Sex Assault on Wheelchair Man
“A man in a wheelchair was subjected to a horrifying sex ordeal by an attacker who had pretended to befriend him during a night out. The 25-year-old victim, who is severely disabled, had been out for a drink with friends in Lowestoft when he was approached by a man who started chatting to him and offered to push him to a nearby pub… The pair carried on towards Gordon Road, but the victim was then pushed round the corner towards the bus station. On reaching Woolworths’s loading bay, the disabled man was subjected to a sexual assault. But his ordeal continued as he was pushed to a car park on Gordon Road and an alley off Regent Road, where he suffered further attacks before his assailant punched him and walked off. The victim made his way back into London Road North where a group of youths helped him to the police station.” — Norfolk Eastern Daily Press (UK)
It is very difficult to read this story because it elicits an uncomfortable, contradictory knot of feelings.
On one hand, you recognize how awful the assault must have been for the victim. It’s kind of like raping a baby — or worse even, since the victim has the motor skills of a newborn but the consciousness of an adult. To be physically helpless yet mentally aware must have made for a horrid combination.
On the other hand, so far as the reader of this story is concerned, you can’t help but acknowledge that there’s something uncomfortably funny about the whole thing. Forgive this, and please don’t leap to the conclusion that it is proper to laugh at the rape and assault of disabled people. It’s not. But still, there is something darkly comic about the image of the rapist wheeling his victim into the parking lot behind a Woolworth’s…
Why? Why can something that you know is awful seem funny?
Perhaps it is a matter of which viewpoint you adopt when thinking about the story. If you look at it from the vantage point of the victim, it’s awful — pure and simple. There’s no other interpretation. But when you look at it from the vantage point of the perpetrator, you see just how brazenly wrong, how disgustingly exploitative, the act was. It defies all reason — and it is precisely this irrationality, this unreasonableness, that makes it funny in a sick sort of way. It’s the same as the laugh you emit when you tell a nigger joke or fart in someone’s face. It’s not the cruelty itself that’s funny, but the awareness of perversely and gratuitously doing something cruel.
This is something I’ve explored myself in some of my literary work in Get Underground Magazine (www.getunderground.com) as part of my Slippery Id column, though I have never articulated it as fully as Pervscan has. It’s the Cervantes Syndrome, that comedic thread that has run from Don Quixote into other work as rich and hilarious, or oftentimes bizarre, as “My Left Foot” (when Day-Lewis gets hit in the head with the ball by the little punks or he writes with his feet), The Three Stooges and even, in some ways, practically every drug movie that has ever been made (including, in parts, the screen adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s “Less Than Zero”, manifesting itself in Julian’s character). Inscrutable cruelty, pangs of agonizing irony and other tragedies that befall humankind appeal to a person’s sense of humor, I think, because there’s a certain amusing relief that comes from realizing that someone else is having all these nasty little things happen to them.
Obviously, a plane crashing into the World Trade Center isn’t funny because that’s genocide. But an invalid zipping down a highway in a wheelchair (see: Robert Altman’s “Brewster McCloud)and then falling over on to a curb and getting shit on by a bird will always make me laugh, as I am sure it would make most people laugh.
And, as this article has pointed out very eloquently, the epiphany that you are entering a realm of perversion, something taboo or just indecent, can be funny for so many reasons. I wouldn’t think to laugh at a kid in an electric wheelchair, but when I see Stephen J. Hawking on television, I nearly piss myself. And “South Park” is probably the cognizant show on the subject, displaying every sign of obscenity and cruelty but exposing it all as just the way things are…which they are unequivocally. Timmy! will always make us laugh, the kid with the crutches and the bad stutter will always make us laugh.
I will always crack up when I see a really decrepit geriatric, not because I don’t hope to make it to his age myself and not because I do not have respect or sympathy for the elderly. Just because many of them are very funny looking, in my opinion, and like everything else this article and my comment has mentioned, uneasiness can tickle your funny bone and when we aren’t laughing out of a sense of “Oh, this is naughty, but I’m getting a primal kick out of it”, then we are giggling out of nervousness.
–Bob Freville http://bobfreville.tripod.com
http://vile_material.tripod.com
Dont be ridiculous….. its hilarious.
hahaha
If you think timmy! is funny or that much of the south park world view is just the way it is, rather than just the way it is in the minds of a certain sliver of sheltered suburban white men…well, you’re probably a sheltered suburban white man…for the rest of the world, south park is like making fun of that entire world view of whitebread upper-middle-class suburbia and their pampered stupid little boys. The joke’s not on timmy, it’s on you, at least for most people who watch the program.
And if you think this kind of thing hasn’t happened a million times over in medical and penal institutions across the USA, and probably other countries, you’re wrong. It’s only in this day and age, and in certain jurisdictions, where men can even be legally considered victims of sexual assault. Most laws specifically refer to women, though sexual assault on men is as old as the greeks.
you know, i think i might just go to a red state and have myself some fun with some suburban boys
When i was 19 i sort of.. raped a wheelchair girl. Like the original story, i was in a night club. We got talking but i was a bit drunk. We walked (well, I walked, she rolled) through a park, something came over me like a haze of bumble bees – and i pushed her over and raped her.. anally. Is this wrong?
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