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David Banbury never tires of the shocked looks
on women’s faces when they see he has an
erection.
He’s not a trench-coat wearing flasher.
He’s just sick of being typecast as an asexual
retard.
“New carers or fellow swimmers at the pool
have been caught with a look of
surprise and shock when confronted with my manliness
in all its glory,” the Brisbane academic
says. To a woman, on their face is written their
puzzlement: ‘he’s paralysed, but look
at THAT’.”
A regular thirty-something professional who also
happens to be quadriplegic following a car accident
days before his 21st birthday, David says being
immobilised from the neck down is vastly underrated.
“Getting a car park close to the door of
a busy shopping centre or never having to queue
leave much to be desired,” he says. “But
there is one, very unspoken, but big advantage:
Although my legs don’t work, this isn’t
true for everything below the waist, a fact which
almost nobody is aware of.”
As a bloke who’s as interested in scoring
a shag as he ever was, Banbury is fed up with
the squeamishness and lack of information surrounding
wheelchair sex.
“This is a taboo subject and there is virtually
no official advice or help,” he says. “Ask
any rehab centre what they do for sexual rehab
and you won’t blunt your pencil with the
response.”
While everyone with spinal injuries has different
sexual capabilities,
healthy male quads are often the home of the non-stop
stiffie. The penis is
engorged by a signal from the autonomic nervous
system which means erections are easy. Having
an orgasm is more problematic. The signal to ejaculate
just doesn’t make it from the brain to the
wedding tackle.
“Maybe you have seen the TV show Quads
on SBS,” David says. “Now you know
why Franny, [Reilly O’Reilly’s] girlfriend,
is always up for it in almost every episode. When
bonking a quad there is no such thing as a quickie.
Any fit
girl can keep going as long as she’s got
the stamina. And of course, there
are no arguments about who’s on top. Moreover,
most quads are also happy to play the mouth music
and use their tongues in ways undreamt.
“I have to say though, that one of the
big things I’ve learnt as a quad is penetrative
sex is not the be all and end all. I have a much
greater appreciation of satisfying my partner,
emotionally and physically.”
Liz Bray, a 26-year-old Perth student, spent
two years in a relationship with a paraplegic
and says it had a profound effect on the development
of her sexual consciousness.
“His disability rarely registered,”
she says. “Most of the time, I didn’t
realise he was in any way disabled, unless the
wheelchair wouldn’t fit through the doorway.”
Liz’s lover was a strikingly handsome man
who had a new girl every week.
“They’d jump on his lap in nightclubs,”
she says. “They were the empty girls, who
only wanted to know what it was like to be with
a paraplegic. They more often than not only had
one night to find out. He tired of their curiosity.
I spent two years exploring. He took me on a journey
of embodied discovery.”
Liz remembers sucking her lovers’ feet
- acutely aware of the privilege of feeling what
he could not. She recalls the way he’d only
sweat above the line of his paraplegia - from
the nipples up.
“We only knew if I was hurting him if his
legs involuntary spasmed, indicating pain or discomfort,”
she says. “It’s also how we knew where
that cigarette butt ended up in dark nightclubs.”
Liz’s partner only ever achieved fleeting
erections, which resulted in a radical shift in
her definition of what constituted sex.
“That sex must involve climax and/or penetration
became my teenage myth,” she says.”
This high-school mentality was left at the foot
of my paraplegic lover’s bed. I never looked
back.”
Sadly, these stories of love, sex and possibility
are almost totally absent from mainstream media
coverage of disability. A search of Australia’s
newspaper databases by News Ltd’s librarians
came back with a sum total of zero stories. The
internet offers slightly more material but most
is of the clinical variety. A complex human interaction
is reduced to plumbing only.
One interesting exception is the controversial
UK-based Outsider Club which was established by
an able-bodied sex activist called Tuppy Owens
back in 1979 (see http://www.outsiders.org.uk/framesfiles/index.html)
.
Owens came up with the idea of a sex group for
disabled adults after a close friend became blind.
She began taking her mate to parties where she
would describe to him in great detail what other
women were wearing.
It’s a shame this feisty sex-vocate and
former porn star wasn’t around back in 2000
when Kathleen Ball went to court claiming that
she had been kicked out of an Australian swingers’
party because she arrived in a wheelchair.
A federal magistrate eventually ruled that Club
Jacaranda was effectively an illegal brothel and
that its activities were anti-social, an affront
to the public conscience and against good morals”.
Discrimination laws, therefore, should not apply.
But Ms Ball, who has muscular dystrophy, still
claimed the case as a victory because it had raised
community awareness of disabled people and their
rights to a sex life.
The National Director of the Quadriplegic Association
of South Africa (QASA), Ari Seirlis, agrees that
it’s crucial for people with spinal cord
injuries to get back into the dating and mating
game. But he says his peers often dress badly
because they feel appearance no longer matters.
“Guys,” he implored a recent gathering
in Durbanville, “You have to look at your
dress sense. How often do you change your underwear?
Polish your shoes? Clean your nails?
“Let me tell you, if I am on a dance floor,
the minute a woman hangs her bag on the back of
my wheelchair, I’m one up on the guy she
is dancing with. Because she has to come back
for her bag, and I’ve got time to think
up the best chat-up line ever.”
David Banbury finds clubbing tough but says there
are advantages to being situated at breast or
groin level. Wheelchairs are also handy for encouraging
women onto your lap for a snog.
“If you become sexually active after a
spinal cord injury, it will change your life.
It is like learning to drive - you don’t
feel like a disabled person anymore,” Seirlis
concludes.
“You will have to throw away the Kama Sutra
with its 169 positions, but you will find seven
that you like, and most of them will probably
be new to your partner.”
* Some details in this story have been changed
to protect the privacy of interviewees.
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