{"id":3640,"date":"2012-11-28T18:28:09","date_gmt":"2012-11-29T00:28:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3640"},"modified":"2012-11-28T15:34:48","modified_gmt":"2012-11-28T21:34:48","slug":"dont-cry-for-me-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=3640","title":{"rendered":"Don’t Cry For Me, Hollywood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over at ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg takes issue with a reviewer of the movie The Sessions<\/em><\/a>, a sex comedy based on the life of Mark O\u2019Brien. O\u2019Brien spent most of his life in an iron lung as a result of polio; the movie depicts O\u2019Brien\u2019s efforts to lose his virginity with the assistance of a sex surrogate. The reviewer in question wishes that the movie would have focused more on the fragility and despair that must be inherent in O\u2019Brien\u2019s life. Rosenberg disagrees:<\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t think\u00a0The Sessions<\/em>\u00a0is a movie about a man learning to cope with a disability\u2014in fact, it\u2019s a movie about a man who\u2019s coped very well with the limitations in his mobility for years. The film explains those arrangements because it assumes that an able-bodied audience will be interested in how Mark gets around and makes a living. But it\u2019s emphatically not about him coming to terms with the fact that he has to use an iron lung, or hire an aide, or even that in a power outage, Mark could be in considerable danger. Instead,\u00a0The Sessions<\/em>\u00a0is a sex comedy with Mark\u2019s experience with polio as the reason he never lost his virginity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I haven\u2019t seen the film yet, but Rosenberg makes a key point. Not every movie featuring a person with a disability has to be a story about struggling against the odds. Those of us who have lived with disabilities for years don\u2019t typically perceive our own lives in such terms. We\u2019re too busy with the prosaic details of our own lives, whether it\u2019s going to school or hanging out with friends or trying to get laid. Our disabilities are sometimes the furthest things from our minds, particularly when we enter the realm of sex. When I\u2019m having sex, I\u2019m not thinking about my tenuous grip on this mortal coil. I\u2019m thinking, \u201cHey, I\u2019m having sex! This is awesome!\u201d And when my partner has to reconnect my vent tube after accidentally disconnecting it with her foot (I\u2019ll let your imaginations run wild here), I don\u2019t curl up into a fetal ball and bemoan my fate. I simply thank my partner and get back to whatever we were doing. Because that\u2019s how real life works.<\/p>\n

Most people without disabilities (including those who work in Hollywood) have difficulty grasping how a disability can be anything other than an epic struggle that is by turns both tragic and inspirational. But there\u2019s no reason why people with disabilities can\u2019t be featured in sex comedies or science fiction thrillers or crime capers. We can be just another feature of the pop culture landscape rather than the go-to source for feel-good tearjerkers. Perhaps The Sessions<\/em> is a signpost on the road to the movies I\u2019m imagining.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over at ThinkProgress, Alyssa Rosenberg takes issue with a reviewer of the movie The Sessions, a sex comedy based on the life of Mark O\u2019Brien. O\u2019Brien spent most of his life in an iron lung as a result of polio; the movie depicts O\u2019Brien\u2019s efforts to lose his virginity with the assistance of a sex […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14,23,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-disability","category-movies","category-pop-culture","category-14-id","category-23-id","category-11-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-WI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3640"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3641,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3640\/revisions\/3641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}