I recently came to know about “Devoteeism” when someone added me as a friend on Facebook. We got talking and eventually he told me about his desire to marry a girl with a disability. This took me by surprise, as I wondered how a non-disabled person wanted someone with a disability in his life. At last, he told me about this term, “Devoteeism” and I started reading about it on the Internet. I researched everything and what I found out disturbed me from the core of my heart.
“Devoteeism”, to my understanding is a physical attraction to the ‘different’ movements by a person with a disability, even as they are doing something as normal as eating food. When I searched the Internet, I discovered there are many websites that host videos of the day to day activities performed by people with disabilities. In one such video, a woman says she likes watching people with disabilities get dressed! There seem to be millions of people interested in these kinds of videos, people from India, too.
Sometimes people from this community can be insensitive and exploitative, but most of the time they want themselves to be known in the world of disability, so they can hook up, or sometimes just make friends with people with disabilities, and eventually use their pictures for their own sexual gratification. Some other devotees are really understanding and they don’t intrude in your personal life. The person who sent me a friend request, was nice and he was the one who told me everything about it; he even told me that I can ask him anything I want.
Nowadays, when I eat my food, as I aim the food towards my mouth, my hand shakes, and a bit of the food falls. As I take a bite, what goes through my mind is this – the devotees are going to love this vision of me struggling as I eat my daily meal. There’s a constant fear of being objectified as a girl on a wheelchair everywhere I go. I can’t understand how someone can find my wheelchair ‘sexy’ or ‘desirable’; it’s like someone will be in a relationship with me just because I use a wheelchair. It is a horrifying thought because not everyone will confess that they have an obsession. This person can be anywhere and everywhere, observing you and getting sexual gratification, through you.
Seeing people with disabilities struggle is a major part of devoteeism or their fetish. For me, each part of my life is a struggle, it may be typing, walking or even going to the bathroom. This is my life and I have become used to it, but when I found that someone else on seeing these struggles, can get sexual arousal or can gratify themselves – this means for them, the disabled community is nothing more than just a sex object.
For me, my disability is a part of me, not the whole of me. This devoteeism makes me scared and forces me to cover up my disability. When I told this issue to my friends, they told me to be conscious, moreover to not upload pictures showcasing my disability on Facebook.
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