Do you have weak stomach? Do you think it’s not serious to talk about pornography? Do you feel in bad taste to put disabled persons’ sexuality in the spotlight? Excellent: this interview was made just for you. Please, sit down and read it in one go, at the end you might discover a new world, more respectful of everyone’s body, desire and feeling. We talk about disabled persons’ sexualities with Tim Dean, professor of English at the University at Buffalo (New York), queer theory expert and researcher of sexualities in the contemporary world.
One main problem complained by disabled people, at least in Italy, is the fact that common sense sees them as asexual: a disabled person wanting sex is considered, explicitly or not, as perverse, sexual desire toward a disable person is considered in bad taste, a sexual intercourse with a disabled person is considered degrading…
I think the situation is quite similar in the US. We tend to think of disability, however it’s defined, as deeply undesirable. What’s great about disability porn is that it shows us how disability can be sexy and desirable. But we also tend to think that disabled people shouldn’t have erotic desires; they should behave like children who are dependent on our care and goodwill. This is incredibly patronizing!
And, by doing so, they’re deprived also of the ability to have sex…
One study of people who had suffered spinal cord injury showed that these people rated the ability to have sex higher than the ability to walk again. Disabled people have sexual desires, just like anyone else. It’s as though you were allowed to have sexual desires only if you’re young and have a normative body. We don’t like to think of people we find unattractive having sex… but that’s ridiculous. Disabled people bear the brunt of these prejudices.
When we think to gay porn, we usually imagine beautiful, muscular, almost perfect guys. Disability porn represents a form of erotica without connections with the mainstream idea of perfection…
I think you’re right: images of physical perfection are not very erotic. The most intense forms of sexual pleasure come from brokenness… when some bodily or psychological boundary is shattered. It may be easier to access that kind of intense pleasure in disability porn than in airbrushed, utopian pornography.
How does the relationship with bodies change in this different perspective?
What has been great about the proliferation of porn online is that it has allowed us to see all the kinds of bodies, as well as all the kinds of acts, that people find exciting. The range of possibilities for pleasure just keeps expanding. Disability porn is part of that expansion. It also helps to see how people can transform a site of injury or disability into a site of pleasure. Increasingly we see how the normative body has been idealized as a myth.
All bodies, in short, can be erotic …
What I like about the early films of Paul Morris, at Treasure Island Media, for example, is how he included a lot of quite ordinary men in his films. And now we see quite ordinary bodies -not sculpted to some impossible ideal of perfection- in online porn. It was tremendously important that Paul Morris showed us how skinny men’s bodies, or overweight bodies -and especially bodies marked by HIV- could be desiring and sexy. I think that this democratization of bodily types in pornography has been very encouraging for disabled people’s sexuality. But it probably should be acknowledged that there is a greater range of body types for men in porn than for women.
So, it almost seems that disability porn has an educational function…
I think disability porn does educate us about the kinds of pleasure that can be generated with non-normative bodies. Perhaps more than educate, such pornography can inspire us to be a little more inventive about how we have sex. We have to be careful in talking about porn as educative, because this taps into people’s fears about porn -that, for example, bareback porn will make everyone stop using condoms. Or that rough porn will encourage violence. I don’t think porn works so directly on its viewers’ behavior. And of course we don’t want porn that’s strictly educational… we want porn that’s hot!
Could we talk about a revolutionary role instead of an educational role?
The point is that what people find hot is going to differ depending on the person. And, more so, that what any individual finds hot can shift quite considerably. Porn helps us see that there are all kinds of bodies and acts and conjunctions that can generate pleasure. I really admire the disabled people who are making porn and putting it out there. Porn is a great medium for breaking through all kinds of taboos, for challenging social prejudices about who has desire and who should be able to act on their desires.
Obviously among consenting adults!
It should go without saying that sex always requires the consent of its participants. But we don’t require social consent to publicize sex among consenting adults, even if the kind of sex or the kinds of bodies in that porn challenge social expectations.
Which are the most common sexual practices in disability porn?
Disability porn is really very varied -as various as the kinds of bodily differences and impairments that characterize disability. I’ve even been thinking about bareback porn, where all the performers are HIV-positive, as a kind of disability porn. There is also deaf porn. And I’ve written about stump porn, in which men get fucked in the ass by limb stumps, mostly lower-leg amputees… but also by guys who have lost a hand or arm. One amputee calls this “fisting without a fist.” There is a famous porno from the 1970s, in which a woman with a lower-leg amputation uses her stump to fuck guys in the ass.
So can we say that performers practice mainly fetish or BDSM?
Yes, I think these practices tend more toward the BDSM end of the spectrum; they explore a greater range of the body’s capacity for pleasure. What I find especially interesting about disability porn is how physiological impairments encourage people to get more inventive about how they use their bodies for sex.
How widespread is this kind of porn in the US? Is it an underground market?
There are still taboos associated with disability sex, but I wouldn’t describe disability porn as an underground market. Increasingly disabled folks are putting themselves out there online. The internet is the best sexual prosthesis that we have! In the US there are a lot of young men coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan as disabled vets – guys who have had a limb or two blown off but who have survived the explosion. We have more amputee vets than at any time since the Civil War (i.e., mid-nineteenth century). These guys are discovering things they can do with their bodies and they’re putting the results online, on amateur sites like Xtube, as well as more specialized porn sites. Judging by the number of hits some of these clips get, they seem pretty popular.
Which other forms of porn do you consider particularly interesting?
What I find most interesting right now is that we all have the technology to produce our own porn. If you have a camera on your phone and internet access, you can become a pornographer. That technological change is perhaps revolutionary. I hope it leads to ever greater diversification of pornography and to the withering away of sexual shame.
©2012 Il Grande Colibrì
