Dr. Temple Grandin

I am super excited about the upcoming HBO biopic Temple Grandin, based on the life of lecturer, best-selling author, autism advocate and professor of animal science at Colorado State University, Dr. Temple Grandin.

Grandin, who is among the most famous individuals with autism in the world, was diagnosed with autism as a child in 1950. She overcame many personal and educational challenges before becoming an inventor and earning a Ph.D. in animal science. As an adult, she is an advocate for people on the autism spectrum, speaks regularly at autism conferences and offers advice to parents with autistic children. Grandin has also devoted much of her career to improving the treatment of livestock animals.

At age 18 she invented a device called a Hug Machine – a deep pressure device designed to calm hypersensitive persons. It is typically used to treat individuals with autism spectrum disorders. She came up with the idea after noting the way cattle were vaccinated while confined in a squeeze chute on her aunt’s ranch. After pressure was administered to the animals, they calmed down, and Grandin correctly predicted that such a device might settle her own hypersensitivity.

Grandin relates easily to animals and has to work hard to interact socially with other people. She says:

I’m a visual thinker, not a language-based thinker. My brain is like Google Images. If someone says the word factory, most people think of a vague place. I think in detail of every factory I ever saw, like the John Deere plant in Moline. Animals are sensory thinkers, thinking in pictures, smells, sounds. They don’t think in terms of language. I don’t either.

Grandin harnessed her “disorder” to better understand animal behavior, and became one of the top designers of livestock facilities in the nation. She advises the livestock industry in animal behavior and has created improvements to animal handling systems in meat plants.

[T]he things that scare a prey/species animal like cattle are a whole lot of little visual details that people just don’t tend to notice. And one of the big problems they used to have is the people just wanted to get out there and yell and scream and push and shove and you know more and more prods. Rather than remove the things that the cattle were afraid of.

A few years ago, American Public Media accompanied Grandin on slaughterhouse inspections she performed for McDonald’s. The resulting story is fascinating, describing the influence Grandin has had on the meat industry and providing a glimpse into her everyday life.

I so strongly admire Dr. Grandin’s philosophy, her talents and her career. I bet she has to deal with some nasty sexism in her field, too. Temple Grandin is based upon Grandin’s memoirs, Emergence and Thinking in Pictures. It airs on HBO on Saturday, February 6.

The campaign, which is animated by the wildly talented people over at Aardman Animations (the people who brought you Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, Rex the Runt and others) borrows the concept of the series Creature Comforts, which ran in the UK in 2003, had a bit of exposure in Canada, and was Americanized–albeit briefly–for CBS in 2007.

If you’re unfamiliar,  the show was made up of a series of stop-motion animated shorts of various creatures–dung beetles, hound dogs, alligators, etc.– in Aardman’s familiar pop-eyed style, speaking to the camera about specific topics:  work, sex, health, etc.   The brilliant part was that the script of each bit was compiled/arranged from interviews with members of  “the great British public.”  The contrasts (and the similarities) between the words and images were funny, moving, and always clever.

The LCD campaign, “Creature Discomforts,” takes the same tack, but specifically uses the voices of British citizens with disabilities talking about their lives:  work, sex, health, etc.  While ideally the original show would have incorporated the words and representations of people with disabilities, I think the campaign–which is a couple years old but new to this Yank–is fair, sensitive without being maudlin, clever without being smug, and, ironically, since they’re being animated as various animals (the way the “great British public”–which does include PWD, even if they were disappeared in the animation–were) a way to recognize that people with disabilities are people.   There’s some animation/puppet performance theory about why this kind of abstraction/displacement reads the way it does, but I’m too busy with end-of-semester grading to dig all that out.

Take a look (sorry, our new firewall seems to reject embedded files):

LCD #6 Love and Sex

I think these ads are very effective, but I understand that others might read them differently. What do you think?

You can view the rest of the ads at the LCD site, or at YouTube (search for “creature discomforts”).

Lynn Hecht Schafran and Jillian Weinberger of Legal Momentum point specifically to two reports: Crime Against Persons with Disabilities, 2007, and Female Victims of Violence, 2008, and explain the problems with their methodologies.

According to BJS, 182,000 rapes were committed against women in 2008. Dr. Dean Kilpatrick and his colleagues concluded that over one million women were raped in the U.S. in 2006. One million is obviously much higher than 182,000. That gap is the result of differences in methodology between the NCVS and the Kilpatrick study. Say Schafran and Weinberger:

The NCVS asks directly whether the respondent has been subjected to “[a]ny rape, attempted or other type of sexual attack” rather than asking behaviorally-based questions that do not label the victim’s experience. The National Women’s Study, in contrast, asks behaviorally-based questions like, “Has anyone ever made you have anal sex by using force or threat of harm? Just so there is no mistake, by anal sex we mean that a man or boy put his penis in your anus.” It is essential to ask behaviorally-based questions because victims often do not put the label “rape” or “sexual assault” on their experience, especially when the perpetrator is someone they know, as is the case in the significant majority of rapes.

Only 16 percent of all rapes were reported to law enforcement in 2006, according to Kilpatrick’s findings, not 47 percent as reported by BJS. Government reports severely underestimate the scope of sexual violence against women and overestimate the rate at which women report their attacks to police.

And, as Schafran and Weinberger point out, they underestimate the incidences of sexual violence committed against people with disabilities. Methodological problems are to blame in this case, as well. Crime Against Persons with Disabilities did not count people with disabilities living in institutional settings, for instance, but that information only appears at the very end of the report.

The BJS needs to update its methodology in order to yield accurate data about sexual violence. In the meantime, spread the news about these findings and keep Legal Momentum’s list of questions in mind when reading studies and surveys about rape and sexual assault. Abyss2hope has more.

“How would you like it if Michael was having sex with your mom!?” Pam asked.

After a brief pause, Oscar told her, “My mom is in a wheelchair…”

The embarrassed, stunned reactions on behalf of both characters suggested that Oscar might have told Pam his mom was dead. His mom is in a wheelchair, so – she can’t have sexual relationships? Using a wheelchair is not like being in a coma, and it’s not death. Wheelchairs don’t render their users incapable of sexual activity, nor do they erase sexual desire. I was baffled and pretty disappointed that The Office writers would desexualize and infantalize people with disabilities in that way.

Coincidentally (?), Chally at the FWD blog covered this in a post on Sunday. As she points out, people with disabilities (PWD) are often characterized as passive and stoic, not really living. That’s just not true.

It’s not that disabilities don’t affect people’s sex lives, but they don’t necessarily destroy people’s sexuality. Our media puts forth the message that only those with supposedly perfect bodies have sex (unless some frat guy sleeps with a fat chick on a dare). Straight, thin, conventionally attractive, able-bodied, cis-gendered white people are framed as “normal.” Everyone else is sexually deviant, sexually inactive, or unfuckable. That message has seeped into our culture and warped our “reality.” The consequence of this is not only intense body insecurity, but judgement about other people’s bodies and their potential as sexual beings.

On the other end of the spectrum, sometimes able-bodied folks treat PWD explicitly as sex objects, fetishizing them on the basis of their disabilities. Trust me; it’s out there. In terms of sexuality, the dominant culture pushes PWD to the margins, either desexualizing them or fetishizing them. In reality, PWD have sex lives as diverse as people without disabilities! To The Office writers, I’d say: don’t make assumptions about what PWD can or can’t do, or like or dislike to do in the bedroom – or on the floor, or up against a wall – based on their disabilities.

They have a series called “Ableist Word Profile,” in which bloggers profile ableist words and phrases, discuss how they’re used, and talk about how to stop using them. The other day abby jean covered “hysterical.” She explains the etymology and history of the word as well as modern applications and addresses why it is problematic.

I have written before about my invisible disability (if you could call it that), and this FWD has given me so much food for thought already about my own circumstances and the intersection of feminism and ableism. I’m excited about what they’re doing and hope to learn a lot and incorporate disability issues into my own writing and activism more often.