Blind woman calls for adult industry to be more inclusive

It was a response no-one ever wants from someone they want to date – but it also lays bare a problematic view around sex.

A Perth sex blogger has revealed the bedroom-related question that caught her off-guard since she began documenting her intimate experiences.

Bianca Peterek, who describes herself as “kinky” and “sex-obsessed”, shared everything from sexy toy reviews to “sexy fantasies” on her blog Helen’s Toy Box, which she posted regularly on until last year.

The 40-year-old is also blind after being born with congenital glaucoma, a rare condition that affects the development of the eye’s drainage system before birth.

However her lack of sight hasn’t stopped her from enjoying a healthy sexual appetite, a fact Ms Peterek says shocks many people without a disability.

One of the first times she encountered the broad, and incorrect assumption, was during a conversation with a man she was dating.

“So as a blind person, I take it you don’t have any sexual feelings right?” he said.

The 40-year-old said she was “shocked” by the question, largely because it simply wasn’t true.

“I’m like, ‘Where did you get that from? That’s not true’,” Ms Peterek said.

Sadly, Ms Peterek believes the man’s question was far from unusual when it comes to how non-disabled people view the relationship between sex and disability.

Bianca Peterek believes that many disabled people are ‘infantilised’ when it comes to sex. Picture: Supplied.

“A lot of disabled people are infantilised, they’re treated like they’re children, even after they grow up,” she said.

“Especially people who have disabilities that make it so they are reliant on people for other things.”

Ms Peterek said this belief also extends to accessing pornography or sex toys if you are disabled, explaining that it’s far less common for adult videos to come with audio descriptions for the blind.

Even when they do, she said it often ruins the mood rather than help set the scene.

“Putting more of a story to the porn, making it so there is more dialogue even if it’s just one person doing stuff, then talking about what they are doing, makes it more accessible to us,” Ms Peterek said.

Very few pornographic videos come with audio descriptions for vision-impaired people. Picture: iStock.

While Ms Peterek has been able to access the right information and sex toys through her sex blog work, she says it can challenging if you are vision impaired.

Something as simple as knowing how to charge a vibrator can be impossible to decipher unless the toy comes with information a blind person can access.

“We also want instructions in a way that we can read them, not with little pictures, we want them in text so that they are accessible to us,” Ms Peterek said.

Some adult shop staff may also not be educated on how to accommodate blind customers who may need to touch and feel a sex toy before purchasing.

“You can go online and read all the descriptions about sex toys and those kind of things, but there’s nothing quite like being able to touch it to understand what it is,” Karen Knight, Vision Australia’s general manager of client services, said.

Ms Knight said barriers to accessing porn and adult entertainment can be “quite a common issue” for blind people.

Vision Australia's Karen Knight. Picture: Supplied.

“Of course, people are more or less open to talking about it as a barrier,” she said.

“Perhaps they don’t want people to know they’re having these struggles, so often it’s not until they have built up a strong trusting relationship with their therapist that they will raise those kinds of issues.”

Ms Knight, who has also been blind since birth, said a lack of access combined with an assumption that those with disabilities simply don’t have sexual needs, can have a damaging impact.

“It can mean they either need to be able to push those things out their minds, or maybe they go to the other extreme and explore things that are not particularly safe,” she said.

Ms Peterek hopes people without a disability can realise the difference for sexual desire for blind people is that “we process it differently, not that we don’t have it to process”.

“It’s there with us, just like it is for everyone else and we’re allowed to have these feelings,” she added.