I get asked the following question a lot:
‘What’s your favourite story of all time?’
I always reply with the same answer:
‘My favourite story of all time is the one about the guy with no arms who got to lose his virginity to the sexiest bitch, (his words), in the whole school'.
And why, you ask, why do you love this story so?
I love it because it challenges what I think I know about people. It challenges the subconscious assumptions that we make about people the very first time that we meet them.
’I bet his first time was difficult’. That’s what was going through my mind, consciously or not, the first time that I met Charlie. I based my shortsighted assumption on the fact that Charlie has very little in the way of arms.
Born in the early 1960’s, he was the unlucky recipient, via his mother, of a drug called Thalidomide. Thalidomide had various uses, but it’s most tragic was as a treatment for expectant mothers with morning sickness. With no trials performed on pregnant animals, the results, for over 10, 000 children and parents were devastating. Thalidomide caused serious birth defects, mainly in the shape of abnormally short limbs.
Short limbs were no barrier for Charlie Thomas. Ok, he couldn’t do any press ups, but what he lacked in physical prowess, he more than made up for in other departments. Handsome and charismatic, Charlie was inducted into the language of love by the school hottie, Stella. Stella had 'huge bosom’s, reeked of ‘teenage’, and sashayed down the corridor in a way that stopped everybody in their tracks’. She also rid Charlie of his virginity and when she had finished, she asked him this:
‘Do you mind having sex with my best friend? She’s going to college in a couple of weeks and she doesn’t want to be a virgin when she gets there.’
Errrrr, let me think about that for a moment. Let me just mull that one over. Let me just wonder to myself, shall I, having already had sex with the sexiest bitch in the school, also have sex with her best friend, the girl that I actually fancied more in the first place anyway?
I don’t think I need to tell you how that story ends but I do need to say the following:
‘I bet his first time was difficult’, is a mild judgement in comparison to some.
Yesterday’s Observer ran a fascinating story about Treloar’s College in Hampshire. Treloar’s is a college for physically disabled teenagers over the age of 16, and today they go public with a ground breaking ‘sexuality policy’ – one whose roots lay in a very sad conversation. At 17, and confined to a wheelchair with Cerebral Palsy, a female student asked a teacher, ‘Do you think it is alright for me, as a very disabled person, to fancy someone’? She went on, ‘will society think it’s disgusting?’
The answer to that is possibly yes. Some people will think that.
I listened to Alison Lapper talk on Radio 4 recently, as part of the ‘Sex lives of us’ season on Radio 4. A poll was run to find the most significant landmark work of art on the subject of sexuality in the last fifty years. High on the list – other entries included ‘Don’t Look Now’ and Channel 4’s ‘Queer as folk’ - was Marc Quinn’s sculpture of naked, pregnant and limbless artist Alison Lapper. ‘People don’t want to believe that disabled people even have sexual feelings, let alone actually have sex’, said Lapper. ‘It is still one of the greatest taboos in today’s society’.
‘The Goldfish’ sums up Radio 4’s list of entrants thus:
‘The shortlist is inevitably going to be controversial, but it is both pleasing and interesting to see the statue on the list. It's not that it is an erotic work, but the mere image of a naked pregnant disabled woman challenges so many preconceptions about disability and sexuality; the idea that we can't have sex and have babies, the idea that our imperfect bodies should be hidden in case we frighten the pigeons. It is great to have these messages considered significant alongside other works which explored sexuality and our attitudes towards it’.
The Goldfish will probably be pleased to hear that Treloar College plans to implement a policy that will ‘fundamentally change the ethos of the college’. Somewhere along the line, I think this policy will change a lot more than that. ‘Students’, the document states, ‘not only have the right to pursue sexual relationships, but they will be assisted physically and emotionally by specially trained staff’.
We’re all searching for the perfect relationship. Some of us have checklists; clipboards full even, of criteria to be fulfilled by a potential amour. Are you tall enough, fit enough, polite enough, smart enough? How much baggage are you bringing to the table? A suitcase? Five? An airport runway’s worth? Do you drink? Smoke? Snore? Leave your dirty socks outside the front door? It’s hard work in this day and age to find the right person to have sex with.
Imagine that, having filled all the above criteria; you then have to surmount the following problem - you are so physically disabled that to even hold hands, cuddle or kiss is impossible without assistance from a third party.
‘Before, if any student was caught in a sexually compromising position, they would be expelled’, said Jan Symes in The Observer, but physical relationships, argues Symes, are a basic human right for every individual, able-bodied or not. At least now at Treloar’s there is someone to talk to if a student wants to say, ‘I know I am going to die in a couple of years and I would like a relationship before that’, ‘I fancy someone of the same sex’, or, ‘I have erections because I am a 17 year old boy but I have no hand control’.
Amen to that.
In trying to round the strings of this story up, I hear only the words of 19-year-old Stuart Wickison in my head. Stuart suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy.
‘We all have this desire to lose our virginity. We feel we need to experience this ultimate pleasure to balance out the pain we have – not just physical pain; it’s psychological as well. It is as if we feel the only way to make worth of ourselves is to have sex. It sounds so crude, but I feel that to experience that is to live life to the full, to know the whole of life. We don’t have much time left. We have to live our 77 years in 20’.
Kind of puts things into perspective doesn’t it?
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