Disabled people are once again being kicked around in a game of ideological football. This week the minister for the NDIS, Bill Shorten, ruled out the use of sex work services under the scheme as part of his efforts to impose austerity on a program that provides life-changing supports for more than half a million disabled Australians.
It does not take an actuary to recognise that, given there were just 228 requests in 12 months, the material impact upon the scheme of disallowing sex work services will be minimal. The discourse surrounding this issue, however, betrays a deeper undercurrent of social attitudes toward disabled people. Namely, that they do not have sexual needs, are not interested in sex and shouldn’t be having it anyway.
By virtue of its difference to the norm, the experience of disability is rife with opportunities for projection, where non-disabled people make assumptions rarely consistent with the lived experience of disabled people themselves. With regards to sex, we see evidence of caregivers projecting a state of perpetual childhood, marked by sexlessness, on to disabled people.
Taken to the extreme, these projections can lead to distressing scenarios like the forced sterilisation of disabled people, or the “velvet eugenics” of selective genetic screening that has greatly reduced rates of Down syndrome births. But even in questioning whether NDIS participants might need to use the services provided by sex workers, the spectre of these attitudes lingers: thinking about disabled people having sex, and using sex workers, means also thinking about disabled people procreating.
This reticence to accept disabled people as sexual beings can be observed in the popular TV series Love on the Spectrum, where autistic adults are coaxed into G-rated meet-cutes; very little, if any, airtime is given to topics like informed consent or safe sex practices. In the first series, an engaged (later married) couple are asked breathlessly if they’ve “consummated” their relationship, as though their being autistic precludes them from having a sex life.
In our research about interpersonal trauma in autistic women, we have observed the dangers of refusing to conceptualise disabled people as sexual beings. Parents of autistic young adults who believe their children do not experience sexual desire or attraction are less likely to provide developmentally appropriate sexual education and support to their children. Not only is this kind of thinking incorrect and dehumanising, it may also be dangerous. This kind of sexual education and support is particularly critical for autistic people – the largest cohort, as we are often reminded, of NDIS participants – who are uniquely at risk of sexual assault and exploitation partly due to a lack of appropriate information about sex.
It has been particularly disheartening to see Shorten team up with Senator Pauline Hanson this past week, given Hanson’s track record when it comes to her dehumanising rhetoric about disabled people. The optics of the minister for the NDIS joining forces with someone who believes disabled children should be removed from mainstream classes, implying they are a burden on the education system (to use just one example), is not just an odd-couple ideological pairing of sworn political enemies.
As Patrick Marlborough wrote in response, “Hanson’s view has always seemed to be that those she deems to be a burden on society have no real place in it. By shaking hands with her, Shorten has tacitly endorsed that view.”
Hanson’s comment that sex toys and sex work services are “not a necessity of life, as far as I’m concerned” also betray the puritanical attitudes towards sex that linger in Australian society. It is seen as something private, non-essential, taboo. Yet sex is a key element of almost every adult’s life, to some extent, and involves much more than penetrative sex for the purposes of reproduction: it covers our capacities to play, to connect with another person and to our own bodies, to release tension and to have fun.
Shorten’s assessment of the appropriateness (or lack thereof) of NDIS funding being used in this manner also betrays a lack of intersectional understanding of sex work. Many sex workers have a lived experience of disability themselves. In response to Shorten’s comments, the Deaf and disabled sex worker Katia Schwartz made an impassioned post on her Instagram. “Disability does not diminish one’s capacity for sexual expression or the ability to derive pleasure from intimacy,” she wrote. “However stigma, discrimination and a lack of access can often make sex and companionship unattainable to some people with disability.”
Under the social model of disability, there are many barriers to access that might prevent a disabled person from pursuing the sort of sex life they desire, whether it’s not being able to go on dates, being unable to access dating apps, or requiring manual support to have sex. Sex work can be an accessible and safe way for them to fulfil and explore those needs.
The purpose of the NDIS is to provide holistic support to disabled people in Australia to improve their quality of life. Sex and physical intimacy is a key component of anyone’s quality of life and, yes, disabled people get horny too. Deeming sex work services to be an inappropriate use of NDIS funding only “supports” disabled people on dehumanising terms that we would not accept for anyone else.
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Dr Clem Bastow is a screenwriter and critical autism studies researcher, and an NDIS participant. Dr Ali Schnabel is a writer and clinical psychologist who works with victim/survivors of sexual violence and autistic adults.