It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! No, It’s Rape Culture.
For the first sixty years of my life, it never once occurred to me just how many times Superman grabbed Lois Lane without her consent. From infancy, we’ve all been endlessly conditioned by comics, cartoons, books, movies, TV, and video games, to cheer for a man who wordlessly swoops in and exercises his superior strength to save a damsel in distress. A true superhero whisks her away, not because she has asked for his help, but because he has taken one glance at the situation and let his superior masculine brain instantly make that decision for her. Now that I’m a disabled senior traversing my home planet in either a wheelchair or a walker, I see all these so-called Supermen saviours as a real, ever-present danger.
These men fly through the air at the intersections of ableism, ageism, and rape culture.
They play out variations on a scene that I’m forced to act in multiple times a week. In a recent episode at our local Ribfest, when my daughter struggled to pull my wheelchair over a curb, a young man raced forward, hands outstretched, intending to grab the front wheels of my chair and yank them into the air. I was a Drama teacher. The sonic boom of “Stop!” that I bellowed at that Superboy froze every pedestrian in a twenty meter radius.
He looked stung and resentful. He said exactly what I expected because I’ve heard it uncountable times: “But I was only trying to help!”
I smiled and recited my own script. “Please ask first. For disabled people, our walkers, chairs, and canes, are extensions of our bodies. Please don’t touch our bodies without our consent. It’s dangerous, patronizing and rude. Always ask first. Always do only what we ask you to do. That would be really helpful. ”
Like so many before him, this hero didn’t hear me. What he did see and hear was his masculine pride being rebuffed in public with his Ribfest beer buddies watching. More loudly than necessary, he sneered, “I’m pretty sure my hands can tell the difference between a wheelchair and a cray-cray old woman.”
He thought it a joke, but it could have been life altering for all of us.
Strangers have no idea how heavy my wheelchair with me in it really is. If they jerk the front of my chair into the air, they could easily dump it and me backwards. They could throw my daughter onto her back and flip me out headfirst. These good Samaritans could likewise seriously hurt themselves, injure their arms, shoulders, necks, or backs. If any of us got hurt, beyond the heartbreak, time, fear, and cost of pain and medical care, legal liabilities abound. Permanent injury would change more than one life in more ways than one.
This Superman Syndrome doesn’t replay itself only when I’m in my wheelchair. On my walker, I’ve had men rush to open doors I had no intention of opening, then swear at me when I don’t go through them. When strangers rush to “help” me on my walker, they have no concept that my balance is already very precarious. If you touch my walker, any unexpected movement can send me flying. I can’t count the times men in a hurry have bumped into my walker, then scolded me to be more careful when they made me fall. They added further insult to injury by grabbing any part of my body they pleased to “help” drag me back up to my feet. I see them looking around to see who’s watching. Their real concern isn’t for me, but for themselves. Their goal is to set fat old me upright a fast as possible, because they are publicly embarrassed to be seen with me, to have to touch me. They want to bang into me, forget me, and move on.
These Superman scenes play out thousands of times per minute all over planet earth, because, of course, this doesn’t happen only to me. My social media feeds are full of members of my disabled community for whom being grabbed and “helped” is a daily occurrence. Disabled cis men occasionally report both, but disabled cis and trans women report unappreciated “help” all the time. Blind women get grabbed by elbows and pulled across streets they weren’t intending to cross. Deaf women kindly get unrequested instructions and information yelled in their faces. Women in wheelchairs have resorted to taking the handgrips off their chairs because they are so tired of being abducted by strangers who simply step up and start pushing. When strange men approach our wheelchairs from behind, we can’t see their faces. Many of these men don’t stop, even when repeatedly asked to stop, when begged to please stop. Positioned behind us, out of our reach, especially if we are old, fearful, and frail, we physically can’t make them stop.
We’ve all learned that if we want these men to stop, we have to yell, immediately, loudly, and in public. If we ask nicely, if we take too long to ask, if we don’t assert ourselves in full voice, these abled saviours ignore us. They’re sure they know best. They’re the Superman of the moment and their closeup has arrived. Basking in superhero light, they feel young, big, strong, healthy, athletic, and entitled. They have decided that they’re Supermen Boy Scouts doing a really good deed. They believe they can “just do it.” And so they do.
It’s all so unnecessary. Consent can be established here by some old-fashioned good manners, something I was raised to believe was an equal part of male chivalry. Consent can be achieved by politely asking, “May I help you with that?” or “Can I be of any assistance?” or simply, “Hi. Please tell me if there’s anything I can do.”
Instead, the cumulative effect of being man-handled several times a week is both infuriating and demoralizing. Even when I don’t fall, or get injured, my self-esteem does. My dignity as a capable adult in the world gets erased. My bodily autonomy disappears with my confidence. Time after time, I get turned into a little child. A big, strong, adult man can reach down and “help” me, because he knows better than I do, because he has power over me, and can exercise it wherever and whenever he chooses. I can get angry, I can protest as loudly as possible, I can scream, and sometime in the next few days another man will still do it again.
Of course, all of these abled aggressors are men.
As a practicing feminist for over four decades, I see this as both understandable and unacceptable in the era of #MeToo. It’s fueled by the “boys will be boys” mentality. Men unthinkingly rush in to save me because society tells boys they must be the ones to take quick action, must always be fast, big and strong. Men rush in because it offers them a dramatic, visible moment to be seen in public as taking quick action, seen as being fast, big and strong. Beyond reinforcing their masculinity and male privilege, saving little, old, disabled me makes them feel good about the power of their younger, abled bodies. It makes them feel so very good about themselves to publicly prove and flaunt their ageist, abled, male privilege.
I understand that no man rushing to my aid consciously intends any of this.
Some men do rethink my lines and offer new ones. They say things like, “Yeah, I’ll try to be more careful.” Or, “I’m sorry. I never thought about it that way.”
But here’s what none of these men want to hear and what we all should hear.
None of these men are heroes. They are all rapists in training.
I’m a survivor of infant sexual abuse. I have horrific memories of a big, strong man taking gratification from tiny me without my comprehension, let alone my consent. When a man rushes in to save still-tiny-helpless-old me without asking my consent, it reduces me to an object to be acted upon for his self-gratification. I’m the prop. I’m just the means to his self-satisfaction. Grabbing me because he’s decided I want it, is an explicit display of rape culture.
I don’t forfeit any part of my right to consent just because I’m old and disabled.
My right to consent to be touched or not, assisted or not, applies at all times. Consent from any person, of every ability and age, must be sought out and clearly given. Or it’s assault.
When men dismiss the harm, when they tell themselves they “have only good intentions,” that’s exactly how male and ableist privilege work together to define the narrative, to normalize and reinforce each other. All abled people need to learn the same lesson about abled privilege that all white people need to learn about white privilege: intent is never as important as impact. The people who get to decide if something is help, or harm, are those on the receiving end.
Unfortunately, when told they have caused harm, when asked to check their privilege, too many abled people double down to defend that privilege. Under racist, ableist, patriarchal, colonial capitalism, abled privilege uses some of the same maintenance tactics as white privilege. As disabled Black, Indigenous, and people of colour have explained, “abled tears” function much like “white women’s tears.” When told they have done ableist harm, abled people react in a predictable pattern. First, they value their intentions over the impact of their actions. Then they try to minimize and deflect. If the disabled person doesn’t back down, they act hurt and insulted, claim they are being victimized. Then they retaliate and attack. When I’ve asked abled men not to touch my wheelchair, I’ve had them turn on me, accuse me of “hating normal people,” of “viciously attacking them” because I was “jealous and bitter.” One stomped off shouting, “Screw you, not that any man with eyes would ever want to!”
Where are all the abled women when all of this is happening to me?
What are my “woke” feminist allies doing, or not doing?
I have many abled women friends who have stood with me during battles and held me after them. Thankfully, I’ve never encountered Superwoman Syndrome; strange women never swoop in to try to grab my wheelchair or walker. But I have been on the receiving end of all kinds of microaggressions and passive-aggressive behaviors. Abled women, especially pretty, thin, young, white women, look me up and down like they’ve just scraped ancient shit off their shoe. They make “fat, lazy, ugly, stupid, old granny” comments designed for my hearing. Abled women find every kind of reason to rush into the accessible washroom stall ahead of me. Women drivers without accessible parking permits cut me off to steal my accessible spot shouting, “Sorry, honey! I’ll just be a sec.” Or, “Bye, bitch!” When I’m in my wheelchair, women talk to my carer, not to me. They talk about me as if I’m too doddering and unintelligent to understand a word. I’ve had strange women in bathrooms pump the soap and start washing my hands.
Only once in all my life, has any one of the Lois Lanes accompanying their countless wanna-be Supermen ever intervened. She turned to her boyfriend the way we hope all women will turn to their sons, brothers, friends, husbands, uncles, fathers, and grand-fathers. She crossed her arms and said what we all need to keep saying until everyone believes all of us, all of the time, “No, don’t argue. Listen to her. It’s her body. Her body, her choice.”
This stranger is my Wonder Woman and Wakanda warrior.
She could also be you.
Dorothy Ellen Palmer is a disabled senior writer, accessibility advocate, retired high school Drama teacher, improv coach, and union activist. She serves on the Accessibility Advisory Committee for FOLD (The Festival of Literary Diversity) and on the board of CCWWP (Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs). Her work has appeared in REFUSE, Wordgathering, Alt-Minds, All Lit Up, Don’t Talk to Me About Love, Little Fiction Big Truths, 49th Shelf, and Open Book. Her novel, When Fenelon Falls (Coach House, 2010), features a disabled teen in the Woodstock-Moonwalk summer of 1969. Her disability memoir, Falling for Myself, appears with Wolsak and Wynn this fall. She can always be found tweeting @depalm.