How the Olympics Makes Me Think About Disability, Not Sex

I'm surprised by how much of the Olympics I've been watching (considering that I don't have cable, don't have enough free time, and have an aversion to competitive sports developed over years of being called names and being called last for anything involving physical movement and coordination). I don't get that excited about the competition, but I do like watching bodies do things.

I think it's interesting how different the bodies on the screen are appear to be from my body. I notice this particularly when an athlete is preparing to do the thing they are about to do, and stretching their body out. In some ways it's not recognizable to me.

It's funny because the way I talk about their bodies reminds me of the way other people talk to me about disability. People tell me they couldn't ever imagine living with a disability. They'd rather be dead (they think) than use a wheelchair to get around or have to be public about the way their body functions. Because disability and disabled people are such a big part of my life, it's hard for me to remember a time when I was so disconnected and naive.

All this watching and thinking about bodies makes me wonder why we come to think that some kinds of difference are good and other kinds are bad. Or maybe it's more that I wonder how we came to that place. After all our ideas of what makes a perfect body or ability has always been tied to time and place. There's never been a universal physical ideal, and there never will be. What's considered beautiful in one community is considered undesirable in another. Physical abilities that are valued at one time are considered useless (or in today's parlance, unmarketable) in another.

The same is true for sexual bodies, and sexuality. If you talk to enough people from different communities, cultures, and generations about their desires you quickly learn that what is beautiful and arousing couldn't be more subjective. Partly I think this speaks to the amazing complexity and diversity of desire. As people we are turned on by so many things. And partly I think it's about the way that our beauty and sexuality emanates out of or through our physicality in unexpected ways.

What I don't think it has anything to do with is competition. Another thousand make up or moisturizer campaigns, another ten thousand porn films, or another hundred thousand beer ads may make us think that there's something wrong with us (as opposed to what they should do, which is make us know that there's really something wrong with the them that make all this stuff for us), but trying to match those ideals, their ideals, won't work.

An evolutionary perspective would suggest that sex is the ultimate competitive sport. But evolutionary theorists are talking about reproduction, not sex. Sex, and sexuality, are much much more than reproduction, and neither, I would argue, are ever helped by serious competition. Which is okay with me. As a spectator in a crowd, if I'm going to watch two more-than-half-naked people in a pool, I'd much prefer to watch them diving than having sex.