The Sexual Needs and Rights of People with Impairments
This first chapter deals with myths about sexuality and impairment, namely what are the current myths and how are we affected by them?
Sexual experience is a learning opportunity also and people with disabilities have less opportunity than others to find out what their sexual likes and dislikes are. If they never find a partner they will forever wonder about this and the frustration they may feel will be hard to cope with, especially if there is no privacy to masturbate.
As in the general population, there will be impaired clients who have high sex drives, as well as those with no interest in sex at all, and a whole range of people in the middle, some of whom may have enjoyed a good sex life prior to becoming disabled but now with illness and medication have decided to live and love without it.
There are two outlooks: one says that providing opportunities for sexual expression for disabled people gives them a false sense of what is possible and breeds discontent, so taking the option away is kinder in the long run. The other view is that if we start from a point of realisation that we all start life with a sexual potential, and some people develop this fully while others never do, we leave the door open for this to happen if it is right for the client, and in providing sex education, an open forum to ask questions and opportunities to make and develop friendships, those of people who wish for sexual experience are enabled to find it. Time and again, disabled people have confounded their advisors and consultants and become sexual beings, married, given birth and undertaken enormous challenges. We may think we know what’s best for them, but we have no right to impose this on them, when perhaps the biggest myth we hold on to is that they cannot make decisions for themselves about this.
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