Sex On Wheels

I was in a vile mood last night. For whatever reason I had the rage. In the midst of this rage I made a mistake. With the anger and vitriol building up I suggested that The Apprentice was 'the very fucking bottom of the tv industry's enormous barrell of shite'. It's not. Not quite. Loathesome as it is to consider how many people are glued to the search for the next capitalist fat-cat, there is a greater evil about to hit our screens.

Tonight Channel Four will cover themselves in disgrace with the airing of a film about the sex lives of disabled people. Now you might think it slightly arse-about-face of me to write a scathing attack on such a programme without actually having seen it, but I'm afraid I don't have the mental strength to sit through it. After 30 seconds of their previous effort on the subject, 'The Undateables', I look back and remember how this made me feel and consider myself a danger to society should I put myself through this kind of abject horror again. I don't need to see tonight's airing of 'Sex On Wheels' to hate it. It offends me as a concept. It's pandering to the sick voyeurism of people who want so desperately to feel superior to someone else.

Let's start with the title anyway. Sex On Wheels. Who came up with that? It sounds like something that Brian Potter might sing in tribute to Kings Of Leon on Talent Night at The Phoenix. Apart from anything else, it's misleading. Normally one does not have sex on wheels. No more than one sleeps on wheels or one takes a fucking bath on wheels. Read the bio, I was not born in a wheelchair because my mother would never have survived. Nor therefore, am I tied to it, despite my inability to walk. My wheelchair doesn't have brakes, and so to have sex on wheels would be frankly impractical and probably quite dangerous. Too much of that and my partner might very well end up in need of a wheelchair herself. The need for brakes on wheelchairs is a myth, by the way. I can't tell you how many bus or train drivers I have wanted to disembowel for asking me if I've 'got my brake on' when I get on board. They only stop a tiny hair short of rubbing you on the head when they ask. The implication that able bodied people know more about how to ensure the safety of disabled passengers is beyond absurd.

Back at the ranch, the plot that is, what really offends me about Sex On Wheels and it's cheaply-made, turgid brethren are the people who take part. Why the fuck would you want to put yourself through this level of humiliation? To be on television? That's the kind of mentality that sub-humans like Jeremy Kyle make a living on. Nobody knows any better than me that it is more difficult to 'get some' when you have a disability than if you do not. It wasn't until my friends started camping out with girls in tents at about 14 years of age that I actually considered myself to be any different to any of them. I'd missed out on other stuff, like football, but I replaced that with basketball. Basketball was my football, and it took me further and allowed me to travel far more than I would have been able to in the St.Helens Junior Combination. But camping out with girls in tents is not something that can be so easily substituted. It's little exaggeration to say that the nearest I got to intimacy with any of my female friends at that point was a walk to the corner shop. You haven't lived, haven't really suffered, until you have heard someone say to you that it is not you, it is the wheelchair. We're no different from animals, really. When the male lions get old and weak the females bugger off and find a younger, stronger partner. So it is with us. It's not pretty and if you think about it too much there is only darkness, but that is our society.

Yet this does not make it completely impossible to find a partner. I am living proof that it is possible to have a disability and look like the back of a 10A and still have a meaningful relationship. And before that some less meaningful ones. You just need a shred of charisma and a modicum of intelligence. These things didn't get me anywhere when I was 14 but you will find that they are more effective as you get older. Do I think I would have been more popular had I been able bodied? Almost certainly, but then if my auntie had bollocks she would by my uncle. If you really, really can't get any then here is what you should do. Save your money and buy yourself a whore. Able bodied people can pontificate all they wish about the seediness of prostitution but the fact is that I know people who have reached a ripe old age with their virginity in tact. What kind of a society would decree, under those circumstances, that prostitution does not have a place?

Just do me a favour, will you? If you are going to take my advice and fill the physical void in your life using the contents of your wallet, don't be going on television shouting about it. Don't feed the voyeurism. Your sex life is nobody else's business but your own in any case. Channel Four's decision to screen a documentary about the sex lives of disabled people seems to me to be as arbitrary as airing a similar documentary about the sex lives of people who shop at Tesco. It's perverse that they think that the sex lives of disabled people are either any more interesting or any more of their concern than anyone else's. And what is more disturbing is that they are right in their assertion that the cretins who live among us will sit and watch it. As if it will tell them anything about how the other half live. You have learned more about the subject from reading this page than any overly intrusive, saddo-fest documentary could ever provide.

God I'm so fucking angry again now. And I thought this would help..........