Dear People,
Two bits of news:
For the Accsexers amongst us, Mike Letch and myself have finally upon a meeting date for Accsex! It's going to be on Thursday the 13th of Sept. at 2.00 pm. It will be at DDLS - the Disability Discrimination Law Service (on the 1st floor of the Yooralla building) at 212 King Street (near Little Bourke).
I'm sorry it's not at Family Planning - but Sally Allen is on maternity leave and now they want to charge us... This has been part of the delay in calling this meeting - the other part is that I have been really busy with schoolwork. I hope finish by the end of this year and graduate next May!
Also, the Exclusion and Embrace conference has accepted me as a speaker. My talk will be a slightly amended version of the one I posted on these lists a few weeks ago - "Coming to the Spirit through Sexuality."
For those of you who don't know anything about the Accsex Coalition the following may interest you:
DRAWING A FINE LINE ON A TABOO
by Sharon Mascall - AGE NEWSPAPER - "Body" Section. June, 11th, '01.
"INGRID is a feisty 50-something. Her mischievous laugh peppers our conversation, alongside references to sex, masturbation and silky underwear.
This is a woman who enjoys her sexuality and isn't afraid to discuss it.
"I think we're lucky," she says. "We have to be far more open with our partners than other people do. I have to take my clothes off in front of my husband and he has to position my body. It encourages more openness in a sexual relationship"
"We" are people with disabilities. People like Ingrid, who was born with cerebral palsy. People whd've lost the use of a limb through accident or illness. Anyone and everyone who has a physical, mental or intellectual disability. The fact they may want sex is a social taboo.
"There is the fear we'll breed monsters," says Mike Letch, a disability consultant for Yooralla. "Hollywood's partly to blame, depicting us as Quasimodos and Freddy Krugers. In the past, if the disability was 'good enough', we became monsters in freak shows - like the Elephant Man"
Letch lost the use of his legs at the age of 21, after crashing his motorbike on a speedway track in England. In hospital, he plucked up the courage to ask a "dragon ofa charge-nurse" whether he'd be able to have children - the 1970s euphemism for sex. "you filthy little guttersnipe," she hissed, "if you keep your mind above your navel you might get somewhere in life"
Letch ignored her advice. In 1997 he started work on ACCSEX - a forum for people with disabilities, their attendants and care organisations -- to work out how disabled people can gain access to safe, healthy sex lives.
Unofficially, such access has been available for a while. Mike Lanyon is a recreation specialist, who'd never set foot in a brothel, until he was working in a private rehabilitation hospital in Melbourne 12 years ago.
"One resident was exhibiting inappropriate behavior. He was touching the nurses -- so they asked me to talk to him," Lanyon said.
"I found out he'd been the victim of a hit-and-run in his 20s. He'd suffered a severe head injury, had speech problems and was in a wheelchair. He was also very sexually frustrated."
"I took him to the brothel in Clifton Hill -- the one tucked away, next door to McDonalds. The girl was an ex-nurse; she'd worked in a head injury unit and made him feel very comfortable," Lanyon said.
"After that, his behavioral problems stopped."
Brothels became a regular outing at the hospital for those who were interested and who had the money.
Today, several Melbourne brothels employ sex workers who specialise in disability, some having rooms tailor-made for mobility-impaired clients. The only barrier is the price.
At more than $100 a time, brothel sex doesn't come cheap.
And it doesn't address the needs of women. Lanyon combines his job as a recreation lecturer at Victoria University with the design and development of dildos, vibrators and other sex toys specifically for disabled people.
Working with a manufacturer, he's in the process of adding a giant dial to the end of a vibrator, to make it easier to switch on and off. He has designed a "lexi-please" that bends in many ways to cater far the mobility restrictions of some users.
All the products are being fashioned in silicone, rather than latex, to make them easy to clean in boiling water and reduce the likelihood of an allergy.
"The main problem," he says, "is the batteries. Changing them is an issue. We can modify the switches but then it's up to them to ask someone they trust to change the batteries" That "someone" is likely to be an attendant. The person who drives them to work, helps them to get undressed, or cooks their meals.
Asking them to facilitate a disabled person's sex life may be controversial.
ACCSEX's research, incorporating the views of consumers and providers of attendant care, shows that lines must be drawn. Changing batteries is one thing. Putting on a condom is something else.
"The lines already exist,'' says Letch. "some attendants do toileting, some do not.
We're trying to develop a care model which clearly defines what attendants can do and what they can't".
The priority is to respect ethical and professional standards by clear demarcation of responsibilities.
Attendants are not sex workers, nor will they be expected to be.
The dilemma is how to give disabled people the sexual freedom to which they're entitled, without compromising the sensitivities and professionalism of those who work with them.
The alternative -- ignoring the issue -- is not an option.
"Disabled people have always been considered completely asexual or completely deviant with nothing in the middle," says Letch. "The fact is that we do have sexual feelings. To ignore that is irresponsible and may increase the risk of exploitation."
His comments are backed by research soon to be released by the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, at La Trobe University. As part of its "Living Safer Sexual Lives" project, 25 intellectually disabled adults were interviewed and asked to talk specifically about their experience of sex and relationships. What emerged supported previous suspicion that intellectually disabled people are often the targets of sexual abuse.
"One man told us he'd been taught that sex with his peers was wrong, independent sex was wrong, but that sex with workers was OK," says Dr Lynne Hillier, the principal researcher on the project. "Many of the women said they'd been raped or sexually abused. In our motivation to protect these people, we are leaving them unequipped to protect themselves".
Lanyon agrees. He recalls one case that exemplifies the need for responsible sex education and access to safe sexual practice. "A woman came to our hospital for respite care. She kept complaining of vaginal pain," Lanyon says. "We discovered that she'd been using a hair curler as a sex aid and part of it had got lodged inside her. Her disability meant she didn't understand what she'd done wrong. The skin had healed over and she had to have an operation to have the object removed.
We have a responsibility to teach people that if they masturbate, they do so safely."
Even conservatives dealing with disability accept the need for sex education. But how to put the theory into practice?
"We've created a brand new race of people through medical and scientific advances," says Letch. "In the past people with disabilities or suffering accident or trauma would simply have died. The problem is that technology hasn't caught up enough to allow their complete inclusion in society.
It's still thought that disabled people shouldn't have sex" But they do. Or want to.
"We're tired of being told that we had the right to have sex,'' says Ingrid, a member of the ACCSEX forum. "We want to see some practical solutions to be mooted for us to get access to sexual relationships". Access in the form of sexual surrogacy -- perhaps where people with disabilities are assigned a sex worker to teach them about sexual experience, or access in the form of a social club - modelled on the Outsiders Club in London - that enables people with disabilities to meet and form relationships."
Jai Guru Dev (this means I'm acknowdging the spiritual "spark" in you!),
"Sundari - pronounced Soon(like lun in 'lunatic!')-DHE-ree" [my e-mail name].
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