Attraction to disability is a stigmatic-eligibilic paraphilia which entails a sexualised interest in the appearance, sensation, and experience of disability. In some individuals, the attraction extends into a wish to be disabled. The attraction appears to be a minority fringe to commonplace erotisation of unusual physique. It has not been researched scientifically; the observations on it which follow are mostly restatements of consensual standpoints and incisive statements by those subject to the attraction and by interested onlookers.
History
Allusions to the attraction are found in, inter alia, Herodotus, classical Vietnamese legend, works by Bruegel the Elder, de Brantôme, de Montaigne, Pushkin, Brecht, Bulgakov, Dalí, Hemingway, Mayakovsky, von Stroheim, and Buñuel, and roles by James Dean. A number of living mainstream artists, cinematographers, dance producers, photographers and performers do not hide the fact that they are attracted to disability and/or that they are approvingly aware of the attraction. The phenomenon has become ever more widely known over the past century in waves coinciding with Interwar decadence, the Sexual Revolution, and the advent of the world-wide web. Today, it features regularly in Japanese anime and manga and is broached ever more openly in the visual and performing arts and the media. It has established a heavy, though largely apocryphal online presence.
Small informal networks of people (mostly men) attracted to disability had emerged by the 1920s, and possibly earlier. They were linked largely by correspondence and their members often assumed pseudonyms for the purpose. The attraction was broached in popular magazines in the 1930s and again in the 1970s. By the 1980s, a community involving those attracted and disabled people was emerging in the USA, with widely advertised regular weekend gatherings in large hotels beginning in June 1985 in Chicago. Gatherings continue to date across the USA (and elsewhere on an ad-hoc basis). A virtual world community has been coalescing since the 1990s. This comprises a rather fragmented set of numerous internet fora, chatrooms and p2p networks which serve as environments for ventilating members' feelings and general exchange. It is not a purpose-driven, monolithic lobby, yet sections of it are articulating meaningful strands of discourse.
The attraction has been subject to episodic and mostly highly superficial scientific interest since the late 19th Century, with some relative resurgence of interest since the mid-1970s. In scientific discourse, it is invariably described fragmentedly as opposed to comprehensively. Thus, most 20th Century sources (including the otherwise incisive Dr John Money, see References) present it as acrotomophilia, with no apparent awareness of the relatedness between the narrow attraction to amputees and the broad attraction to disability as addressed here. Likewise, most 1990s sources who record early case studies of apotemnophilia appear unaware of any relation between the narrow phenomenon they describe and the broad continuum of the attraction to disability.
Nature
Those attracted to disability ("devotees") desire disabled people. For devotees, disability does not reduce a potential partner’s attractiveness but boosts it significantly. The disabilities concerned may be minor like missing fingers, profound like blindness and (archetypically) amputations, or grave like quadriplegia. An extreme fringe of devotees desires people with cognitive disabilities. It appears that literally all detectable disabilities have their devotees.
The desire to acquire a disability appears to be an extension of the attraction. It appears that many devotees occasionally pretend to be disabled, though avowed "wannabes" number not more than five per cent of them. Anecdotal evidence links the attraction to disability with foot or shoe fetishism and/or cross-dressing in some individuals. At its extreme, "wannabe," stage, where those attracted in fact desire to become disabled, the attraction appears to involve elements of transsexualism.
Well over half of all devotees have felt the attraction since childhood (as is typical of the emergence of all paraphilias), often cherishing early memories of a trigger event involving objects of their future attention. About a quarter report discovering the attraction in puberty, and a few do so in sexual maturity.
In intensity, the attraction is rarely exclusive, ranging between optional and preferred in most devotees. It appears that wannabe elements emerge and increase as the intensity of the attraction increases, with wannabes seeming to feel their aspect of the attraction significantly more keenly than ordinary devotees. Thus, the attraction to disability may be represented as a continuum whose less-intense end features above-average sexual fascination with disability, with a powerful imperative to acqure a disability at its other end.
Preferences
A devotee's ideal preferred partner is a conventionally attractive person who happens to be disabled. They are at ease with their disability. Rather than resenting it, they do little to conceal it. In fact, their attractiveness grows in direct proportion to the extent to which they are prepared to parade the disability in contravention of socially established norms. This general statement is subject to a very significant proviso.
Devotees tend to have individual preferences: those desiring people with one disability may feel little or no attraction towards people with other disabilities. Alongside defining the nature of the preferred disability, preferences may define whether it is acquired or congenital, traumatic or caused by illness, 'ideal' elapsed periods since it was acquired, whether it involves more marked or subtler physical scarring, and even apparent trivia such as whether it affects the left or right side of the body. How coyly or brazenly the disability is 'worn' is also a preference area: most devotees call for candid revelation of it, with some insisting on 'camp' overstatement, while a tiny minority prefers understatement.
Evidence of the enormous variety of devotee preferences is provided by the very large number of very narrowly specialised devotee fora. Examples include groups dedicated to amputees with bandaged stumps, brides with disabilities, hook prosthesis users, hopping leg amputees, leg amputees who use pylon prostheses, non-users of prostheses, people with one short leg, et c.
Depending on the individual, preferences may be firmly or less firmly set. They may evolve to varying extents with time, usually broadening to involve a somewhat wider spectrum of preferred features and circumstances, but seemingly never 'leaping' from one type of disability to another. Individual devotees' exact personal preferences are rarely, if ever, replicated in others.
Preferences appear to be a key feature of the attraction. They seem to serve two purposes. First, they fix the appearance and circumstances of the initial individual trigger of the attraction (a fondly remembered 'first devotee event' or 'first sighting,' typically in childhood) and perpetuate and reinforce its influence through the devotee's later life. Second, they may act as an excuse which keeps inhibited devotees from establishing relationships (see Behaviour), since their precise preferences would be most unlikely to be replicated.
There are many indications that male and female devotees may have differing overall preferences. Thus, the preference for women who have lost a leg above the knee and walk with crutches appears most common among male devotees, while preferences for men who have lost one arm or are paralysed appear more common among female devotees.
Devotee preferences are overlaid over common attractiveness criteria, rather than supplanting them. Thus, a devotee may lament the fact that someone with his or her preferred disability has plain features or an unappealing character, and devotees routinely rank disabled people by looks.
Population
A distinction has to be drawn between the unknown number of people who feel varying types and degrees of sex-tinged fascination with disability but have not acknowledged this fascination or acted upon it in any definite manner, and aware members of the subculture who have come to define themselves as "devotees." This article focuses on the latter, with the proviso that the former's number exceeds avowed devotees several-fold (see Behaviour below).
In 1976, a company selling photographs to devotees had a clientele of about 300. As the world-wide web began rolling-out 20 years hence, devotees in dedicated fora numbered under 10,000. By 2006, the world devotee community comprised up to 100,000 members of several hundred dedicated internet fora. Duplication/multiplication of memberships, dead memberships, and the probable 'grey zone' of merely-curious or less motivated fora members would indicate that there were some 50,000 devotees worldwide by 2006.
By sex, it is widely reported that over 90 per cent of devotees are male, as suggested inter alia by the survey discussed on www.dysmelien.de (see References). This may reflect the fact that women attracted to disability (see the above distinction between aware devotees and others) tend to view the attraction as a romantic aspect of hero worship and not an 'up-front' sex-centred drive. They may be offended and/or disheartened by the 'male domination' of the current devotee scene. As with transgenderism and other sexual originalities, there are indications that women are gradually catching-up with men.
By sexual orientation, the share of homosexual and bisexual devotees appears identical to that in the general population. There are indications, however, that a small proportion of otherwise heterosexual devotees may experience homoerotic fascination towards members of their own sex with their preferred disability; this may be more common among female devotees. There are also indications that where the 'first devotee event' involves a person of the same sex, the future devotee may grow up homosexual. Inasmuch as wannabes are driven by autoeroticism, they tend to be homosexual, though statements of sexual orientation emanating from them tend to be very few and very ambiguous.
By age, the acknowledgement of devotee fascinations may occur from pre-puberty onwards, with aware devotees discovering the subculture from their mid-teens onwards.
By geography, in 2006 devotee fora membership indicated one or fewer devotees per million inhabitants in some countries, with a mean of 8 a million, and peaks of 50 a million. North America and Western Europe had most devotees, followed by the former USSR, eastern China, Japan, Australia, and the rest of the world. Southern Asia and Africa appear to have the fewest devotees. Differing levels of internet access are clearly at play, though the spread may also reflect national, cultural, class, lifestyle, and period factors, as mooted in The Amelotatist (see References; the main virtue of the survey was its complete list of possible explanations. It has been ridiculed for showing devotees as better than averagely educated and remunerated WASPs, yet — if true — this may explain at least one aspect of devoteeism, as discussed below. No replacement has emerged).
In comparison, the disabled are predominantly elderly: up to two thirds of them are over the retirement age. They form up to a tenth of the general population. Amputees (whom devotees typically desire) are about one per cent of the disabled, and over 60 per cent of them are men. Leg amputations lead at almost 90 per cent of this total, with above-knee ones accounting for 20 per cent of the subtotal.
Behaviour
No cases are known of devotees physically harming disabled people or inflicting disability on able-bodied ones. There is no evidence of any advocacy of such harm in devotee circles (save for the legend of a Vietnamese Vuong dynasty king who cut his own leg off and surrounded himself with concubines whom he also made one-legged). On very rare occasions, devotees have been known to steal disability aids such as crutches or artificial limbs. Wannabes engage in self-harm, often with fatal outcomes.
People who are fascinated with disability in a sexual way, but are unaware of themselves as devotees, appear to fall into two groups. Most appear to think they are alone in the world. A few assume the attraction is universal and are later surprised and disappointed to find it confined to very few others.
Inhibitors to devotee behaviour
Many devotees feel intense guilt and shame at apparently deriving pleasure from others' misfortunes. For this reason, they fear parental, family, peer, and public censure. They also fear ridicule and reprimand for desiring people whom convention both brands and patronises. Moreover, they also fear reprimand from the very people whom they desire. This guilt and feelings of fear from seemingly all sides, added to the guardedness exhibited by most members of sexual minorities, appear to form powerful inhibitions to many devotees' publicising their feelings and pursuing their preferred partners. Many devotees appear to have developed 'siege mentalities' and become 'closeted' to a remarkable extent. Indeed, claims to have overcome guilt and fear appear to bestow significant community cudos on the devotees who make them.
Under different formulations, the question of whether — given an opportunity — a devotee would actually act on his or her desires, is posed occasionally in devotee fora. Answers indicate that guilt, shame and the imperative of secrecy are so powerful in some devotees that they exercise ultimate self-control through self-denial. They also indicate that many devotees feel ill-equipped for relationships with disabled people, especially as regards the attendant family, social, career, et c. dimension. It can thus be claimed that, for most devotees, the attraction to disability is a gateway to a strictly private fantasy world guarded both by preferences (see above) and inhibitions.
Instead of relationships, it appears that some devotees instead seek unencumbered and non-committing transactions with understanding and/or economically motivated disabled people. This is evidenced by at least two devotee fora (2006) dedicated to disseminating and sharing information on disabled prostitutes, and between nine and a dozen 'disabled courtesan' websites (2006). Rather than being merely sexual, however, it seems that such transactions involve the disabled partners displaying as wide a range as possible of intrinsically 'disabled' behaviours, including dressing in specific clothing, play-acting specific routines, and optionally making anonymous public appearances with their devotee 'suitors.'
There are indications that female devotees may be less inhibited and more direct about their attraction, and that they tend to form relationships with preferred partners more easily.
In relationships
Relationships between devotees and disabled people tend to be reported as being ordinary, the attraction being sated by the mere fact of the partner's disability. It appears that devoteeism is undisclosed in a proportion of devotee-disabled relationships. Devotees may press disabled partners to put their disabilities to the fore in intimate situations and exhibit them in social ones. Sexually, some devotees have been reported to engage in active tactile observation as much as in intercourse.
Some devotees appear to have intermittent transient and fragile links because sexual satiety does not satisfy broader emotional needs. The pattern is similar to that in other sexual minorities such as some gay men. The issue at play is the disparity of motivations: in a relationship, devotees first seek physical satiety, while their potential partners seek satisfaction for the broad range of human relationship needs. The disparity ceases to be a consideration only in purely sexual contacts.
Over half of all devotees fail to establish relationships with disabled people. 'Second-best' options for them are relationships with 'pretenders' (devotees who purport to be disabled) and with wannabes. Practically all devotees have experience of relationships with able-bodied partners. Such relationships are also reported to be ordinary despite the (mostly undisclosed) devoteeism of one partner.
Outside relationships
Many devotees redirect their desires into creative pursuits. A number of them occupy positions offering professional contact with the disabled. Others are members of disabled people's social and/or political fora. Collecting disability-linked objects is a pastime for some devotees.
Over the past decade, a number of devotees have launched websites with images of their ideal partners, descriptions of fictional encounters with them, and devotee pornography (often produced in cooperation with disabled people). Online, devotees exchange images of disabled people, descriptions of sightings and meetings of/with them, potted biographies of disabled people, techniques for attracting their attention, and opinions on acceptable/unacceptable devotee behaviour. There are attempts to condemn the objectification of disabled people. Wannabe fora are dominated by enquiries as to which doctors may be willing to inflict elective disability.
The devotee community has a growing English-based internal terminology which emerged in the 1930s. The label "devotee," adopted in the early 1980s due to its alliteration with "amputee" has entered research usage. "Wannabe" is another internal label, with a variety of other terms coined, borrowed or modified from the disabled world (thus, "sticks" instead of "crutches") or other sexual minorities (thus "devdar," a modification of "gaydar," denoting the supposed devotee ability to foretell "sightings" of people they desire, or "transabled," another term for wannabe and a modification of "transsexual").
Borderline
Some devotees derive pleasure by pretending to have a disability, as mentioned above. Others may persuade some non-disabled partners 'to pretend.' Pretending usually takes place in privacy or intimacy, but may be practiced in public. There was overwhelming evidence that male devotees in the devotee chatrooms which sprang up during the 1990s pretended to be disabled women en masse. This confirms a widespread proneness to devotee pretending first mooted in The Amelotatist, as well as the putative continuum between non-pretending devotees, pretenders, and wannabes. Being a premeditated confidence trick, pretending tends to be viewed as unedifying by the high devotee community.
Some devotees collect personal data on disabled people, follow and photograph them candidly, call them and write to them, contrive to encounter them, and seek them out in healthcare establishments and at disability gatherings. This "potted palm syndrome" (practitioners are said to peep from behind parlour plants) is condemned within the devotee community. Where it spills over into stalking, mostly of the incompetent suitor and intimacy seeker types, such behaviour may give the authorities in some countries grounds for prosecuting the devotees responsible.
The wholesale circulating of images of disabled people is a behaviour under impotent attack from some sections of the devotee community. Most images are obtained candidly, distribution (if commercial) does not benefit those depicted, and risks compromising them since the context is sexual. Alongside this, commercial images of disabled models are invariably "copywronged" by devotees posting them on the internet for free use by others, thus depriving models of expected income. "Electronic surgery" ("ES"; retouching photographs of able-bodied people to make them look disabled) is also popular in some devotee circles. The resulting images are widely circulated on the devotee Web, jeopardising the reputations of the original subjects. Images of people known to be dead continue in circulation.
People attracted to disability appear to have been obsessed with images for as long as the attraction has been known. Stories are told within the community of collectors who had succeeded in garnering up to some tens of thousands of images in the pre-internet era. The devotee fascination with images lends considerable credulity to claims that the attraction to disability is voyeuristic and hence forms part of the sadomasochistic continuum.
Devotees practising intrusive, stalking, and fetishist behaviour, and who peddle images, often plead a paucity of potential partners, of opportunities to approach such partners in a normal fashion, and the lack of any established polite etiquette for such encounters.
Explanations
The attraction has been largely glossed-over by scientific literature and is yet to attract rigorous research. This circumstance perforce renders any discussion of its psychology and etiology into a perusal of often unfounded and frequently fanciful or outrageous claims, and/or a listing of commonsense explanations and labels-of-convenience. The reasons for scientific uninterest lie in devotee secretiveness (see Behaviour above) which makes gathering statistically valid empirical evidence impossible. Meanwhile, today's increasingly confident devotee scene rejects scientific enquiry as noted below under explanations by devotees. In addition, devotees appear not to have caused genuine concern among the disabled and the public, further depressing scientific interest. In contrast, there is proportionally much greater scientific and media interest in the significantly smaller number of wannabes, reflecting public disquiet as to that micro-fringe of the attracted.
Of the explanations offered, some are at odds with each other, yet a number are repeated (albeit with different formulations) by all relevant sides. This unanimity cannot, however, imply that those explanations are 'correct' or exhaustive.
Psychiatric
Early psychiatry considered devotees off-mainstream sadomasochists:
1. Devotees are suppressed homosexuals. This first explanation (by Krafft-Ebing in his 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis assumed that amputation stumps resembled phalli. In line with the contemporaneous linking of much sexual oddity with homosexuality, and with the author's clear intent of linking the "antipathic instinct" (as he termed homosexuality) with all "perversions," this explanation was most thoroughly debunked in the decades immediately following the book's publication;
2. Devotees are sadists deriving satisfaction from disabled people's perceived lower status;
3. Devotees are masochists deriving satisfaction by denigrating themselves through associating with stigmatised partners; wannabes are masochists wishing to acquire permanent physical stigma;
4. Devotees are voyeurs intrigued by the unusual behaviour and appearance of disabled people. Their willing disabled partners are exhibitionists capitalising on their unusual physique;
5. Wannabes are exhibitionists seeking satisfaction in the reaction of other people;
Psychology views sadism and masochism as interchangeable, with voyeurism and exhibitionism as their respective aspects. Devotees’ observation-based behaviour and preference for display-minded partners seem to support explanations 2 to 5. Devotee pornography tends to display the appearance of disability across a range of activities, rather than focus on sexual situations.
Subsidiary observations include:
6. Devotees are teratophiles because they desire deformed people;
7. Devotees are classical fetishists because the focus of their desire is shifted from a person to parts of a body and/or objects. Indeed, physical stigma (without the rest of the person) and disability aids (crutches, wheelchairs) feature to a significant extent in devotee websites;
8. Devotees are coprophiles since amputation stumps may be interpreted as resembling stools; this early hypothesis is in line with the linking of sexual behaviour to toilet training and has been discredited.
Sexological
Contemporary sexology does not consider devoteeism a problematic sexual deviation unless exercising it infringes the rights of one of the parties and/or those of third parties. Explanations include:
1. Imprinting: the impact of influential events on behaviour. Meeting visibly disabled people in childhood awakes strong emotions which may give rise to quasi-logical reasoning and a desire for people with the type of trauma encountered. Care received during hospital stays may awaken a wish to become disabled (as a way of ensuring constant care), which is later projected onto others. It repays mention that Freud is credited with discovering conditioning ("imprinting" in sexology) in the context of fetishism;
2. Implied parental approval: if, on encountering someone disabled, a future devotee’s parents express admiration, the child may conclude that disability inspires regard, later ranking it among sexual preferences. (This is among explanations mentioned by Dr John Money in Lovemaps.);
3. Flight from pressure: strict parenting and/or onerous peer environments may cause the future devotee to seek respite in sickness and disability. With time, the wish to become disabled is ‘projected’ onto others. The analogy with Munchausen Syndrome (simulating or inducing illness as a route to compassion and benefits) here is clear in wannabes. In them, projection has failed, leaving them to see themselves as more attractive if disabled. The fact that most devotees feel the attraction from childhood also backs the above explanations. There are also suggestions that there are more devotees in America, Europe, and the Far East due to specific parent/peer-driven achievement models there. (This is another explanation mentioned in Lovemaps.);
4. Transvestism and transsexuality are put forward as partial explanations-by-analogy for pretenders and wannabes; by the early 2000s, some wannabes were beginning to style themselves "transabled";
5. 'Darwinism': devotees see disabled people as proven in natural selection, having cheated death and overcome adversity;
6. The Unknown: many children experience fascination with and fear of, the unknown, when first seeing an amputee. As adolescents, they may experience similar emotions when first approaching the opposite sex. This fascination with alienness may become associated with sexual attraction over time by classical conditioning. Eventually, the sexual attraction will be triggered by the emotion;
7. 'The missing phallus': when exposed to the nude female body, some men are fascinated by the fact that 'the penis is missing' and there is an alternative and sexual organ (in fact, one reminiscent of a wound) in its place. This feeling of surprise may become a part of sexual attraction. The sight of a missing limb may evoke a similar feeling. (Similar to 6 above, this explanation was proposed by Dr Anne Hooper in 1978.)
By devotees
The devotee community constantly debates the origins of the attraction ("the Why?"). The Amelotatist, reporting a poll of about 300 devotees (some 200 responded) was a community contribution and the first synthesis of explanations. A 2005 straw poll in two devotee fora revealed that in childhood many respondents (often first or only children) felt alienated from peers, forming solitary interests in, inter alia, transportation or collecting. This may indicate that empathy with the disabled, who are subject to degrees of social exclusion in most cultures, is among the motivations for devoteeism. It may also indicate that admiration is at play in the attraction, inasmuch as the disabled have perforce overcome inhibitions similar to those many devotees find hard to overcome.
Dissatisfaction with psychological and sexological explanations, many seen as contrary to perceived reality, dominates devotee debates on the Why. Devotees energetically dispute sadomasochistic explanations, claiming that to them the disabled are not less able and inferior, but hyper-able and superior ("godlike"; this dovetails with the element of admiration mentioned above). Teratophilic and coprophilic explanations are vigorously rejected as offensive.
Current explanations and claims include:
1. Devoteeism is a mere addition to the physical attractiveness criteria which everyone has for potential partners;
2. Everyone wishes to have a distinguished partner, and disabled people stand out as unique amid a physically standard population;
3. Disabled people perform a number of actions in original ways which capture onlookers, rather like ballerinas capture audiences;
4. Devoteeism is a sexualised extension of protective compassion for misfortune, fascination with uniqueness, and hero-worship;
5. Each devotee may have become one for a variety of personal motivations rarely replicated in others;
6. Devoteeism is not primarily sexual, since it involves an overall curiosity about the broad existential aspects of disability rather than its narrow sexual aspects. There is indeed overwhelming evidence that, rather than being sex-centred, devoteeism is 'sex-diffused.' Dedicated pornography caters to people erotically intoxicated with the appearance, spectacle, and perception of the entire disabled experience, rather than merely with nudity or sex;
7. Devoteeism is an expression and extension of infantile non-conformity, being a counterpoint to the mainstream attitude to disability and sex, with its denial, ill-logic and hypocrisy. There are examples of devoteeism (or approving awareness of it) among non-conformist avant-garde artists. Another argument in favour of this explanation is that devotees, who may be more than averagely successful (see The Amelotatist in Population above) and hence analytical, are able to sense the flaws in the conventional attitude to disability at a formative age and react against them by cultivating an opposing attraction;
8. Religious, occult, and esoteric explanations are that devoteeism is programmed into some people by a higher power in order to provide a pool of potential partners for the disabled; that it is sent by a higher force to test or build devotees' characters through exposing them to practically insurmountable deficit; that it is evidence of past lives in which the wannabe occupied a disabled body and the devotee had a disabled partner; that it is a natural focusing upon the supposedly intriguing juncture where the physical body is severed but the astral body continues (disabled people are claimed to have healthy auras).
By wannabes
Wannabe circles have formulated no cogent explanations for the severe discomfort their members experience. They repeatedly paraphrase the transsexual rationalisation by stating that wannabeism indicates that the soul of one with a disability is rebelling against an able body.
By disabled people
A widespread view by disabled people outside devotee circles is that the attraction results from low self-esteem. Lack of success in attracting able-bodied sexual partners on the part of such individuals may drive them to view disabled people as 'soft targets.'
Devotee-aware disabled people generally adhere to the devotee community's explanations. In particular, they draw attention to the untenability and political incorrectness of the argument that denigrates them to the status of second-best partners for social inepts. They do, however, draw a very sharp distinction between 'sound' devotees and a fetishist category of devotee who engages in borderline behaviour and objectifies disability at the expense of the person.
Summary
However arresting and outlandish, the attraction remains almost entirely unresearched and appears likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
Voyeurism/exhibitionism/sadomasochism and fetishism are certainly present in devotees, but far from the forefront and not to the exclusion of a very broad range of other, and predominant, motivations. The latter are a diffuse blend of sexualised compassion, protectiveness, and maudlin empathy with the poignancy of stigma and disability. There is anecdotal evidence that some devotees exhibit degrees of mild introversion and alienation. If true, this would tend to make them more likely to empathise with the experience of disabled exclusion and stigma, or to admire the perceived heroism of disabled people in overcoming exclusion and stigma, hence prompting them to seek disabled partners.
The devotee claim that the desire is an augmentation of widely shared attractiveness criteria is borne out by widespread public erotisation of commonplace physical distinctions ranging from dimples and gappy teeth, through moles and freckles, to spectacles, dental braces, and limbs in casts. The fact that 'freak shows' featuring disabled performers were popular fairground attractions until after the Second World War hints that a significant number of ordinary people harbour curiosity about unorthodox appearance and modi operandi, at least some of which can be assumed to be tinged with sex. The undying popularity of elective physical modification such as body part piercing, tattooing, and sundry cosmetic interventions (surgical or not), exhibits at least some drives in common with wannabeism. Devoteeism and wannabeism appear to be the extreme tip of a 'pyramid' of commonplace, less common, and minority attractions to unorthodox physique, and the desire to have such physique oneself.
Another devotee claim — that the attraction visits different devotees for different reasons — also appears reasonable in view of the sheer number and diversity of proffered explanations (most with their 'lobbies'), coupled with the extremely small number of devotees.
The great significance of the "first devotee event" and the marked preferences for one disability as opposed to another would indicate that devoteeism originates in childhood imprinting and childish responses to various pressures. Though yet inconclusive, the rather uneven geographical spread of devoteeism appears to show that the attraction's initial hold and later development depends greatly on specific cultural models of parent-child and peer behaviour.
Standpoints
Scientific, quasi-scientific, and self-generated explanations seek to highlight the causes of the attraction. This section outlines the stances of those most affected by it and the modi vivendi they are developing.
Since devotees desire disabled people, the latter's views of devoteeism form the undoubted crux of the devotee community's attention. Devotees have tended to emphasise their usefulness as political and social allies to the disability movement. For its part, since a near-rapturous discovery of devoteeism in the 1970s, that movement has largely disabused itself regarding the nature and intentions of devotees.
Devotees
Devotees assert that the attraction appears deviant only from the untenable position that disabled people are intrinsically unattractive or asexual. Since devotees' desired relationships are voluntary and equal in principle, and since the disability has already been sustained, they claim that issues of deriving pleasure from others' misfortune have no place in debates on the attraction. They stress the circumstance that these relationships are 'because of,' rather than 'despite,' the disability, assuming this to be welcome to potential disabled partners.
The devotee community rejects scientific enquiry into the attraction because it may throw an unhealthy shadow over it and because it feels science has failed it. It is minded to move towards coalescing as a lifestyle grouping like the gay community; today, scientific enquiry into the latter is viewed as unnecessary and discriminatory. Similarly to the gay community, which rejected the term "homosexuality" in favour of "gayness," devotees reject terms like "amelotasis" in favour of internal ones like "devotee/ism." Words like "fetish" or "paraphilia" appear to raise loud devotee hackles, probably due to a widespread misunderstanding of their meaning.
Disabled people have been welcomed into the devotee community since its emergence. The community feels that public acceptance of the rights and equality of disabled people would benefit its members, not least by removing blocks and inhibitors to their self-expression. In social attitudes, some devotees appear to sense a paradoxical parallel between their social position and that of disabled people. Devotees also feel that borderline behaviour by some of their number would be curtailed or obviated by social acceptance of the attraction. Hence, their community expresses unreserved support for the disability movement.
Disabled people
Despite the explosion of the devotee Web, many disabled people remain unaware of devoteeism. Those newly-introduced to it often report initial alarm and deep shock. Subsequent reactions (often after further research) appear to involve deep introspection and an eventual revision of attitudes. While some aspects of devoteeism remain unacceptable and disquieting to disabled people, others appear welcome and liberating. If devotee fora membership is a sign of approval, by mid-2006 there was one disabled member for ten or more devotees: a proportion somewhat lower than a decade earlier. Nevertheless, in 30 years, up to 500 disabled people have offered images of themselves for sale to devotees, several dozen of them even becoming 'devotee courtesans.' Often, their 'impresarios' are themselves disabled women. This may be interpreted as approval, but also as economic opportunism.
The disability movement is significantly larger than the devotee community and the latter rarely comes to its attention. The movement perforce backs the devotee stance that the disabled ought not to be branded unattractive and asexual, but if it has any real stance on devotees, it is neutral-to-negative, with devotees seen as being sexually needy and fetishistic to an unacceptable degree. Despite early hopes that devotees were its long-sought allies in the battle against 'lookism,' the movement has found that they do not offer any escape from the tyranny of visual norms; they merely pile bizarre standards atop mainstream ones. In addition, the 'hero adulation' and protectiveness elements of devoteeism are ideologically most unwelcome to the movement. More insiduously, devotees are seen as entryist. Thus, 'visibility' is a disability movement issue on which devotees have attempted to influence views. Cosmesis is widely available to the disabled. Some welcome this: it hides their physical differences, aiding integration; others claim it perpetuates a visual norm which implies that disability is ugly; devotees promote the latter side.
Summary
While devotees continue to press home the point that they are attracted to the disabled 'because of the disability,' the disabled generally appear to prefer relationships occurring 'despite,' rather than 'because of' it. On an internal and individual level, however, growing awareness of devoteeism among them appears to be resulting in a range of subtler, if unvoiced, accommodations with the phenomenon; normalisation of relations appears to be undeway, with emotional, sexual, social, and even business ramifications for both sides. All this may be of little or no consequence to the significant number of devotees who experience their attraction to disability as a strictly private realm of fantasy.
References
- [1] Aguilera, Raymond J., "Disability and Delight: Staring Back at the Devotee Community", Bent: A Journal of Cripgay Voices, May 2001.
- The Amelotatist: A Statistical Profile, Ampix [exeunt], Lawndale, California, 1979
- [2] Baker, Louise, Out on a Limb, Whittlesey House, a Division of the McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York, N. Y., 1946
- [3] Barreda, Kimberley, "The Devotee Phenomenon", DisTHIS: the Cripculture Experience, 2004.
- Bruno, Richard L., "Devotees, Pretenders, and Wannabes: Two Cases of Factitious Disability Disorder," Sexuality and Disability, 15.4 (Winter 1997), pp. 243-260
- [4] Review of Katherine Dunn's novel Geek Love on Strangewords.com.
- [5] Eliot, Carl, "Costing an Arm and a Leg: the Victims of a Growing Mental Disorder are Obsessed with Amputation"
- Elman, R. Amy, "Disability Pornography: The Fetishization of Women's Vulnerabilities," Violence Against Women, 3.3 (June 1997), pp. 257-270
- Hooper, Anne, "The Amputee Fetish," Forum [exeunt], June 1978, Penthouse Publications Ltd, London
- [6] Kafer, Alison, "Amputated Desire, Resistant Desire: Female Amputees in the Devotee Community," a paper to the Chicago Conference of the Society for Disability Studies, June 2000
- Money, J., Lovemaps: Clinical Concepts of Sexual/Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia, and Gender Transposition in Childhood, Adolescence, and Maturity, New York, N.Y., Irvington, 1986
- Money, J., K. W. Simcoe, "Acrotomophilia, Sex, and Disability: New Concepts and Case Report," Sexuality and Disability, 7 (1984-1986), pp. 43-50
- [7] Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays, Booke iii, Chapter xi: Of the Lame or Crippel (translated from the original French)
- Nattress, LeRoy, Jr., "The Female Amputee as an Object of Interest and Sexual Attraction," in Pfeiffer, David, Stephen C. Hey, Gary Kiger — Eds., The Disability Perspective: Variations on a Theme, Salem, Oregon, USA, The Society for Disability Studies and Willamette University, 1993
- [8] a portal site to the devotee web
- [9] web articles on the attraction
- [10] a site whose disabled owner is researching a thesis on devoteeism, with preliminary results posted
- [11] abasiophilia website
- [12] Owens, Tuppy, et alia, Inside, The Outsiders Club, London, Spring 2006 et passim
- [13] the website which pioneered online discussion of the phenomenon in the early/mid 1990s
- [14] The wannabe site which pioneered the label "transabled."
See also
- abasiophilia — the desire for people who limp and/or use leg braces, walking sticks, crutches, walkers or wheelchairs
- acrotomophilia — the desire for amputees (also known as "amputee fetishism")
- amaurophilia — the desire for blind partners
- amputee fetishism — the desire for partners with missing limbs (also known as "acrotomophilia")
- apotemnophilia — the desire to acquire a disability ("wannabeism," "transability")
- disability devotee ("dev") — one who desires disabled partners
- eyeglass fetishism — the desire for partrens who wear spectacles
- handicap fetishism — another term for the broad range of attractions to disability
- legbrace fetishism — the desire for partners who use leg braces; an aspect of abasiophilia
- medical fetishism — a sexualised interest in observing medical practice and receiving medical treatment
- Munchhausen's syndrome — a psychological disorder whose sufferers feign illness and/or cause themselves self-harm
- pornography addiction — the excessive or exclusive reliance on pornography to attain sexual arousal (also known as "pictophilia")
- robot fetishism — the desire for people dressed to appear like robots and acting as robots
- statuephilia — the desire for mannequins or immobility (also known as "agalmatophilia")
- transformation fetish — the desire for people who undergo physical transformation (mostly an aspect of pornography fetishism) or body modification
- voyeurism — the excessive or exclusive reliance on observing other people to attain sexual arousal