Dating Advice From . . . Glassblowers by Ariana Green Q: How does your job affect your skill set in the bedroom?
A: I work with beads, so I don't do much blowing. Working as a glassblower makes you immune to double entendres, by the way.
Once I walked erect, now I roll.
As a young man, I took great pride in every manner of strength, dexterity and touch. Then, while on a summer job logging in Wisconsin, I fell off a waterslide headfirst, hit the bottom of the lake below and fractured my neck at cervical 5. The double bit axe that I'd swung for hours each day toppling hemlock and hard maple was retired, along with my soccer ball, climbing boots, archer's bow and baseball glove.
The surgeon explained I wouldn't walk again. Physical control below mid-chest was lost. In medical terms, I would now be labeled "quadriplegic." I yelled for another hypo of morphine. As the pain receded, I asked the doctor, "How will this affect my sex life?" Like most physicians who've missed their
calling as accountants, he dodged my question. So I learned on my own, the hard way.
I became a wheeled man, also a marked man in public. Power chair–borne, I was seen as embodying a "deviant" physique. Able-bodied "verticals" regarded me with furtive glances, self-absorbed stares and transparent brush-offs. Most people averted their gaze in contexts where polite eye contact and spoken interaction would be commonplace.
I've never been troubled by sincere curiosity. But studied indifference and avoidance, particularly by women (for I'm heterosexual), left me feeling dismissed, anonymous, unseen. Many women will grant a nodding smile, until approached for the simplest of human needs: social interaction. Most will retreat into a hurried preoccupation with something or someone, elsewhere, as if Quasimodo were extending his tongue for a French kiss. Truly, many individuals continue to respond to people with physical disabilities much like freaks of nature, modern incarnations of the Wild Man of Borneo.
Years passed and I gradually created a new body image, a new life script. And while old pals were affirming their masculinity and virility, recounting sexual conquests like golf scores, I went cold, longing for the closeness and catharsis sexual intimacy can offer.
Painful as the unwanted abstinence was, I myself proved culpable on occasion — an accessory to the fact. For example, a few years after my injury, when a college friend pressed for further closeness, I withdrew,
assuming she would eventually reject my naked disability, see me only for what I had lost.
I too had bought into mainstream cultural prescriptions of masculinity. Although I hadn't lost a healthy sex drive or the ability to have an erection, I equated being a man with being a human screwing machine — one that could lunge and plunge hard and fast, over and over. I couldn't imagine anyone seeing me as a sexual being.
Perhaps it's not so surprising. When we think of sexuality, we tend to think: Boy meets girl, girl meets boy, or some same-sex variation thereof. They fall in love and rendezvous in bed, or up against a warehouse wall, or under a park tree. Or in a wheelchair? For many, this last is almost unthinkable. Wheelchairs have been denied their erotic potential, and the resulting erotic estrangement of those using them is due not to any actual physical difficulty of ours, but to the prejudice and ignorance of the public eye.
In a culture that invests billions in cosmetics and faux-glamour to attain a very narrow ideal of beauty, someone will be set up as the ugly duckling. The media and the arts continue to exploit wheelchairs and persons with impairments to cheaply manufacture or symbolize the incapable and unsavory, the unsexed or asexual. Archaic and reprehensible as such characterizations are, they reliably evoke the pathos that lazy and socially irresponsible writers, directors and producers eagerly seek. From the villainous banker in It's a Wonderful Life to Christopher Walken's evil crime boss in Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead to the deformed dastards in the recent film The Wild, Wild West; from D. H. Lawrence' s Lady Chatterly and her
embittered, impotent husband to the lame, withering Laura in Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie, to Jake, the genitally damaged and dissociated voyeur of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, disability is consistently posed as an opposite to "conventional" beauty.
It doesn't help that wheelchairs, which we can't do without, box us in, posing an obstacle to casually sharing personal space, at least at first. We can't as easily sit down exactly where we wish, right there next to the woman with a beckoning smile. We can't as quickly make our way through a crowded bar to the woman in need of a drink. The built environment is often a damning obstacle. Given the likelihood of our feeling social stress and exclusion, the risk of isolation runs even higher. Public or private, individual expressions of sexuality rely heavily on nonverbal communication. Impaired mobility and altered movement impose daunting side effects. Driving in my chair, erotic communication becomes smothered, lost to the vertically mobile, hip swaying, swaggering and strutting crowd.
I know now that an altered physique and wheelchair can remind people of their own mortality; it can exacerbate gnawing anxieties about how they look, about their place in our brutal beauty hierarchy. And I also understand how readily stereotypes and misconceptions can "prove" self-fulfilling. Shunning was once a most severe penalty for violating a community norm or taboo. I believe the sex and sexuality of people with physical disabilities has struggled, and continues to struggle, under a silent, persistent shunning. The effects of which, like chronic pain, obstruct our full humanity, social participation and human equality in a free society.
Mirrors are everywhere: in shop windows, in other people's eyes or reactions to you. You may be an especially attractive and uniquely bright individual, but other people's pity, amplified by the media's obsession with ideal body-images, can warp and reduce you to one of society's lowest members: a victim. Well, I'm not a victim of anything but tired stereotypes. And I'm weary of living in a culture that confuses pretty packages with the good, the true, the virtuous, the sexed.
Many assume that since I cannot walk, my disability is somehow generalized to my entire being. Suddenly, a thousand acts and actions are mysteriously presumed to lie beyond my capabilities. Not only can I not walk, but now supposedly I cannot converse intelligently, cannot proclaim a libidinous desire, cannot sensuously touch and be touched, nor make
love — all grotesque misconceptions. And ones that obviously protect the prejudiced from encounters with people whose very existence challenges prevailing standards of what is normal, safe and predictable.
The fact is, I'm quite capable as a sexual being. I too feel delight and am comfortably happy while giving and receiving sexual pleasure. And what I say is true for many other "quads" and people with a variety of so-called "disabilities." You just haven't seen us "doing it" on your TV (except perhaps in Coming Home, where Jane Fonda lovingly gives herself to Jon Voight, the cinema's only paraplegic antihero to date).
There's a bumper sticker that proclaims, "Quads Make Better Lovers" and perhaps it's true. One positive by-product of adapting to a disability is having to learn to go with the flow of experience, both mentally and physically. After severe spinal injury, one must begin again, and this includes redeveloping alternate sense faculties. My erotic self need not be solely localized at the tip of my cock, where I've lost much sensation; I have learned that other areas of my body can be erotically sensitive and responsive. Sensation is mobile. My passion, desire and heat can be creatively retrained or refocused on more sensitive areas: ears, lips, neck, shoulders. In doing so, I
can transfer sensual feeling into areas where sensation is diminished.
Just as important has been learning to free myself from a preoccupation with my own pleasure. To give myself over to my partner. To slow down, not because I'm disabled and have to, but because I want to. This has proved crucial, paradoxically, to building up my own libidinous momentum. By relaxing into a quiet, tender space while stroking and touching my lover, I can engage vicariously in her enjoyment and stimulation so intensely as to share in her — and expand upon my own — felt pleasure. How curious that pleasing women orally has never been held as a form of manly sexual expression. Speaking as a man labeled "severely disabled," this may truly be considered a high and most subtle erotic art.
Everyone with a disability is unique, no less than each able-bodied person. We are physically different, but all-important similarities remain. Nothing that warrants fear or discomfort is inherent in another's physical disability. You will not learn by avoidance, and we won't disappear because of others' denial or discomfort. Much about our post-injury nervous systems, the lost and found sensations that accompany spinal cord injuries, remains a great mystery. I for one am hoping you will engage us, connect with us, and through us, shed light on another facet of everyone's humanity.
calling as accountants, he dodged my question. So I learned on my own, the hard way.
assuming she would eventually reject my naked disability, see me only for what I had lost.
embittered, impotent husband to the lame, withering Laura in Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie, to Jake, the genitally damaged and dissociated voyeur of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, disability is consistently posed as an opposite to "conventional" beauty.
love — all grotesque misconceptions. And ones that obviously protect the prejudiced from encounters with people whose very existence challenges prevailing standards of what is normal, safe and predictable.
can transfer sensual feeling into areas where sensation is diminished.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
