gimpled

Roll up, roll up.   Here’s the new Freak Show, right here, right now, right in your country.   It’s not sixteenth century England, nor nineteenth century America.   You don’t even need to go to an amusement park, a circus, a vaudeville hall or museum.   It’s coming to you right from your Twitter feed, in your art gallery, from your Facebook newsfeed.      It’s ExploitAbility.  We’re calling this brave new trend ‘ExploitAbility’ to bring it in line with the hundreds of other disability organisations with Ability in their headline (note the capital A) – why not?   It’s as good as any other name to describe the plethora of tragedy and pity porn that’s currently being rolled out as an alternative to inspiration porn.   It’s to raise Awareness, you see.   About whatever particular issue is the flavour of the day – diagnoses, violence, poverty and homelessness.   And like those Freaks in other long-gone shows, our sto...

There we were, on the dance floor, feeling slightly conspicuous.   Drunk enough not to care, but conscious that we were in our forties (in my case, late forties) and far older than most of the twenty somethings on the dance floor.   We danced at the outskirts – me in my wheelchair, my three friends in a group around me.      It’s a different thing, dancing when you’re older.   You’re not dancing to please anyone but yourself.   If you’re with friends, you’re dancing with wild-woman abandon, uninhibitedly, to celebrate your friendship and your own joy in the moment.   There are those casual encounters with strangers, a shared dance, a conversation, but mostly it is about the music and the dance and the celebration of being alive.  We’d been there for a whole twenty minutes.   And then it happened.  A young woman in a crop top and sneakers danced over to us, attracting every male gaze a...