“A revealing beauty, an erotic dance, spellbound eyes, but the last secret is not revealed: A tiny privacy preserved from utter surrender …”
Anastasia Umrik, founder of the German modelling/photography project AnderStark. More photos at the link.
To the anon who had a problem with me reblogging posts from devotee(s).
I’m not really sure what to say to you. (Some of the terms you use in your message make me think I probably can’t say anything adequate, because they are terms that indicate ways of thinking/communicating that I really don’t understand. But I feel I need to respond somehow. That’s also why I’m not quoting the actual message here.) But… you say “I thought this blog was about breaking the stigma of disabled bodies, not fetishism”. I’m struggling to understand the difference you mean here, so I think I need to try to explain how I feel about “devotees” and “fetishism” more generally in the hope that I cover what you want to know.
I don’t identify myself as a “devotee”. I feel very ambiguous about both the word and the community. But the tumblr blog “devotee” (which isn’t the only devotee blog I follow, or reblog from - there are several others which I know are run by people who do identify as devotees) is one that I follow, and sometimes reblog posts from, simply because it’s a source of photos of sexy disabled people. There are a lot of posts on there that I don’t reblog. A few because I don’t feel completely comfortable with them “ethically” (like the ones that are non-disabled models posing with wheelchairs/crutches/other “disability equipment”, or photoshopped to remove their arms or legs, which I can’t exactly say why I think they are ethically problematic, but it sort of feels like being dismissive in a nasty way to real disabled people), more because I happen not to find that particular photo sexy/attractive/whatever. But some I do like, and I reblog them. I’m not completely sure if there are any other pictures from devotee in my queue right now, but I can’t guarantee either that I will or that I won’t reblog more from there in future.
(If you want to avoid anything with the word “devotee” altogether, my advice is to use one of the programs that block posts containing particular words from your dashboard. I don’t use them, but I know people who do. I think one of them is called Tumblr Savio(u)r?)
Now to “fetishising”… I don’t know exactly what you mean by that term. Some people seem to use it in a way that means something universally bad. Like treating people as objects or not human or something. Other people seem to use it in a much more neutral way, just to mean something that a person has a strong sexual attraction to that is outside what it’s considered “normal” to be sexually attracted to. Like things like a foot fetish or a leather or PVC fetish, as well as things like a disability fetish. That’s the use of the word that I’m more used to among people I actually know. When I was at uni (briefly, before dropping out) one of my friends started a “Fetish Society”. I think now the same thing would be more likely to be called the BDSM society or maybe the Kink society, because of how communities and the terms they use seem to have shifted in the last 10 years. But I have always liked and got on well with people in the fetish/BDSM/kink communities, even though I don’t have any interest in the dominant/submissive relationship thing that seems to be the commonest thing people in those communities are into. (I do like/get turned on by some of the imagery, like chains and bondage and stuff, if it’s on a sexy person, and maybe I’d like to try some of the more physical things, like spanking or being tied up. But I don’t like the idea of a relationship in which one person is supposed to be “dominant” over the other and the other person “submissive” to them. But that’s off the point.)
I have problems with the “devotee community” in particular. The way some people in that community act is really horrible and I don’t want to excuse that or look like I support it. Things like stalking people or taking photos of people without their consent are always wrong. And a lot of the stereotypes that some devotees seem to believe in or be attracted to are really nasty and disablist as well. Things like seeing disabled people as helpless or pathetic or as someone easy to control, or being turned on by people being somehow “broken”. I don’t like that and I don’t identify with that. But I think a lot of this is related to the other thing that puts me off the devotee community, which is that it (or what I have seen of it) is very much dominated by straight men - and all that stuff is how straight men typically treat women, whether they’re disabled or not. I don’t at all think that being specifically attracted to disabled people is either in itself bad or in itself linked to those kinds of stereotypes or those kinds of sexist and oppressive behaviour.
I knew I was specifically attracted to disabled people before (about 10 years before, in fact) I knew I was a disabled person. I didn’t know why I was attracted to disabled people (still don’t really know why). But finding out about the “devotee” thing did (at first) make me feel like I wasn’t a completely unique monster. Like being attracted to disabled people was actually a thing, that other people felt as well as me. Although things about the devotee community didn’t appeal to me. Like the fact that most devotees only seemed to be attracted to very specific impairments (mostly arm or leg amputations, or sometimes paraplegics). Whereas for me it’s all types of noticeably disabled people. (And I’m not completely exclusively attracted to disabled people. There are non-disabled people that I find attractive, and that I have had fairly serious crushes on. But if there were 2 people who were otherwise equally attractive and one was visibly disabled and the other not, I’d always be more attracted to the visibly disabled one.) And then I found out that lots of disabled people hate devotees, and that the reason why is how shitty a lot of devotees treat disabled people. But like I said, I don’t think that’s unique to devotees, I think it’s the same as how men treat women pretty much everywhere. And I really don’t understand when disabled people hate the whole idea of someone being specifically attracted to disabled people. That feels like a woman hating the fact that some people are specifically attracted to women, which really isn’t the thing to hate about things like sexual harrassment.
Then, years later, I found out about autism and that it’s possible for people to be autistic who can talk and do well academically in a “normal” school, and who weren’t diagnosed in childhood. And I realised that I actually am a disabled person. And that added a new dimension to me being attracted to disabled people (like was I recognising something that those people had in common with me all along, and was that adding to the attraction? And maybe some of why the things I found attractive about disabled people were different from what most “devotees” seem to find attractive about disabled people). But it didn’t completely explain it, because I definitely have a sexual attraction to noticeably disabled bodies that is separate from identifying with other disabled people. I still don’t really know why I have that (and why other disabled people who only got diagnosed as autistic, or dyslexic, or whatever, as adults don’t). I don’t know whether it should or shouldn’t be classed as a “fetish”. But I know it is by at least some people’s definitions.
So… I’ve gone on for ages. I don’t know whether the attractions I feel towards disabled people are bad or “dehumanising” or treating people as objects. Some people seem to talk as if all sexual attraction that’s to a body type or to someone’s physical appearance rather than to the “whole person” is that. But I’m pretty sure that (for me, and I always thought for most people) being sexually attracted to a person just by looking at a picture of them is something that just happens without really having any choice or control over it. Maybe some people don’t feel any sexual attraction just from looking at a person, but only from getting to know them in “real life”. And there is definitely a difference between looking at a person and thinking “that person looks sexy” and actually wanting to have a relationship with that person. (I have no idea whether I would want to have an actual relationship with any of the people I post pictures of on this blog, because I don’t know them. I only know that they are sexy to me in the one dimension of looking at them.)
I’ll stop here although I don’t know if I’ve said what I wanted to. What I made this blog for is to show that disabled people can be sexy and beautiful and to celebrate the sexiness of disabled people. I don’t necessarily see that as being about (or only about) “breaking a stigma” - I chose the word “sexy” in the title of this blog deliberately. Breaking a stigma is part of it because there is a stigma attached to disabled people’s bodies and sexualities. But this blog is about sexual attraction, and if any blog that is for pictures of people that someone finds sexy is fetishising then I guess this one is too, but I don’t think “fetishising” has to mean treating people badly.
