Inspiration porn
Dec. 3rd, 2015 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kengrOver on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alex_antonin's tumblr, he reposted something from someone else.
https://t.co/qOQN93V2Sg
It's about a image being posted by Autism Canada.
It may look fine at first glance.
But when you stop and think about it, it's an example of an all too common with campaigns "for" people with various disabilities.
It's not actually about the people with the disability. It's about the *non*-disabled.
In this case, it's holding them up as an "inspiration". It's about *us* felling good" for "helping" *them*.
Other examples are all the comments about how "brave" people with disabilities are, or how hard their lives are.
They disabled aren't being treated as real people with real problems, but as props for getting an effect.
Thus the phrase "inspiration porn".
In this particular case, it's doubly bad in that by using the phrase "how good we can be" it encourages the people without the disability to "be good" to the people with it.
Why is that bad? Because it encourages people to use their own judgment as to what is "good" for the disabled person.
This almost never goes well. Most blind people have horror stories about people offering unasked-for "help". I know a couple who have been *injured* when some idiot grabbed them to try to steer them away from a hazard they were well aware of (in one case, the attempt to "help" him avoid falling into an excavation next to the sidewalk actually resulted in him falling into it).
With autistics, consider that many of the attempts to "help" them use methods that the ASPCA won't allow to be used in training *animals*. But because it's professional psychologists trying to make them "act norrmal" most non-autistics shrug it off as "they know what they are doing" or "they need to learn to 'act normal'".
Here's an example that may get thru to some people. I've got asthma. As such, I *could* do most of the stuff in PE. But things like running distances were very difficult What was easy of merely "a bit difficult" for non-asthmatics was very, very hard for me, if not impossible.
Using the "logic" used in treating "low functioning" autistics, the PE teachers should have used electric shocks, or withholding food, etc as means to get me to be a better runner.
alex_antonin's tumblr, he reposted something from someone else.https://t.co/qOQN93V2Sg
It's about a image being posted by Autism Canada.
It may look fine at first glance.
But when you stop and think about it, it's an example of an all too common with campaigns "for" people with various disabilities.
It's not actually about the people with the disability. It's about the *non*-disabled.
In this case, it's holding them up as an "inspiration". It's about *us* felling good" for "helping" *them*.
Other examples are all the comments about how "brave" people with disabilities are, or how hard their lives are.
They disabled aren't being treated as real people with real problems, but as props for getting an effect.
Thus the phrase "inspiration porn".
In this particular case, it's doubly bad in that by using the phrase "how good we can be" it encourages the people without the disability to "be good" to the people with it.
Why is that bad? Because it encourages people to use their own judgment as to what is "good" for the disabled person.
This almost never goes well. Most blind people have horror stories about people offering unasked-for "help". I know a couple who have been *injured* when some idiot grabbed them to try to steer them away from a hazard they were well aware of (in one case, the attempt to "help" him avoid falling into an excavation next to the sidewalk actually resulted in him falling into it).
With autistics, consider that many of the attempts to "help" them use methods that the ASPCA won't allow to be used in training *animals*. But because it's professional psychologists trying to make them "act norrmal" most non-autistics shrug it off as "they know what they are doing" or "they need to learn to 'act normal'".
Here's an example that may get thru to some people. I've got asthma. As such, I *could* do most of the stuff in PE. But things like running distances were very difficult What was easy of merely "a bit difficult" for non-asthmatics was very, very hard for me, if not impossible.
Using the "logic" used in treating "low functioning" autistics, the PE teachers should have used electric shocks, or withholding food, etc as means to get me to be a better runner.
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no subject
Date: 2015-12-03 11:26 pm (UTC)It's not actually about the people with the disability. It's about the *non*-disabled.
My only nitpick is that I don't consider autism to be a disability. People with autism tend to develop disabilities like depression, anxiety, and other things, but I believe that being different in this society is what causes that stuff, that these problems are caused by allistics whether out of benevolence or malice; that in a society designed by and for autistic people, we would be just fine. It's just that society was not made by or for us, and allistics don't generally know or care how to integrate us into society, or change society to fit us better. So it's a mal-adaptation, but not a disability necessarily.
That said, I admit there ARE people whose particular form of autism would probably not be helped by any changes to the environment or society, IE they're going to suffer from things like sensory overload no matter what, and some of them will be nonverbal because of it no matter what. But autism as a whole is not, IMO, a disability. Just a different brain operating system.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-03 11:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 12:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 07:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 05:31 pm (UTC)See, Teddy had childhood asthma, and then decided to basically train his way out of it. This was around the time he hit puberty, and it turned out that indeed, his asthma went away. Well, some people's asthma DOES do that -- go away once they grow up.
Others', such as mine, do not. And I had people pointing to his example MANY TIMES when I was a kid, basically saying "it's your fault you still have this, all you have to do is exercise!"
no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 08:17 pm (UTC)Mostly been more of a nuisance than anything else, but I *have* had four or five episodes that led to ER visits.
I think the PE teachers just assumed that if I could run at all, it wasn't a problem.
no subject
Date: 2015-12-04 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-12-05 06:09 am (UTC)I suspect you have enough experience to understand why a nurse friend did a facepalm when I described one ER visit to her.
I got the usual "epinephrine and IV" bit. Only thing was the nurse doing it gave me the epi shot *before* getting the IV started.
It took *eight* tries. Both ways in each elbow and both ways in the back of both hands. It was one of the back of the hand sticks that finally worked. I had bruise. Many bruises...