KYLIE JENNER: GIMP GIRL WANNABE

By now, you’ve probably seen the fruits of the Kylie Jenner photo shoot in the current issue of Interview magazine. The teenage reality TV star is dressed provocatively in leather bondage gear. In some of the shots, even her delicately-curved derriere is exposed.

But with all of the photos we average folks are bombarded with on the Internet – celebrities posing in little more than body paint and glitter, fashion models striding nearly nude down catwalks – Ms. Jenner’s photos are not terribly remarkable. You, dear reader, have probably seen much more revealing stuff on your friends’ Instagram accounts.

So why am I even mentioning this? Well, it seems that Ms. Jenner has revealed something intimate about herself that goes beyond bare skin.

Kylie Jenner is a gimp girl wannabe.  

In two of the shots, Kylie is wearing a black leather strapless onesie and a black leather collar while sitting in a gold-tone manual wheelchair.

Looking at the shots left me flummoxed. You see, I thought Larry Flynt was the only gimp out there rocking a gold chair.

Then I tossed that thought aside. I mean, if anybody else could acquire a golden gimp-mobile, it would be a member of the storied Kardashian-Jenner family.

Next, my eyes went to the expression on Kylie’s face. In one photo, she stares off into space as if she’s perhaps experiencing a petit mal seizure. My cynical side wanted to dismiss this as the typical empty gaze of a high fashion model. You know, that look that says “I am insanely gorgeous and make $10 grand an hour, yet I’m so misunderstood.”

But then I realized that Ms. Jenner is really trying out the look of someone who has a disability. She wants to live it, to feel it.

Kylie’s tired of her incredibly privileged, affluent, non-disabled life. She wants to know what it’s like to have precarious health, to struggle to find employment yet keep her government benefits so she can pay for attendant care. She longs to spend weeks trying to find an accessible apartment she can afford, only to have the landlord tell her that the “no pets” policy means she can’t bring her service dog. She yearns to sit in the rain waiting for a bus, only to find that the one that stops has a broken lift and she has to wait another 20 minutes for the next one.

Kylie Jenner, I pronounce you an honorary gimp girl. Welcome to the club.

Face of Failure, Symbol of Shame

Back when I was a kid, it haunted me.

It was always lurking in the back of my mind. It weighed on my shoulders and jangled my nerves.

It was the stick with no carrot that my parents used to motivate me. Its sinister proximity was held over my head, the motivation to do 10 more minutes of exercise. To walk 10 more feet. To try just a little harder.

I feared vampires but I was much more terrified of it. Vampires vanished with the sunrise, but this dastardly beast was always just around the corner.

It was the face of failure and the symbol of shame. A stain impossible to wash away. Once its lamprey-like jaws latched on, it consumed you. It became you. You were marked for life, and what a pathetic life it would be.

You see, my Nosferatu, my demon, the thing I feared above all others was a wheelchair.

I never consciously admitted it to myself, but I think I knew as a teenager that full-time use of a wheelchair would have made my life a whole lot easier, and undoubtedly richer. The precariousness of my walking and the crushing fatigue it caused meant I could expend energy only for essential movement like walking to class.

In high school, I went to the restroom once a day or not at all. I simply couldn’t afford the pain and extra energy needed to make the trip. Holding it was a better option for me, if not for my kidneys. Activities like writing for the school paper or yearbook were impossible. To participate meant more walking. And that just wasn’t gonna happen.

Back then a chair was acceptable only for those labeled “profoundly disabled,” individuals who’d been discarded by society. Even the elderly shunned wheelchairs. My grandma would rather have worn Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter on her bosom than ride in one.

“I hope you at least have two fingers you can still move to run a wheelchair!” my mom once shouted after a therapy session when she thought I hadn’t tried hard enough. (I didn’t know how to break it to her that a power chair is controlled with a joy stick, not “forwards” and “backwards” buttons.)

With adulthood, my childish fears faded. I shook away the terror of needing a chair, but it took much longer to shake the shame. I still believed I was lucky that the non-disabled allowed me into their stores, restaurants and theaters, even if it meant coming in the back door through the boiler room. I should count my blessings that I was allowed to sit amongst them, even if it was in the back row.

It took decades to see my wheelchair as a device of empowerment rather than a burden of failure. It was no longer an albatross around my neck but a raptor that swept me off to college, enabled me to have a career and a meaningful life.

If you’re young and disabled, don’t let ablecentric troglodytes define your life and how you should live it. Don’t buy into their bigoted ideals. Reject their pathetic need to make hierarchies and pigeonhole you in them.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: going through life in an upright position is highly overrated.

RUBIK’S SHOES, or Feeling as Feminine as Ernest Borgnine

Rubik’s Cube blasted into American pop culture when I was in high school. I still remember the first time I held one. I loved it the way I love Piet Mondrian’s paintings: for its mesmerizing, aesthetically pleasing geometry.

That is, until I tried to solve it. I’ve never had a knack for math and I wouldn’t know an algorithm from Algeciras, Spain. I made several tries in earnest to line up the same color on each side. But when I got close to lining up the white squares on one side, it threw the yellow side out of whack. I failed miserably. It served the remainder of its life as a paper weight. Today, the only “Cube” I love is the 1998 film in which six people are inexplicably imprisoned in a booby-trapped system of boxes.

Which reminds me of my relationship with shoes. (Yes, dear reader. This particular blog entry is much like a Simpson’s episode, starting out with one apparent plotline and veering over to something completely different.) You see, because of my 40+ year battle with rheumatoid arthritis, my feet and ankles are a disaster. Consequently, trying to find a pair of cute shoes that I can walk in is as exasperating as trying to align color facades on a cube.

First off, I take a small shoe size: size 6 American, size 35 or 36 Italian. But my tootsies are really wide. Sometimes I can squeeze into medium width, but “wide” width is preferred. The next problem is my ankles. I had them fused into a fixed position back when Jimmy Carter was still in the White House. This means my feet are like Barbie’s; I must wear shoes with a heel or I will fall over.  In my case, every pair of shoes I own must have a heel height of 2.6 inches: no more, no less. (Sometimes if the heel is only a tiny bit too low, I can cheat with a small wedge inside the shoe to raise me up.) The putrid icing on top of this stinking cake is the fact that I can’t reach my feet with my hands. So I need shoes that I can slip on and off by myself. No ties or buckles.

Shoe shopping is typically an exercise in exasperation. Like the squares on a Rubik’s Cube, everything must align just so. When I find the right size, the heel height is often too high or too low. If I can align both size and heel, the shoes are probably too narrow. When I get lucky and align size, width and heel, my hopes are shot down by shoe strings or buckles. “Cloven toes” are also a deal killer.

Truth be told, I do own a pair of low-heeled cheetah print Manolo Blahnik mules and a sweet pair of Emilio Pucci slides. I save them for special occasions. The remaining pairs are fit only for a bingo hall or a skateboarding half-pipe. No six-inch stilettos; just clodhoppers. About as feminine as Ernest Borgnine in a pair of SAS waitress wedges.

So I pretend. When I’m doing my adapted aquatic exercises, I work a runway walk along the stripes painted on the pool bottom. For a few moments in my mind, I’m a fashion model in a pair of Prada flame heels strutting along the catwalk.     

Rev. Blowhard and Tank Top Tina

"...(P)aralyzed limbs may not particularly limit a person's mobility as much as attitudinal and physical barriers. The question centers on 'normality'. What, it is asked, is the normal way to be mobile over a distance of a mile? Is it to walk, drive one's own car, take a taxicab, ride a bicycle, use a wheelchair, roller skate, or use a skate board, or some other means?”

 -- Prof. David Pfeiffer, Ph.D, internationally recognized scholar in the field of disability studies, and polio survivor

 

Although it pains me to admit it, driving a car remains an acid test of human normalcy in American culture. You are what you drive. You drive, therefore, you are.

Dear reader, before you attribute my distaste for automobile dominance to being too gimped up to operate a vehicle, let me put that to rest. I own a wheelchair lift-equipped mini-van and I drive it daily. I’m grateful for it. But I wish everyone – myself included -- had numerous, high-quality transportation options besides driving a car.

I think my ambivalence began the summer I learned to drive. I didn’t feel ready to take Driver’s Ed when I turned 16, so I waited until the summer after my freshman year of college. I enrolled in a course taught by a sweaty, little strawberry-blond man who sounded like Foghorn Leghorn and preached to a fundamentalist congregation on weekends. He taught classes in a seedy storefront space in the dying downtown of formerly robust Rust Belt city. My classmates and I sat at beaten-up desks and perspired while Rev. Blowhard shouted continuously for no apparent reason.

My friends, who already had their licenses, told me stories about the nauseating films they’d seen in Driver’s Ed. There were tales of tough-guy high school ballers who tossed their cookies in the trash can while watching “Highways of Agony” and “Mechanized Death.” So, I was filled with dread when the sweaty preacher man fed the leader for “Signal 30” into his 1950s-era reconditioned projector. Then I had an epiphany: each minute of amateur footage of teenagers with crushed vertebrae screaming in pain meant one less minute of being preached at.

After several weeks of classroom instruction and gore porn, it was time to get in a car. My instructor, a pleasant middle-aged woman with a penchant for tank tops, picked me up at my house. I was anxious but also excited to get out on the road. This was an important milestone in my young adult life!

As we set out, my instructor held the steering wheel with her left hand. “OK,” I thought. “She’s letting me get warmed up. She’ll let go soon, right?”

Uh, no. We drove around for 45 minutes while Tank Top Tina kept a white-knuckle death grip on the wheel. Keep in mind we were doing 25 mph on dry, flat Ohio streets, not screaming down the Mokee Dugway in a blizzard.

I was befuddled. None of my friends had mentioned this. Neither my instructor nor I broached the subject. We simply pretended like this was normal, a construct I was all-too familiar with.

I told my parents when I returned home. This resulted in my mom calling Rev. Blowhard, who agreed to come to our house to discuss “the situation.”

In other words, to discuss the driving school’s baseless trepidation of teaching a gimp girl to drive.

‘Cause, you know, them cripples can’t be trusted not to crash into a brick wall.

When the Sweaty Rev arrived at our house, I was seething with rage, but containing it like the good, little demure girl I was back then. Was.

My mom and the Rev engaged in an awkward conversation in which they danced around the elephant of ableism trumpeting its trunk in front of them. The Rev. refused to say I couldn’t be taught to drive, yet dodged any direct answers to my mom’s questions. The conversation concluded with him swerving off on a tangent about how a spinner nob on the steering wheel would solve all “my problems.”

That was the last I ever saw of the Good Rev or Tank Top Tina. Since I was 18, I didn’t need a driving school certificate to get a license. Over the next couple weeks, my dad patiently taught me to drive and I passed both the exam and field test on the first try.

I’ve driven ever since. But I still wish the world was full of wheelchair-accessible trains, trams and taxis so I had more choices.

Choices are good.