Having Great Sex With Limited Mobility with Kelly Gordon

LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST EPISODE HERE

On this podcast episode Kelly Gordon joins us to talk about sex as a person with disabilities. Kelly is an entrepreneur and consultant based out of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She has spinal muscular atrophy type 3, a genetic disability, and she uses an electric wheelchair to get around. She is head of creative at a global sex tech brand called Hot Octopus where their mission is to ensure that everybody has the right to sexual pleasure. 

What does sex look like for individuals who are disabled?

There really is not a straightforward answer to that question. The thing that people don’t understand is that every disability varies a great deal. It’s really hard to kind of determine a way that sex works for everybody. We’ve all got different levels of pain, we’ve all got different levels of mobility, and we’ve all got different wants and desires, fantasies, and kinks. But I recommend that your listeners think about having discussions with disabled people, if the person is comfortable and if you’ve got a reason to be having those discussions. Learning and taking the time to listen and to talk is really important when it comes to disability and sex.

I think it’s important for people to know that persons with disabilities are still having sex. Having a disability does not mean that you’re not having sex, that you cannot feel pleasure. Sex is so much more than penetration.

It really is important to break down those kinds of ideas of what sex is because it puts so much pressure on people to put sex in a box and say sex is penetration. It kind of removes the fun, the exploration and the pleasure out of the whole thing. So I think looking at sex in a different way, thinking about sex as whatever you want it to mean; it can be so freeing, and it can be a great experience to have with a partner.

What types of mobility aids are out there to help disabled individuals have sex?

There really are a lot of mobility aids available. For us wheelchair users, we already have our wheelchairs which are typically seen as a means to get around. But actually, if you start to see your wheelchair as an extension of your body and the extension of what you can actually do, wheelchairs are great for having sex. Wheelchairs are great for being able to do “standing up sex” with your partner. Mine’s even better because it has what you call a rise function and a tilt function. So, it can rise to most heights, it can tilt back so you get the vibe of a flat surface to lie on. There’s a lot of things that are seen as mobility aids for disabled people that are actually amazing for adaptation for sex. For example, we have Hoyer lifts; we call them hoists. They are an aid that can help you get from your wheelchair to a bed or your bath, for example. But, you can also use them like a makeshift sex swing, which is incredible. That can help a lot of people be on top when they wouldn’t be able to without that assistance. There are also chairs that can help with that thrust in motion and that kind of bouncing motion. Something that we talk about quite a lot and and we promote is positioning pillows, such as Liberator wedges. They’re amazing to be able to achieve a sort of a doggy position. Sport sheets are also amazing. They have straps, leg straps, straps that go under the body so that your partner can assist you and lift you. And again, these are all mainstream products that make sex fun, but they are kind of dual purpose because they allow so much sexual freedom to disabled people that use them. 

As someone who has a disability, how did you learn to have sex?

For me, growing up during the age of the internet when chat rooms were emerging, I got a lot of my sex education from talking to people online. Whether it was accurate information or not remains to be seen, but it was great for me because as a wheelchair user that was struggling with identity and struggling to feel attractive and struggling to see where I fit in the conversation of sexuality. It kind of gave me a space to put my face out there and then see that people did want to talk to me, see that people did find me attractive. That was the kind of reassurance that I needed at that age.

I feel like our sex education really fails people who are not having what society believes is “normal” sex. 

There’s a real big issue with the way disabilities have been portrayed in mainstream media. It leads to a lot of everyday people believing that disabled people should be patronized or talked down to because of the way we’ve been taught about disability and sex. And it’s really difficult because a lot of the time, the voices in this space are non disabled people, sometimes older, sometimes very well meaning, but they’re telling the story of disability wrong. 

They are talking without any input from the disabled community. Those are dangerous narratives that feed people and make people think that disability looks a certain way, when, if people are working with lived experience, and working with people that actually are disabled and have a story to tell, it’s transformative. Those stories might not be perfect. Some of them might be embarrassing, some of them might be sad, some of them might be hilarious. It just depends. It’s just about making space for those voices. 

What have you noticed are barriers to sex that individuals with disabilities have? 

It really comes down to lack of education and lack of communication. Speaking very generally here, I don’t believe there are many people that can’t physically have sex at all. And I’m talking about any kind of sex. There are people that are asexual who don’t want to have sex or don’t have sexual desire. But I think a lot of disabled people want to have sex, and can have sex. It’s just about how that’s communicated outwardly to the general population. That is often the issue. 

It can mean that people are perhaps scared to go on a date with a disabled person, people get in this kind of fear, or this worry that they don’t want to embarrass themselves, or they don’t want to say the wrong thing. And then they get wrapped up in that, which then leads to them making assumptions about what a date with a disabled person might be like, or what sex with a disabled person might be like, and what they might have to do or not do. 

So, I think the fact that fear is there, and that fear is created by lack of education, and communication, is the main barrier. Having conversations like this are really important to be able to communicate to the wider world that disability and sex is a completely natural thing. Having sex with disabled people is completely fine and disabled people will probably talk to you about what they want, and what they need, just as you would with any other person.

To hear Kelly talk more about adaptive tools and mainstream products that help people with disabilities have great sex, listen to episode 163: Having Great Sex With Limited Mobility with Kelly Gordon, on the Vaginas, Vulvas, and Vibrators podcast.

You can find Kelly Gordon on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter @mskelgee.

LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST EPISODE HERE