I began to see the sheer breadth of people seeking connection — and the assumptions I’d internalised about desire, age, ability, and worth started to unravel. I spoke to clients in their 20s and clients in their 80s. One elderly gentleman in a wheelchair had his adult daughter arrange the booking for him. Another, a middle-aged man with motor neurone disease, needed help with logistics, but still sought intimacy. A respected psychiatrist would ask for “absolutely no talking”. A retiree just wanted to be cuddled and told that everything was going to be okay. Some requested elaborate fantasies. Others asked for nothing more than to feel normal – seen, desired, held.
It was, frankly, beautiful. And confronting. Because it shattered something I’d long believed: that only certain people get to be sexual. That desire is reserved for the abled, the attractive, the young. That illness cancels it out.
I read that as less of a “belief” and more of an “assumption”. Most people don’t think about paraplegic sex at any point on their life, so her assumption went unquestioned until she was prompted to by sex work.
This reminds me a series of “porn” pictures of a paraplegic couple having sex that sometimes pass around on the internet. It was like the third time I saw them that I leat that the pictures were requested from the couple itself to be shared on the disability community, to show up that disability dosen’t mean an asexual life.