since disability encompasses physical as well as mental disability we have to take into account that (according to the state of Pennsylvania, and many others I'm sure though I can't vouch for them) one of the conditions under which it is actually illegal to engage in sexual relations with a person is if that person is disabled - mentally disabled, mind you. By law, a person who is determined to have the mental capacity of a person under the legal age of consent (or essentially does not understand what sex is and what its "consequences" are) cannot legally consent to sex. So, I realize that a large part of the reason society tends to desexualize people with disabilities is often because sexuality and images of desire depend so much on the "normal beautiful body" deemed appropriate for sex and sexual appeal and which is invariably absent in the case of a person with a physically visible disability.  However, I do think that it is not as simple as an "Ew, a disabled person having sex!" reaction. I think there may be something implicit in the act of tagging a person as "disabled" regardless of the details of their impairment that triggers feeling of patronization - a guilt-ridden obligatory sentiment of protectiveness over the physical (and emotional) well-being of a person to whom (in the view of the non-disabled person) life has already dealt a bad hand. Given the amount of stigma and demonization and fear-mongering that surrounds the idea of sex in our (American) society today, it would seem natural for the sentiment of insulting patronization that already plagues the lives of those who are deemed to be incapable of making their own decisions (teenagers, young women...) to apply to and negatively affect the population whose various degrees of impairments have the power to render them those "lesser" than the "normal" population and to bring them down (in Maiers case literally) to a lower level.

In summary: "protect the wholesomeness of our poor innocent children from the implicit evils of sex" is translatable into "protect the poor crippled people, whose bodies just can't take any more abuse, from the evils of sex."