Disability

You can read a book. You can read a map. But reading people, that’s difficult in any situation. Reading people to figure out if they’re actually into you romantically or sexually is even more difficult. Lisa Laman is here to give fellow autistic readers a little help.

For those of us with chronic pain, living our lives with other people -- be that with sex or something else -- can be tricky. Why was I often having such a hard time communicating such basic things? I realized that some of the survival strategies I used to get through the day were coming back to bite me. Over time, I developed some strategies for re-learning how to listen to myself.

What if a partner is nonverbal due to disability? Here are some tips on how to seek and obtain consent and how to generally communicate during sex with a nonverbal partner, so sex can be safe, satisfying and fun for everyone involved.

The options for people on the Autism spectrum looking to go out on a date are few. This lack of options can help to compound problems people on the Autism spectrum already have with dating. Navigating social hurdles, like avoiding over-talking, while being on a date is, on its own, a plenty daunting prospect. Realizing that the options for a backdrop to a date are exceedingly limited is just adding salt to the wounds. Together, these challenges can make a person feel like the prospect of going out on a date at all is far more trouble than it’s worth.

It can be incredibly frustrating when a part of the body we strongly associate with, and expect to give us, pleasure ends up causing us chronic pain. If you have chronic pelvic pain, what do you do if you want to get sexual with yourself or someone else? How can you be physically intimate if you’re in pain? How do you talk to your partners? If it starts hurting, should you stop? This guide from Nicole Guappone offers some great help with all this and more.

As a person on the Autism spectrum, I know all too well that living with any sort of disability brings about a barrage of challenges. Your own difficult experiences living with those challenges are important and you have a right to feel all kinds of emotions about them, including frustration at the larger world. However, just as your own humanity and emotions should not be discounted, the same goes for other human beings.

Cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, and spinal cord injuries, among other disabilities, can involve spasticity. People often have day-to-day coping mechanisms to help manage their spasticity, but what do you do when you have spasticity and want to have sex?

It can be hard for anybody to ask for help. For individuals on the Autism spectrum or anyone with some kind of disability, it can be an especially trying task. Here's a little advice from someone who knows.

Disabled people get a lot of practice telling people about our bodies: doctors, therapists, care workers, or people in our support networks like family and friends. It's so important to be able to tell our partners how to support and pleasure us in the ways that work for us, but even though we’ve got all that practice, this conversation can still be really hard to start. Here's some help.

Depending on your disability, everything involving sex may require help – and if your parent is your primary caregiver, bringing up these topics (let alone asking for assistance with them) is not an easy task. It is possible to have a healthy and fulfilling relationship and sex life as a disabled person with a parent caregiver (or any other kind of caregiver). Here's a guide to help you out in this department.