Elsevier

Women's Studies International Forum

Volume 31, Issue 5, September–October 2008, Pages 327-335
Women's Studies International Forum

Disability and the male sex right

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2008.08.001Get rights and content

Synopsis

Access to prostituted women is increasingly justified by disability charities and services on the grounds of the sexual rights of the disabled. In Australia, for example, disabled men form a niche market for the legalised prostitution industry. Male sexuality is constructed out of male dominance and is likely to manifest the eroticisation of hierarchy and the idea that males should have the sexual right to access the female body. This model of sexuality poses problems for all women in the form of sexual harassment and violence, pornography and prostitution. It poses particular problems for women with disabilities who are more vulnerable to sexual assault and harassment from carers and disability fetishists. The sexual rights idea does not generally take gender into account. Thus sexual rights for men with disabilities can include the right to pay for or demand sexual servicing from women in prostitution, nursing or caring work. This article seeks to disaggregate the notion of sexual rights according to gender.

Introduction

In this article I will look in an exploratory way at several issues concerning disability and sexual exploitation that might seem at first to be distinct. They include the sexual abuse of women with disabilities and the prostitution of women with disabilities, the exploitation of prostituted women by men with disabilities, and men's sexual fetishising of women with disabilities. The connecting factor is the sexuality of male dominance. In relation to sexuality, disabled men may pursue interests that are in stark contradiction to those of disabled women. Organisations supporting men with disabilities campaign for their sexual rights which may mean using pornography and prostituting women. These forms of sexual exploitation teach and represent an objectifying sexuality. It is precisely this form of sexuality that disabled women suffer from, in the form of unwanted sexual contact and the fetishising of disability. It is important to disaggregate the interests of men and women when considering the issue of disability and sexuality.

Feminist disability theorists have been working for three decades to provide an understanding of disability which takes gender into account (Morris, 1989, Fine and Asch, 1988, Matthews, 1983). They have pointed out that women with disabilities can be seen as at least doubly disadvantaged i.e. by discrimination on the grounds of gender and disability, and often by a third form of exclusion and discrimination in the form of racism as well (Begum, 1992). They have shown that the model of rehabilitation of people with disabilities that the medical model of disability promotes, has a male body and male sexuality in mind. Rehabilitation programmes seek to cultivate ‘competitive attitudes’ and address ‘concerns about male sexuality’. They are about ‘enabling men to aspire to dominance notions of masculinity’ whilst ignoring the needs of disabled women (Begum, 1992: 72). Feminists have criticised the understanding of sexuality that is applied to women with disabilities by doctors, in which they are seen as functional if they have a usable vagina for a male partner's satisfaction. This is a very masculine model which does not countenance women's pleasure, the clitoris, and more imaginative approaches which do not have to be focused on penis in vagina sex, or even heterosexual (Titchkosky, 2000). Feminist approaches to disability have given little attention, however, with the notable exception of the work of Amy Elman, to the need to disaggregate the concept of the sexual rights of the disabled (Elman, 1997).

Feminist theorists have also criticised the limitations of the ‘social model’ of theorising disability. This article starts from the understanding that disability is to a large extent socially constructed (Oliver, 1990), an approach that has been termed the ‘social model’ of theorising disability (Lloyd, 2001). According to this approach the problems that women with disabilities face are not the sad but inevitable result of a biological or acquired flaw, and an individual responsibility. The disabled experience problems such as violence and penury because the societies in which they live do not acknowledge persons with disabilities and want them to be ‘out of sight, out of mind’ (DVIRC, 2003). The values of capitalist societies based on male dominance are dedicated to warrior values, and a frantic able-bodiedness represented through aggressive sports and risk-taking activities which do not make room for those with disabilities. Feminist critics have pointed out, however, that the social model can reproduce a form of mind/body split, by downgrading the lived experience of the body which is not merely a social construction. It can serve to obscure the very real experiences of pain, for instance, that women with disabilities face (Titchkosky, 2000). Women's physical experience of impairment will affect the ways in which they are vulnerable to men's violence, and the forms that this takes. But sexual violence against women with disabilities is also a classic example of how the problems of disability are socially constructed. This violence is founded on the male sex right, a construction of male dominance, and enabled by economic, mobility and emotional factors that women with disabilities suffer as a result of the obstacles placed in the way of their integration into an able-bodied world.

The sexuality of male dominance is based upon what the political theorist, Carole Pateman, calls the ‘male sex right’ (Pateman, 1988). This is the privileged expectation in male dominant societies that men should have sexual access to the bodies of women as of right. Such societies organise delivery of this access to men, and the removal of obstacles, in various ways. This can be through the provision of legalised prostitution or the tolerance of illegal prostitution. It can be through enabling the creation of other aspects of the prostitution industry such as pornography, strip clubs and sex phonelines (Jeffreys, in press-a). It can be through child marriage in traditional societies or the early sexualisation of children in the west (Moschetti, 2006).

In relation to disability this law of the male sex right leads men and boys to sexually abuse women, girls and boys made vulnerable to them by virtue of their dependence on male carers, or through institutionalisation. It leads to the provision of prostituted women to men with disabilities (see Sullivan, 2007), the provision of what are euphemistically called ‘sex surrogates’, or even the requirement that nurses and carers masturbate men with disabilities, which is called ‘facilitated sex’ (Earle, 2001, Davies, 2001). It also leads men who fetishise and get sexually excited by women's disabilities to harass women amputees and seek sexual access to women with disabilities through various forms of exploitation and trafficking, the mail order bride business, prostitution and pornography (Elman, 1997).

The fetishising of disability comes from the way in which, under male dominance, male sexuality is constructed to eroticise hierarchy and to objectify. As the radical feminist legal theorist, Catharine MacKinnon, points out, gender is a hierarchy, and it is the eroticising of male dominance and female subordination that forms the foundation of what is commonly understood as sex in male dominant culture (MacKinnon, 1989, Jeffreys, 1990). The eroticising of hierarchy by men is not restricted to gender. Other forms of hierarchy are eroticised too, such as age in paedophilia, race in relation to the racist sexual stereotyping that underpins the male interests of using exotic prostituted women, such as those who have been trafficked or are available in sex tourism destinations (Jeffreys, 1997). Disability provides another hierarchy for eroticisation. Women with disabilities offer the double delights of gender inequality and disability as sources of sexual satisfaction to dominant male sexuality. Thus some men come to fetishise women's disability (Elman, 1997). Some of those men who sexually fetishise disability seek to become disabled themselves, usually through amputation of limbs (Elliott, 2003). This condition is commonly called amputee identity disorder or BIID (Body Identity Integrity Disorder). The power and influence of the male sex right is indicated in the fact that a movement to get amputation of healthy limbs available to such men is under way with the support of respected psychiatrists and surgeons, such as the editor of the US Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Michael First (First, 2004).

Despite the rather clear differences in the ways in which male and female sexuality are constructed under male dominance, when disability studies have approached the issue of sexuality they have not usually disaggregated the interests of women with disabilities from those of men with disabilities. When sexuality is addressed in the literature this often fails to mention the problem of sexual exploitation that women with disabilities face. The definition of sexual exploitation that I use comes from the United Nations Draft Convention Against Sexual Exploitation (1991) in Defeis (2000, p. 335).

Sexual exploitation is a practice by which person(s) achieve sexual gratification, or financial gain, or advancement, through the abuse of a person's sexuality by abrogating that person's human right to dignity, equality, autonomy, and physical and mental wellbeing. (For discussion of this Draft Convention and the text see: Defeis, 2000).

Prostitution and pornography are included in this understanding as sexually exploitative practices. In this article sexual exploitation means gaining access to sexual use of a person's body by means of any form of unequal power e.g. payment, force or its threat, emotional manipulation by someone in a position of power, superior age or knowledge. It is distinguished from wanted sexual interaction with equal desire and pleasure for both partners, freely entered into.

Section snippets

Unwanted or coercive sex in relationships and from carers

International research suggests that women with disabilities suffer significantly more from sexual violence than other women (Elman, 2005). In general women with disabilities are ‘assaulted, raped and abused at a rate of at least two times greater than women without, yet are less likely to receive assistance or services if they experience violence’ (DVIRC, 2003, p. 12). Some forms of abuse are unique to women with disabilities. Sexual abuse of a woman with a disability may include, for example,

The prostitution of women with disabilities

In legalised prostitution systems, such as those in most states of Australia, women with psychiatric disorders or intellectual disabilities are exploited in brothel prostitution. In Australia the legal brothel and strip club industry was worth 2 billion Australian dollars in 2006 according to an industry report (IBIS World, 2007, p. 4), though the illegal industry, much of it in the grip of organised crime, still makes up around 80% of the industry (Sullivan, 2007, p. 202). There is no evidence

Disability fetishism

All manner of women's disabilities are offered to ‘devotees’ on sites such as ampulove. The range of pornography on offer demonstrates that there are men who get sexually excited about everything from braces on teeth and braces on legs to amputation (Elman, 1997). Amputation is the most common interest and offers three sub-specialisations. Devotees are those men who get sexual satisfaction from women's disability, particularly limb amputation. Pretenders are those who pretend to be amputees or

Prostitution and the sexual ‘needs’ of men with disabilities

Disability is an important niche for expansion by prostitution industries. The sexual rights of the disabled are employed as a way to make prostitution respectable and to suggest that it serves a noble purpose. Thus the sex industry lobby group, Sexual Freedom Coalition, in the UK, staged a demonstration of disabled men against proposed legislation that would have restricted men's rights to access prostituted women in February 2008 (Sexual Freedom Coalition, 2008). A 2008 documentary, aired on

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