
Divergent_Integral
Spastic ricecel, heightmogged by 99.74% of men
★★★★
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2020
- Posts
- 851
From an essay written in the 1960s by a disabled novelist. This stuff is quite brutal, especially for disabledcels, but I have to commend the writer for being so unflinchingly clearsighted and honest.
Link to the entire essay.
The least abstract and theoretical incentive the adolescent cripple possesses is the sexual one: his glands have undergone the normal disturbances, he suffers the normal torments and dreams the normal dreams. Unless he is particularly unattractive, he probably won't have much difficulty in acquiring a girl friend [not anymore in today's world, ofc], her feelings towards him largely genuine enough but inevitably containing a certain amount of pity and curiosity. He may be deeply in love and think he has detected signs of a similar feeling in her, and the relationship may reach quite a high level of mutual affection as the girl's original curiosity is satisfied and she learns to appreciate him for his qualities as an individual; but pity will rarely be entirely eliminated. Eventually a climax will be reached, a crisis, after which the affair will either plane down to a lower, more realistic level, or - and this is much more likely - stop abruptly. He will console himself by thinking that this kind of thing happens to everybody, crippled or not, and that there are other fish in the sea. But although one or two more may swim into his net, the odds are overwhelming that they will swim out again, and bitterly he will begin to realize that he is in for the lonely, perverted life of the enforced celibate.
The cripple is an object of Christian charity, a sociomedical problem, a stumbling nuisance, and an embarrassment to the girls he falls in love with. He is a vocation for saints, a livelihood for the manufacturers of wheelchairs, a target for busybodies, and a means by which prosperous citizens assuage their consciences. He is at the mercy of overworked doctors and nurses and under- worked bureaucrats and social investigators. He is pitied and ignored, helped and patronized, understood and stared at. But he is hardly ever taken seriously as a manfor reasons I have tried to indicate.
Of course, if he is intelligent he will have ambition, he will want to earn his own living and 'live a normal life' - he may even have hopes of marriage. But only the most determined and capable-and the luckiestever achieve anything approaching their ambitions: the going is too tough, the incentives are too theoretical.
Link to the entire essay.