ABSTRACT
Back in 1996, when my colleagues and I wrote The Sexual Politics of Disability in 1996, I think we made an error. By making sexuality our primary concern, we failed to understand that intimacy is perhaps a greater priority for disabled people. Sexuality is an important form of intimacy, and modern Western societies are fascinated with sexual acts and sexualised bodies. But friendship and acceptance are more fundamental than sex. Despite the implication given by much of the media and popular culture, sex may be comparatively unimportant to a wide section of the population. From a life course perspective, sexual desire appears to play a major part in life between the age of puberty and until midlife: perhaps three decades out of a possible 70 or 80 years. Of course, children are in many ways sexual beings, and it is offensive and inaccurate to see older people as asexual. Yet sexuality is undoubtedly different at different stages of the life course. Moreover, even during the peak period of sexuality, many individuals and relationships are not dominated by sex. Leonore Tiefer (1995) cites a historic study in New England Journal of Medicine. A survey of 100 self-defined ‘happy’ couples found that there was some sort of arousal or orgasm dysfunction in the majority of cases but that the couples considered themselves happy both sexually and non-sexually nonetheless (Frank et al., 1978). It has been well observed that frequency and importance of sexual activity decline as a relationship continues and matures, and other ways of relating become more important. But whereas sex is not always a priority, for almost all human beings, the need for intimacy, companionship, and
acceptance remains central from birth to death. People can survive, even flourish, without sex, but the majority of individuals would be desolate without friendship.
