No More Sex for You, Only for Men: Inequality in Right to Enjoy Sexuality for Women with Spinal Cord Injury

No More Sex for You, Only for Men: Inequality in Right to Enjoy Sexuality for Women with Spinal Cord Injury S. Federici JSM Sexual Medicine 2022 Vol. 6 Issue 1 Pages 1080 https://www.jscimedcentral.com/SexualMedicine/sexualmedicine-6-1080.pdf According to the medical model of disability (as explained also in the ICF), conceiving sexual activity by a person with a disability for a “normal body” population would mean admitting imagining an abnormal (monstrous) sexuality. It follows from this that “abled” people see the person with physical impairment as asexual, because their body condition affects the capacity to perform so-called normal sexual activity. These beliefs and attitudes inform the lives of people with spinal cord injury (SCI). However, these social barriers do not affect men and women with disabilities equally. More often than men, women with SCI’s experience of sexual pleasure is neglected if not outright denied. Through reading the case of “She” and from a perspective of the right to pleasure of women with SCI, we reread data about the Love & Life project, which was carried out to enhance the psychological sexual health in a Unipolar Spinal Unit of in- and outpatients and their partners. The two studies reported here showed that men and women with SCI have experienced restriction to their right to sexual pleasure to varying degrees: women more than men are deprived of their right to enjoy their sexuality.