Brutal:
Let’s not kid ourselves on this particular topic. Two-arms-and-a-head can’t have sex. Doctors and other well-intentioned people assure me I can but that it will “just be different”. I say, “Go home.” In a movie a newly paralyzed man asked his doctor if he could still have sex and the doctor replied, “The short answer is ‘Yes.’” Wrong. The short answer is “No.” True, the unfeeling penis attached to the living corpse I drag around can become erect but what has that to do with me? It’s not a part of me- it’s part of the thing. But sexuality is just another of those areas where the bullshit is too deep to ford at any point. So let’s talk about paraplegic “sex”. Generally the whole joyful experience of being active and physical with a woman is seriously compromised, where it is not completely ruined, by my immobility. Running in the park, wrestling, playing, romping around, and all those types of sweet joyful things are gone. And in the bedroom too a great deal of what was there is either gone or might as well be.
With apologies to all of the Andrea Dworkin fans out there, I thought pretty highly of my penis. It was a source of pride and wonderful pleasure for me. As should be clear by now however, I don’t have a penis anymore. But what about the act of sex itself? Since I was injured I had “sex” once, with a woman I dated before. So she got on top which was more or less the only position available and had a go at it. The experience was bizarre to say the least. It looked like other times I’d had sex with her, but I couldn’t feel it at all. Unless I watched, I could not even tell if my penis was in her or not. Does this register? A situation equivalent to my having sex with a woman would be if I were to hug and kiss her while she pleasured herself with a dildo. Still fun and sweet maybe, but let’s call it what it is please. In truth, watching a woman bob up and down on the penis attached to the corpse that used to be my body struck me as macabre and disturbing. It was like necrophilia. It’s like watching a woman get off by rubbing my amputated foot on herself.
And what about sex with a female paraplegic? The male in that situation might just as well be having sex with a warm ham. What I mean is that he can interact just the same with her upper half whether he’s got his dick in the ham or inside of her. Unless they were trying to conceive a child it would make no practical difference to her, just as she would not know, unless she watched, if he was having anal or vaginal sex with her, or if his penis was in her at all. He could just be bucking up against her and it would be the same to her. But here come the objections from the cripple gallery. Sex isn’t just about intercourse. Now I can concentrate on what is really important about love. I just have a shallow appreciation of intimacy with a woman. What I can do is still “sex” just as much as anything else. Those cripples should really sell their advice because there must be a market somewhere. Yes, one can have a nice time with another human being without having sex, but sex is what we are talking about here. And of course I can still lick some good old pussy. There’s nothing wrong with that but forgive me for saying that taking on the role of designated pussy-licker for the rest of my life takes some of the thrill out of things. No offense girls but surely you can understand. Many paraplegic women feel the same about sucking dick, by the way. Suck some dick or let him fuck your corpse. Those are the options. One paraplegic girl I know told me she has no interest in sex because of how disturbing the idea of a man having intercourse with the lifeless lower half of her body was. Her feeling, she said, was “Don’t touch that!”
Has everyone heard of Jack Handey’s “Deep Thoughts”? The joke is that it’s a stupid guy trying to say deep things, like “I’d rather be rich than stupid.” The following one basically sums up my feelings about paraplegic sex: “To me, boxing is like a ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the dancers hit each other.” The joke is of course that the two things are not alike at all. So to me, paraplegic sex is like normal sex, except you can hardly move, you can’t feel it, and your genitals are irrelevant. Think of it this way- can you imagine a male paraplegic and a female paraplegic trying to have intercourse for any reason at all? Why in the world would they, unless they were twisted in the head and trying to prove something that could not be proven? And have you any idea how impossibly awkward and ridiculous it would be?
Groucho Marx said, “I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.” There are many people out there with perverse tastes and desires and a group of them is called wheelchair/disabled “devotees”. They have websites. They say things like “Look at those sexy, floppy, lifeless legs!” I’m not making this up. Think of anything troubling in the world, and there is someone who gravitates toward it. Some might find it appealing that I’m so physically helpless. They might find security in being with a man whose body is broken or enjoy being more powerful in various ways than me. Maybe they could have a taste for the tragic and macabre. Who knows the exact reasons behind it? Do they sadistically derive pleasure from the degradation of their partners? Do they masochistically derive pleasure from debasing themselves? Do they lack self-esteem and need to be with “safe” partners who won’t leave them, finding security in being with a person of lower “dating value”? Or maybe wheelchair/disabled devotees are on the whole perfectly normal, psychologically healthy and wholesome people who just happen to find themselves sexually attracted to severely disabled people. Just kidding on that last one. Have you all heard the following sick joke? Question: What do you get when you stab a baby in the stomach with a butcher knife? Answer: An erection! That is how I feel about these “devotees”, but in their case the question is: What do you get when you see a human being with a horrible, ghastly, devastatingly disabling injury? The answer is the same, it seems.
Here’s something else to think about. In what sense do I now have a gender? Am I a male? Why? Because I’m hairy? Low voice? Beard? Brain? I’ll admit that the testicles on my corpse still work and put testosterone in my system. So? I watched a disabled man get interviewed and insist with pride that he was “still a man”. The audience applauded. But what precisely did that mean? That he was still tough and would not let this thing “beat” him or whatever? Fine. But how is that not also available to a woman? Why is that distinctly “manly”? Gender is something we take for granted in a sense, but when we try to pin it down we find that it is hard to get a handle on. I believe I have a male brain and that male brains are generally different in some ways than female brains. We generally have better senses of direction, they are more perceptive in certain ways, and so on. Gender is an amorphous concept for sure. The topic just now is sexuality though, so how am I that different than a lesbian paraplegic? No, sorry to say it but being two-arms-and-a-head certainly raises some question marks where gender is concerned. In one sense, it’s clear as day that I’m a male. One just looks at me and knows it. In another sense, I may as well have no gender at all.
Let’s look at some things I’ve heard said. “99% of sex is in the head.” This one, fittingly, came from a high-quadriplegic, who of course really was only a head. He claimed that his other senses were heightened, allowing him to presumably enjoy richer visual, aural, olfactory, and gustatory experiences than others could. Sounds like bullshit to me though there’s some chance science could back it up if more of the brain becomes devoted to those senses when you’re a head. And do you believe this “99%” business even for a second? Consider if a woman asked her husband: “Would you take a 1% loss in the quality of our sex life if I never complain about you hanging out in bars again?” So the husband answers in the affirmative and the wife says: “Okay, then from now on I will never touch anything but your head when we have sex.” Square deal? Will it fly? But why not? 99% of sex is in the head!
This from a man with a spinal cord injury: “The act of sex, I have since found, is not complete without the bonds of love and friendship that take years to establish.” Why would it make sense for such a man to say something like this? For sure, even some able-bodied people say things like this, but personally I’m not buying it. But doesn’t this make perfect sense to a man who can’t feel his penis or the lower half of his body? Yes, it’s not complete without those bonds, because you can’t feel the rest of it! And also he is likely to need a “supportive” and “understanding” partner, because he lacks so much and his condition is so horrible. And by this guy’s lights I guess I’ve never had a ‘complete’ sexual experience since I’ve never dated a woman for more than about a year. If only I had him around to tell me what I was missing before I got hurt.
Here’s one I love. “The occasional bowel accident hasn’t posed any major problem.” So not only is the guy fucking his girlfriend’s unfeeling corpse, but it shits on him “occasionally”. Sorry if I’m a pantywaist for it, but this kind of stuff makes me want to barf. So does having “sex” with high quadriplegics who are just heads. One in particular, in a video I saw, gets a woman to say on his behalf that “He can still fuck.” Someone please let me out of this madhouse! I can’t breathe!
They also tell you that guys can still have orgasms, but that they just have to learn to use other parts of their bodies as erogenous zones. That’s nice. I guess I can still feel most of my nipples, but honestly I feel a little silly asking a woman to suck my earlobes and nipples until I “orgasm”. That’s stretching things just a little in my book. Really, give me a break! Maybe it’s physiologically plausible in some strange way, but I’m not on board that train. If I want someone to lick my ear for an hour, I’ll get a dog and a jar of peanut butter because it would seem courteous to save my poor girlfriend the trouble. What if she did it for a really long time and it didn’t work? I wouldn’t want her to feel bad, right? So I’ve heard of “vaginal” and “clitoral” orgasms, but does anyone have advice on how to fake an “ear” orgasm? Is it ear-llatio or ear-ilingus?
It is generally agreed that sexuality involves more than penis-in-vagina and I’m not disputing that. Sexuality is everywhere. It’s in the way people move, in the way they talk, the way they dress. A physically strong and beautiful body is powerfully sexual and so is being capable of defending women in dangerous situations. When I held them in my arms they would tell me how safe I made them feel. They knew I was a fighter and they knew I had the courage to protect them if I had to. That capacity gave me a feeling that was very important to me. Now I’m completely fucking helpless in that regard. What I mean is there is no way I’m fighting anybody now. But this needs elaboration.
First of all I’ll just point out that most people have absolutely no realistic concept of fighting and physical violence. I’ve fought about fifty other guys. I’ve had the living shit beaten out of me a number of times, been knocked unconscious, put in the hospital to get stitched up more than once, and been punched and kicked in the face more times than I can count. I’ve also put other guys in hospitals for stitches, broken their bones, knocked them out, given them concussions, and so on. So I have a right to talk about fighting and honestly most people have no idea. I’ll give two examples. Once a girl made it very clear to me that she felt she would be a formidable match for me it a fight because she had gone through some self defense training. No, she meant it, and she weighed about 110 pounds. The truth is that I could have literally killed her in about five seconds: two to knock her out, three to stomp her head until it smashed open like a melon. And one I always love is “I don’t care how big a guy is, you kick him in the kneecap and he’s going down.” Remember that one next time a 260-pound defensive lineman is barreling at you in a murderous rage. It will come in handy.
So people run their mouths about fighting either with no understanding or because they want to sound tough and of course the members of the disabled community are no exception. A memorable clip from that movie “Murderball” shows Mark Zupan, a quadriplegic, saying “I’ve gone up to people who start talking shit and . . . I go ‘What you’re not going to hit a kid in a chair? Fucking hit me, I’ll hit you back.’” And I’ve seen paraplegic self-defense videos, heard quadriplegics talk about how they study martial arts and so on. So maybe for the inexperienced the idea that they could put up fights against other, able-bodied guys could sound plausible. But I know both sides of the coin and there is no paraplegic in the world who could even have come remotely close to being able to fight me when I was able-bodied. Don’t even fantasize about it. But there is one way people in wheelchairs can be effective in certain situations, specifically because almost nobody would ever think of getting physical with them.
It’s something like an old lady hitting you with her purse. What do you do in that situation? Surrender! You don’t even try to take the bag from her, you just get out of there and have a good laugh over it. And it’s the same with guys in wheelchairs. If a guy in a wheelchair had hit me I would have done everything I possibly could have to just get away from him because of how impossibly dishonorable getting violent with him would have been. Once in New Zealand I fought a guy and afterwards his friend, who was on crutches, dropped them and hopped toward me saying, “Come on!” and I was perplexed and told him flat out that of course I couldn’t fight him because he had a broken leg. So guys like Zupan say things like that maybe because they want to hold on to the idea of being physically formidable in comparison to normal guys, and maybe because their conditions are so physically humiliating that they would just love to take a beating from a normal guy because it would at least make them feel they were worthy of fighting.
But something happens when situations get violent. It’s intense and there is no longer any time for games. A switch goes off and any irrelevant distractions are filtered out and at those times cripples are irrelevant distractions. There is no way any cripple is going to effectively intervene in a violent situation. At times like that women and people in wheelchairs can generally be ignored. Why do I go on so much about this? Because it hurts so badly and once again I hate the lies. My fighting days are over. When you are a strong man there is a certain awareness you have of being in control of situations. It’s a kind of power. You know others are aware of it and that you can expect their behavior to generally stay within certain bounds. For instance if I was with the girl I love and someone wanted to call her a filthy whore in front of me they could feel because if I objected they could just say “Shut the fuck up cripple.” Because that’s really the correct response. I could to get in the person’s face but when it came down to it I might just be treating my girl, in addition to being called a whore, to watching me get dumped on the ground and laughed at. Maybe I could give a very small man some difficult but not an average or large one. Not a chance.
Being so physically helpless is very hard and humiliating. The idea of being at the physical mercy of almost every other man is miserable feeling. I went from having the potential to be extremely dangerous and intimidating to being like an old woman. That would perhaps been acceptable to me when I was eighty years old, but not at this stage of my life. Right now, as a young man, it turns my guts inside-out. You might have noticed that I have not spent a lot of time talking about my personal feelings up until now. How so much of all of this makes me feel inside. That comes in the next chapter. My feelings about sexuality are especially painful for me but it’s hard to pinpoint things because of the nebulous nature of the subject. Like I said above, sexuality is everywhere.
It’s true that girls are still attracted to me. Not the way they used to be but in a different way. I don’t have the same kind of powerful draw I used to. And part of the reason they are interested has to do with them not really knowing what they are looking at. I’m still a decent-looking guy with a comparatively muscular upper-body. They in part see the illusion though because they don’t register right away that I’m two-arms-and-a-head atop a corpse.
Women tend to look at me more as being ‘cute’ now. I’m like a puppy. But I still remember the way they used to look at me. I was good with girls and a lot of them liked me. I could see in their eyes how badly they wanted me. They would look me in my eyes, or make gestures with their bodies that said “You can have me if you want.” It was an immensely powerful feeling. I loved to be the object of their intense desire. I loved to show off my physical power and capability and impress them. Maybe it sounds vain but everyone knows this! Now I just see the way women look at all of these other young, strong young men who are on the road to prosperous futures. I see the same looks in their eyes that used to be for me. They don’t look at me like that anymore. I don’t see that adoring, hopeful, desirous look in their eyes anymore.
Wilfred Owen wrote a poem called “Disabled” about a young amputee home from war. I chopped it up to put just a few lines:
He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark
And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey,
Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park
Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,
Voices of play and pleasure after day.
About this time Town used to swing so gay
And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim
In the old times, before he threw away his knees.
Now he will never feel again how slim
Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands.
All of them touch him like some queer disease . . .
Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes
Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.
I’m having a thought here that I get often in writing this book and it’s the painful one that my efforts to get my feelings across are just hopeless. I don’t think it’s entirely true but still it’s an enervating thought I have to push through often. I try to speak precisely so you will understand me but feel that doing so takes away some of the power of what I’m trying to convey. My sexuality is gone! I am emasculated, castrated, impotent. The physicality of my sexual self, my power, my force, my virility, gone! Gone! I’ve gone from being a beautiful, vigorous, strong man to being an absolute monstrosity. A grotesque, hideous abortion.
Now when I was a young man I carried me pack
And I lived the free life of a rover.
From the Murray's green basin to the dusty outback,
I waltzed my Matilda all over.
Then in 1915, my country said, “Son,
It's time you stop rambling, there's work to be done.”
So they gave me a tin hat, and they gave me a gun,
And they marched me away to the war.
And the band played “Waltzing Matilda”
As the ship pulled away from the quay,
And amidst all the cheers, the flag waving, and tears,
We sailed off for Gallipoli . . .
Then a big Turkish shell knocked me arse over head,
And when I woke up in me hospital bed
And saw what it had done Christ I wished I was dead
Never knew there were worse things than dying.
And no more I'll go waltzing Matilda,
All around the green bush far and free
For to hump tents and pegs, a man needs two legs,
No more waltzing Matilda for me.
