People with
disability are just that, people. People who happen to have differing
capabilities and limitations. Anything which applies to people, in general,
also applies to people with disability. So, since many people in the broader
community choose to access, consume and participate in netporn, it follows that
many people with disability (being a subset of the community) also wish to be
afforded the same opportunities.
Table of Contents
Netporn, Sexuality and the Politics of Disability
Disability and Impairment, Modern Disability Theory[1]
Disability, Sexuality and Technology
Accessibility of Netporn vs. Classical Porn
Interactive Online Participation
People who are Blind or who have Reduced Vision
Erotica, Sexual Content and Censorship
Transcription and Description of Pornographic Content
Computer-Mediated Information Access
Netporn, Sexuality and the Politics of
Disability:
A Catalyst for Access, Inclusion and Acceptance?
By: Tim Noonan tim@timnoonan.com.au
There are very few treatments of netporn that recognize the specific characteristics, issues, and cultures of Internet users with disabilities. Nevertheless, there is a significant impact that netporn is having on people with disability, including issues of access, inclusion, consumption and changing social attitudes towards both disability and sexuality.
In a chapter describing the effects of pornography on attitudes towards sexuality, McKee concludes: “For many Australians it seems that pornography has helped their ‘participation in society’ by raising self-esteem, confirming identity and confidence, and building communities” (2005, p. 130). People with disabilities were not the subject of this study, but it seems logical to suggest that similar positive outcomes would be reported by disabled consumers of pornographic material.
Classical
paper-based porn formats can be very difficult or downright impossible for many
people with disability to access independently. For this reason, access to
online porn resources is even more crucial and significant for people with
disability, often being THE ONLY - rather than ONE of SEVERAL options for
consumption and participation. For online access to information to be viable,
awareness of the specific access needs and options for people with disability by
netporn producers and designers is paramount, but regularly overlooked.
Historically,
people with disability have been largely sheltered from all manner of sexual
knowledge, material and even opportunities for healthy socio-sexual expression
and engagements. Content which may be considered as very mildly erotic by a
person who has had longer-term access to a rich range of sexual content, could
in fact be powerfully exciting and arousing for another, less exposed person.
Accordingly, I don’t try to categorise or label netporn content in terms
of art, erotica or porn, my focus is on equivalent levels of access for all
across the gamut of sexual material from sex information and sexuality
awareness, through to erotica and what might be termed hard porn.
This
focus is supported at points in the article by anecdotal experiences from
people with various disabilities and their challenges and successes with online
erotic/pornographic consumption/engagements. The anecdotal data were gathered
from various discussions and email correspondence I’ve had with a variety
of people with disability, including some first-hand experiences of my own as a
blind person. They throw light on various elements of people’s personal
sexual lives, their sexual desires and experiences, the channels they use for
accessing and consuming content, and their subjective reporting of the impact
of such technologies in their day-to-day lives. All case study references,
including mine are anonymized, but all reflect real-life experiences and responses
of the people who have so generously shared their personal experiences.
A
variety of different disabilities are covered, but the greater focus is on
netporn and people who are blind or vision impaired. One reason for this is
because I believe that insufficient justice is given to the various non-visual
aspects of porn and netporn, and certainly compared with physical disability,
too little information exists which explores issues of blindness and sexuality.
Finally, I feel it’s particularly appropriate to write about material
with which I have direct experience, rather than predominantly recycling
existing theoretical concepts which exist elsewhere.
Disability
has largely been thought of as a deficient or terrible loss. The biomedical
model of disability revolves around an image of people with disabilities as
having bodies that need to be cured, fixed or at least treated and
rehabilitated, by the expert and professional efforts of medical and health
professionals, who – though they themselves usually do not have a
disability - all-too-often believe they ‘know best’. While the
charitable approach to disability is gradually changing it still is quite
powerful, more often than not positioning people with disabilities as
individuals deserving of pity, who should be assisted by caring,
well-intentioned benefactors.
More
contemporary approaches to disability significantly challenge these dominant
and dominating classical understandings. Informed by the movement of people
with disabilities that has arisen since the 1970s, disability is considered a
socio-political process. This understanding of disability draws upon the ideas
and work of what has been variously called ‘new’ or ‘critical’
disability studies. The central tenet of these studies is to radically call
into question the fixed idea of disability and its location in
‘deviant’, disabled individuals. In the British disability
movement, activists and scholars such as sociologists have famously proposed a
binary opposition between ‘impairment’ and
‘disability’. They suggest that impairment is the material, bodily
dimension - the ‘objective’ sensory condition of blindness, for
instance - as opposed to disability, which is what society makes of vision impairment.
The
proponents of the social model point out that many of the difficulties and
barriers people face are people-made and socially constructed. For example, if
information technology is not designed with the desires and capabilities of
people with disabilities in mind, then it can be disabling. Disability
does not reside with, or is not the fault of, the person with disability; it is
something brought about by an inequitable and even oppressive and careless set
of social relations. This perspective is documented in a study entitled Digital
Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media (Goggin and
Newell 2003). The study looks at how, time and time again, much vaunted
‘new’ technology is needlessly inaccessible to people with disabilities.
The social model has been critiqued by a range of theorists who have pointed
out the shifting and complex relationships between body and society, matter and
idea, nature and culture that are not well explained by a fastidious adherence
to this disability/impairment couplet (Corker and Shakespeare 2002).
There
is a small, but growing, body of literature examining disability and sexuality
issues. This subject, with a focus on sexual access for people with disability,
is explored in the fall 2002 issue of Disability Studies Quarterly. It
is interesting to note that the focus for requested submissions was largely on
issues such as facilitated sex, sexual surrogacy, sex work and the access
opportunities of those disabled people residing in institutions and more
structured living environments. Sensory disabilities (such as blindness and
deafness) and access to online information were not strongly reflected in the
journal.
The
introduction of the Quarterly explains the problem well:
“Obstacles
interfering with access to sexual expression and sexual relationships are often
quite similar to those barriers faced in attempting to integrate into the
majority society. That is, attitudinal constraints, lack of monetary and/or
programmatic access to personal assistance services, physical barriers, and
communication issues and transportation difficulties can all contribute towards
the prevention of full expression of sexuality. Unique to sexuality, however,
are the cultural meanings of sexual attractiveness and desirability, which
often combine with other barriers to compound the problem of sexual access for
disabled people. By sexual access we do not mean access to physical intimacy
per se. Rather, we mean access to the psychological, social and cultural
contexts and supports that acknowledge, nurture and promote sexuality in
general or disabled people's sexuality specifically.” (Shuttleworth and
Mona 2002)
In
a written keynote closing speech for the Queerness and Disability Conference 2002,
Eli Clare says: “On my bookshelves, you can find Best Transgender
Erotica, Bearotica, and Zaftig: Well Rounded erotica, all fiercely asserting
the sexuality of people whose sexualities have been marginalized. And now
it’s time for queer crips to join this line up, time for tantalizing
tales about queer crip sex. And if we don’t write them, then who
will?” (Clare 2002)
Google
searches on the internet glean a growing variety of educational materials and
resources relating to disability and sexuality, ranging from handbooks on
“Safeguarding People who use Augmentative and Alternative
Communication” (for example those people using speech synthesizers to
speak, as does Stephen Hawking) [2]; to the articles found on the Good
Vibrations website which explore the what and how of sex involving people with
disabilities [3]; and to dating sites such as lovebyrd.com: “For disables
singles lovebyrd.com is a place to meet single adult men and women who share
your challenge, handicap, disability or condition. Visit the chat room to chat
with members or visit the forums to read the discussions on love and sex - two
subjects of interest to singles of any ability, as well as more serious
discussions on disability health and other topics relevant to disabled women
and men of adult age” [4].
It
has been said that for every application of technology, a sexual application is
found. “Observers say porn and technology work together so well because
each meets the needs of the other” (Arlidge 2002). It can also be said
that for every netporn development, there will be people with disability who
will wish to participate in, or consume. This is because people with disability
are a sub-set of the broader community, being made of all people. Disability
(or impairment) may hinder what people with disability are able to do with
independence or privacy, but it doesn’t change the needs, wishes and
desires of this group. Whether people with disability can do so in practice is
one of the core themes explored in this article.
“The
major difference between Internet and other forms of pornography (magazines,
videos and so on) is accessibility. It is no longer necessary to go in to a
newsagent or join a mailing list in order to access pornographic images”
(McKee 2005, p. 120). McKee is speaking of accessibility from the perspective
of added convenience and timeliness. For people with disability the term
accessibility has largely to do with whether the service can be accessed with
independence. Therefore, access is one of the key issues for people with
disability. Depending on the nature of the person’s disability, access
barriers can take one or both of at least two forms: access to the physical
(built) environment and access to information.
Access
barriers in the physical environment may include steps, things out of reach
range, narrow or confined spaces, or objects which are difficult to manipulate
e.g. buttons and controls on self-service point of sale devices, manipulating
or turning the pages of a book etc.
Information
access barriers are commonly experienced by people with sensory disabilities
– blindness or deafness and by people with intellectual disability or
cognitive impairments. For people who are blind or vision impaired, online
developments coupled with developments in computer access allow fuller
participation. Textual information, which would normally be rendered to the
computer screen, can be converted into synthetic speech, presented in large
print on the display or accessed via hardware, generating real-time braille
output. Web-based services can be designed to be more (or less) accessible,
depending upon the conventions adopted, such as the World Wide Web’s Web
Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) [5].
A
quite enlightening but completely satirical article about the online porn site
implications of the UK’s recent Disability Discrimination Act highlights
the challenge of true accessibility of the internet, particularly considering
how it is one of the few significantly profitable aspects of the web:
“All the webmasters we spoke to remain unconvinced that there is any
technology that would allow them to make images of 'cum-slurping sluts' accessible
to the blind” [6].
People
with disability may also experience increased social isolation, or lessened
opportunities for diverse social engagement as well as not finding suitable
opportunities for meeting casual or longer-term sexual partners. People with
disability still can be, and certainly have been, sheltered from and have
reduced exposure to sexual education and sexual content. This may be due to
their decreased independence or the ‘caring’ environment they find
themselves in, which results in reliance on others for daily activities.
Many
people with disability are often treated as though they are not sexual beings.
This is a fact, not an assertion. A disability doesn’t remove an
individual’s curiosity about their own body and what it can be used for,
nor does it limit imagination. Too frequently an unbalanced power dynamic
involving the carer/institution is created with the individual who is the
recipient, whether due to fears, projection of values, codes of ethical and
professional conduct, or simply ignorance. Irrespective of the reasons for
greater social exclusion and certainly acknowledging that societal attitudes do
appear to be gradually changing for the better, it’s these social and
even unconscious practices which are the issue. I strongly argue that the
paradigm shift from traditional porn distribution models, over to the openness
of the internet has the potential to be profoundly empowering, enlivening and
satisfying for people with disability in general and particularly so for those
who are still being socially disenfranchised and protected. The internet,
circumventing classical information gate-keepers as it does, is truly
emancipating people with disabilities, socially, sexually and indeed in all
aspects of daily life.
Netporn
has the potential to enable many groups of people with disability to consume
and engage in ways that were never possible or viable through classic porn
forms. But in order for this to be achieved, thought and consideration of the
access needs of a wider range of potential consumers – including people
with disability – must become a key part of design, implementation and
marketing for all relevant technologies and services.
There
is now considerable literature examining gender and gender representation on
the internet: “If the Internet is a hostile environment for women, why
are women one of the fastest growing sectors of the population joining and
participating in the Internet? Gender issues exist in all areas of computing.
However, women have devised certain strategies in order to overcome many of the
Internet's previous barriers” [7].
I
would argue that similar parallels can be drawn between women and with people
with disability on the web, even though their presence may not be that directly
obvious. There are very few good estimates of the uptake of the internet for
people with disability, but in more developed countries technology and
disability is an ever-expanding industry. Just as gender is less visible via the
internet, so too is disability. People with disability can decide how and when
to expose their personal situation and behind their computers, they can and
usually are appearing the same as everyone else. So, depending on the context
and the medium, do they opt to explicitly disclose their disability or do they
opt to ‘pass’ implicitly or explicitly as a person without a
disability? Just as there were many women who via their computer assumed a male
persona and vice versa, so too there are a vast number of people with
disability who, largely through a marvellously telling assumption by others,
would appear to in fact be non-disabled. In fact, while online, such people are
indeed temporarily abled!
Dorian
says, “I’ve been in three significant long-term relationships, and
each of them started online. What I most liked about this kind of getting to
know people was that I could have time off from my disability, and people got
to know my personality, and my values, before they got to know about my
disability. It wasn’t that I hid it, but rather as is the case with my
homosexuality, I could choose when and how to reveal it. I can’t say
whether these relationships would have developed and turned into real life
ones, if I had been blind, at first contact, - but I suspect that perhaps they
would not have. Still, the downside was that I had to ‘come out’
about my blindness at some point, too early and I feared they would be scared
off; too late, and they would feel inappropriately deceived! Nowadays, I bring
it up earlier and earlier, perhaps because now I have a, so I am told, more
cool photograph of myself where I don’t particularly look blind, and I
guess I’m just much less scared of rejection these days.”
[Conversations with the author, August 2005]
Jen
is considered to be very attractive and gets a great buzz using her webcam to
have erotic engagements with guys, not letting them know that she is almost
totally blind. “I love the excitement and challenge of bluffing the body
postures and presenting body language so well, that the guys don’t
realize it. I can see just enough to have some confidence I’m looking
towards the camera. I think it also improves my self-confidence that in spite
of being blind, guys find me appealing, and that my disability is only a small
part of me. I’m also a bit addicted to voice chat over the computer, and
it [their voice] gives me a much better sense about the men I’m
connecting with.” [Conversations with the author, March 2002]
Jen
touches on a concept of portraying oneself online as the person one would
aspire to be. In attempting to display more natural body language, mannerisms,
head angle etc, she is actually learning and practicing a more natural
involvement in social activities. Because many people with disability may have
had less comfortable social experiences when growing up, and because (if blind)
they don’t have visual observation to model from, online communication,
whether dialogue through typing, voice or cameras, can lead to increased
confidence and effectiveness in social engagements online, and inevitably in
real life.
Dorian
relates a situation in the late 80’s where he was text-chatting online
with a guy for a couple of weeks, and had noted some slightly unusual
linguistic constructs in the other’s language, calling into question
whether the guy was as old as he purported to be. “One day I asked him
what kind of music he was into, only for him to say to me (a blind guy),
‘Oh, well actually I’m deaf, I’d rather chat about what
movies you are interested in?’ We met later and he thought ‘he
can't read my lips; I can't understand a word he is saying.’ I thought
‘God, he stinks, and ‘everyone’ knows blind people have
sensitive noses!’ ”. [Extracted from MSN chat transcript with the
author, September 2005] Interestingly, the computer had acted to diminish and
largely overcome each person’s respective disability, and allowed an
interaction to develop which could never have, and indeed did not, work
face-to-face.
Participation
in text-based virtual environments like Lambda.moo allows the user to develop
an online persona in the virtual environment. That persona can truly reflect
the person, as they perceive themselves, or it can present the kind of person
they would like to be or to become. Text-based virtual reality environments are
somewhat like a cross between multi-user chat, and text-based adventure games.
People who are connected can either interact with (type messages to) others
currently connected, or they can manipulate virtual objects through special
commands in the virtual space. Such text-based virtual reality environments are
used for any or all of the following purposes: they can present environments
for online collaboration and learning, facilitate learning about programming
objects in the environment, for developing and sharpening social,
communications and writing skills. In particular, they are locations where one
can meet and engage with one or more people who may share interests. Such
meetings may involve social or technical chat, can lead to fostering romance,
or – very common on some of the environments – act as virtual
venues for engaging in virtual sex (often termed netsex or tiny sex).
To
get a sense of how environments such as lambda work, as well as some
perspectives on virtual reality, object permanence, online addiction and
‘net sex’, the lambda moo transcript as saved by Colin McCalmac
(Samiam on Lambda) is a good starting point [8]. For an example transcript of a
net sex interaction between three members from an online community, and an
anthropological deconstruction of the interaction, see Marshall (2003).
Cotton
(his Lambda identity in the early-to-mid 90s) writes, “I spent a
ridiculous number of hours on Lambda. I chatted, explored, and searched for
virtual sex partners. The cool thing was that on Lambda you even could have
virtual clothes, and could Emote actions, as well as just speaking. As well as
making some good friends, from all over, I also ‘virtually’ dated,
snogged and got off virtually with several people in the lambda community. It
was pretty cool, particularly because I could follow the lead of people more
experienced with dating and courting rituals, and all the (normally visual)
actions were described in text. In real life, as a blind teenager, I had no
romance, a bit of faltering play, but none of those first base, second base
third base things, necking kissing, all of that stuff you see in the movies.
Lambda was helping me regain a lost past, a past where my disability seemed to
preclude everyday social/sexual experiences. I met a couple of my lambda
friends in real life, sometime later, and was pleasantly surprised how they
mostly matched my mental image of them.” (Conversation with the author,
August 2005)
Over
the last fifteen or so years, some blind people and people with other disabilities
have become regular users of telephone chat or so-called phone-dating services.
This is partly because of the anonymity such services offer, and more
particularly for blind people, because the human voice is a very natural medium
to express themselves and through which to read the temperament of others. Now,
some of these systems are also moving online, merging audio from PC users with
existing telephone users, or offering streaming video as well as audio. These
telephone services are covered in this article both because they are still one
domain of network-based sexual engagement for people who can’t afford or
easily use a computer, and because they are essentially employing the
ubiquitous telephone as an interactive voice response terminal driven by
significantly advanced computer software to pass voice messages from user to
user, in a near real-time fashion.
Emma
says, “I’ve found phone lines great for me, I’ve chatted to
some really interesting guys, and I’ve also worked as a phone-sex girl. I
loved that! They never knew I couldn’t see, they didn’t need to,
and I was a lot better than most of the other girls at knowing exactly where
the guy was up to just from his voice and breathing. I kind of read body
language through their voice, that’s a great asset in this line of
work!” [Conversations with the author, 2004]
People
with physical disabilities, who have reduced mobility, for example those who
use wheelchairs, can experience major access challenges in independently and/or
privately getting to bookshops, libraries and other locations where
pornographic and erotic materials are available. In Australia, certainly, adult
bookshops are secreted away often at the top of stairs or located in areas
where sidewalks are potentially less well maintained. For this group parcels
and mail are often collected by friends or family so there is less privacy,
even for mail-order options. With motor skills reduced some people find it
difficult or impossible to hold a physical book, or to turn its pages. Others find
inserting and removing videocassettes can be problematic.
In
the last twenty or so years, technology, and software and hardware options for
enabling people with restricted motor control to interact with such technology
have become quite well utilized. Alternatives to the computer
‘mouse’ and keyboards have allowed many people to engage with
computers independently. Netporn offerings available online have allowed this
group to find and select images, streaming video, interact with others through
webcams and text/voice chat etc, privately and independently.
David uses a wheelchair and is a frequent user of telephone chat services. “I’m in a sort of ok [real life] relationship, but it is a bit unsatisfactory on the sexual side. Because it’s not really cheating, I like the phone lines - I like to talk to other guys about sex, have phone sex, and fantasise about meeting up, but never have. It’s inconvenient for me to travel places, and because of my disability on one hand, and my seriously gym-built upper body, on the other, I am very memorable and well known around the place, so the anonymity of online chat is the best way for me to be discrete and no one is getting hurt. Because I never plan to really meet them, I don’t see why I need tell them that I am six feet tall (only when out of my wheelchair). And the other thing is that it’s nice to have some anonymity, some privacy, a break from all the endless questions about ‘how do you do this’ etc which I often get.” [Phone conversation with the author, 1994]
A colleague of mine was providing
computer access training assistance to a man in his thirties who had recently
lost his sight through an accident. One of the first questions he privately
asked her was: “So, are there any porn sites online for the blind?”
He then told her that seeing women, intimacy, sex and girly magazines were the
things he missed and wanted most since his vision loss. While he will not be
able to see images and actions on videos, he will be able to use his computer
to access a variety of materials, formerly only available in print. Erotic
stories, online chat, dating sites and net sex will all be options he can
consume, and as we have already heard, this could lead to a real-life connection.
People who are blind are arguably one of the groups most enabled by online
netporn developments, certainly textual and voice-based ones, as compared to
past options for access. Though porn is classically associated with visual
still or moving images, it does have many other forms, and with anticipated
developments in virtual reality, audio description and voice, its enablement
could continue to increase for people who cannot see.
Implicit and explicit censorship has
long been a concern to people who are blind. This largely stemmed from the
nature of the people or organizations who transcribed printed material into
braille or who made it available in audio. The large majority of these people
were well intentioned but sometimes biased volunteers, donating their time to
make ‘important’ information available to the blind. Religious
material, classics, and educational materials were the most commonly produced.
Romances and family-friendly adventure titles are also very popular.
Take a book like Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal, two recorded versions: One studio read and complete, the other read by an older volunteer in Tasmania Australia (which somehow had five paragraphs missing, to do with a (relatively tame by today’s standards) passionate night of lovemaking). An extraordinary coincidence, perhaps, but not uncommon for the time.
The
Braille edition of Playboy (produced by the National Library Service of the
Library of Congress) was discontinued in the sixties due to ‘funding
cuts’ until complaints lead to its reinstatement. It was commonly
believed at the time that this was a moral, not a funding decision. Of course,
only the articles were Brailled, the pictures not really being possible to
produce in accessible and meaningful form.
While
tactile diagrams have been produced for anatomy texts and sex education
materials, the kinds of images found in erotic and pornographic materials are
not really expressible in tactile form, nor would the subtleties be necessarily
understood in the tactile medium.
Technologies,
such as SMIL, and other multimedia standards for film production now exist so
that audio description and text captioning can appear along-side the visual and
regular audio tracks of online and DVD movies. While these technologies could
be used to add extra value to netporn materials, I am not, however, aware of
any porn equipped with descriptive soundtracks for people who are blind.
Moaning, screaming and distorted deep breathing don’t really tell the
entire story, especially when they often are not even synchronized with the
‘action’ on screen. With regards to an audio described porn movie,
the closest I’ve personally got to experience one was at an unplanned
after-dinner viewing of a new porn DVD, where two – not entirely sober
– dinner-guests did quite an admirable job of bringing the quieter parts
of the action to life, with their magnificently expansive and colourful verbal
descriptions of the stars, their assets and their antics. This real-time live
audio description was certainly considerably more informative and pleasant on
the ear than was the monotone narration from the main star, who was obviously
selected for something other than his talent for narration!
Erotic
literature in print form was difficult or impossible for blind people to access
historically, unless they could find a person who was prepared to read the
material to them. The Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB)
estimates that only 3-5 percent of printed information is ever made available
in formats accessible to people who are blind or vision impaired. (Kavanagh
2002) and of this, it is a certainty that only a minuscule fraction of a
percent of all the erotic literature in print is made available.
The
internet has indeed opened a world to people who are blind containing vast
quantities of textual erotica, whether from newsgroups dedicated to the
subject, special interest archives like www.nifty.org, or found on some commercial sites. This
material is diverse, and ranges from light reading, through to very specific
fetishes and genres.
In
recent decades, print-scanning optical character recognition technology, when
combined with text-to-speech synthesizers has meant that hither-to unavailable
printed material can be scanned, converted to text, and read in Braille or
spoken aloud by a synthetic voice.
Erotica,
as I am sure you can imagine, is not something that is brought most fully to
life when read by a robotic computer voice, where the pace of reading and the
inflections are perfectly consistent throughout. But, erotically enlightened
blind people will tell you the world-over, when compared to no erotic material
being available at all the synthetic speech versions can do pretty damn well,
when no better alternatives are available. Nevertheless, it takes some time for
listeners to initially acclimatize themselves to the nuances of their
computer’s synthetic voice. However, over time, for most listeners, the
voices’ unnatural characteristics move further into the shadows, much
like a speaker’s accent becomes less noticeable as familiarity by the
listener increases. That is to say, the message conveyed in the words,
progressively becomes less tainted by the constraints of the medium of a
synthetic voice.
If,
curious reader, you want to ‘see’ porn as I do, then I invite you
to listen to a short
erotic story read out via synthetic speech with permission by the author,
Agave. Proudly and sizzlingly read out loud by IBM's ViaVoice speech
synthesiser.
Online at www.timnoonan.com.au/PornAsISeeIt.mp3
More
recently, particularly with the flourishing area of Podcasting and audio on the
web, there is erotica available in the spoken word form, read by real people,
which adds a whole new dimension to the listening experience. One highly popular
example is some of the erotica readings by Violet Blue, as found on her Tiny
Nibbles website, even enhanced with occasional sound-effects such as
locking of chains and ‘bottom-smacking’ as heard in her podcast open source sex 04.mp3 [9].
In recent months an erotica exchange list serve has recently
been set up for people who are blind at
eroticaforblind-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and the following message was
recently posted to my blindness and technology list-serve, vip-l:
“Erotica for the Sight Impaired. We are a company which produces
tasteful, non-violent erotica. We would like to correspond with sight-impaired
people who have an interest in this area to help us plan a new web site.
Questions we have include: What is out there now for the sight impaired? How
can it be improved? What conventional erotica is there which interests the
sight impaired? What is erotic for you in your sphere of senses? If you are
interested send an email to jessica@feck.com.au.”
To
date, netporn has had a significant impact on people with disability and
particularly people who are blind or vision impaired. That impact has been on
the one hand unplanned and largely unthought-of inclusion and on the other
often unnecessary and even careless exclusion from participation. We
can’t change the past but we do have an opportunity to architect a more
inclusive and participatory online future for everyone.
But
as long as researchers, entrepreneurs, designers and marketers of netporn
persist in thinking of people with disability as a group set-apart from
everyone else, those in the netporn industry will remain destined to design
sites and services which are unnecessarily crippled, myopic and flawed.
Adherence
to open standards, accessibility guidelines, and interoperability, all
contribute to services which are more likely to be accessible. It’s not
just a case of specially designing for specific disabilities; it’s more
about designing content and services which are accessible to a diverse range of
people, with diverse capabilities and limitations. I am not particularly
advocating creating ‘special services for The Disabled’; but rather
am encouraging the development of well-designed services for all, as broadly as
possible.
More
research – both industry and academic – is clearly called for in
the emerging and flourishing domain we term netporn; research into the needs,
desires and interests of people with disability with respect to access and
participation in erotic and pornographic content. This will not only serve
those of us with disability, it will - just as importantly - enhance both the
quality and the usability of netporn services for us all!
By:
Tim Noonan
Professional Speaking: www.visionarycommunications.com.au
Access Consulting: www.timnoonan.com.au
Email:
tim@timnoonan.com.au
Tim
Noonan has been instrumental in providing blind Australians timely access to
daily newspapers and other information over the standard telephone and other
channels. He is a member of two Standards Australia committees as well as
having been involved with the Web Accessibility Initiative of W3C (the World
Wide Web Consortium). Tim is a professional speaker and is a frequent guest on
radio and TV where he engagingly examines issues of social inclusion and access
to emerging technologies. Tim has a B.A. majoring in cognitive psychology and
special education, and holds a diploma in Therapeutic Massage. He has more than
20 years professional experience in issues of accessibility and the disability
field with a special focus on technology.
[1] The following
three paragraphs are based on collaborative writing between Dr. Gerard Goggin
and the author. They are part of a chapter for a book examining blogging and
disability.
[2] See http://www.aacsafeguarding.ca/resources-sexhealthk&saac.htm.
[3] See http://www.goodvibes.com/cgi-bin/...../
[4] See http://www.lovebyrd.com.
[5] Available from http://www.w3.org/WAI.
[6] See http://www.utterpants.co.uk/news/sex/pornweb.html.
[7] See http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/soc/c..../
[8] Available on http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/.../
[9] From www.tinynibbles.com.
Arlidge,
J., “The Dirty Secret that Drives New Technology: It’s Porn”,
The Observer, Sunday March 3 (2002), http://observer.guardian.co.uk/...../.
Clare, E., “Sex, Celebration, and Justice: A Keynote
for the Queerness and Disability Conference 2002”, Scarlet Letters:
Sex, Celebration, and Justice (2002), http://www.scarletletters.com/...../.
Corker, M., and T. Shakespeare, Disability/Postmodernity:
Embodying Disability Theory, London: Continuum, 2002.
Goggin, G., and C. Newell, Digital Disability: The Social
Construction of Disability in New Media, Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2002.
Goggin, G., and T. Noonan, “Blogging Disability: The
Interface Between New Cultural Movements and Internet Technology”, A.
Bruns and J. Jacobs (eds.), Uses of Blogs, New York: Peter Lang.
Kavanagh, R., “The Erosion of Equitable Library
Services for Print Disabled Canadians’”, CNIB Library (2005), http://www.cnib.ca/...../.
Marshall, J., “The Sexual Life of
Cyber-Savants”, Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 14, no. 2
(2003), p. 229- 248. Also available at: http://www.findarticles.com/../
McCabe, M.P., and G. Taleporos, “Sexual Esteem, Sexual
Satisfaction, and Sexual Behavior among People with Physical Disability”,
Archives of Sexual Behavior, vol. 32, no. 4 (2003), p. 359-369.
McKee, A., “The Effects of Pornography on Attitudes
towards
Shuttleworth, R., and L. Mona, “Introduction”,
Special Issue on ‘Focus on Sexual Access for Disabled People’,
Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 4 (2002).
TN