"I felt, um, kind of asexual"

As you know, I like horses. I like books about horses, like Colt, which has a crip main character, and movies about horses too. When I was a kid my favorite movie was Dark Horse -- several crip main characters and a crip horse. In Seabiscuit as well, both the horse, Seabiscuit, his rider Red, and another horse are all crips. In Dreamer, Sonador the horse, like the previous 2 movies mentioned, also gets in an accident. I can't remember if there is an accident that occurs in National Velvet. For me, books and movies about crips and horses always peak my interest. But I'm not so sure about this one...

I've written about targeted facebook ads before. This afternoon an ad popped up for the Hallmark made for TV movie After The Fall, about a girl who becomes a paraplegic after a fall during a jumping routine. You can see the 3min 45sec behind the scenes here. There are a few things that bother me from the behind the scenes. Notably the fact that if you become a full time wheelchair user you don't get such a crappy hospital-ly chair. Talk about pain. It seems to me that this is used to make this girl more pitiful-ly. The other thing is when they show the "knight in shining armour" lifting her into the truck. Way to promote pitiful crip... I mean, some wheelchair users really can't independently transfer, especially right after an accident, but I mean assisting with transfers... c'mon!

Then there's this clip above. This character seems to be the "mentor crip," the more experienced crip, the one who gets the cool chair and has confidence, who then promotes the stereotype that wheelchair users are asexual. I don't know about you, but I've never felt asexual even when I had low self-esteem. This message was never one that I got growing up, one of the things my mother did right. I got the message that other people would think I was asexual, but I have never felt asexual. Talking about being stared at and feeling like a freak because of it is a good thing, but to say that the second she popped into a chair in public she felt asexual, and to have this widely distributed on the internet is a public disservice and spreads such blatant ableist lies that I want it off the internet.

But that's just my humble oppinion...