My mother the madam

You might have heard about this mother in the UK who is pleading for women to have sex with her son. Her son is 21, a virgin, and oh, he has Down syndrome.

That's the pivotal point, really. Take that out of the equation, and it's just an odd story. With it, the story raises all sorts of questions.

My gut response is that this mother's actions are really demeaning for disabled people (and virgins) everywhere. When I dig a little deeper, I see that it's really more troubling than that.

The mother spouts a lot of ostensibly disabled-sensitive talk. She questions society's response to People of Difference, as I like to call us. "Why should these people be kept separate and pigeon-holed when they have the same emotions, desires and feelings as so-called normal people?" she asks, quite reasonably.

But then she ruins it with this: "If he doesn't get a girlfriend, I will feel really bad, because I have sold him this thing that he is like everybody else. That's why I'm working overtime to get this sorted for him." Does her behavior make him "like everybody else"? Does "everybody else" have mothers arranging sexual partners for them.

In fact, under the guise of wanting her son to be "normal," this mother is treating him like a freak.

She's also instilling in her son the same shallow, aesthetically based societal values she supposedly rejects:

1. in order to have any value, you must experience what everyone else does (e.g. having sex, fathering children);

2. implicitly, women are interchangeable and have value only as sex partners, not unique individuals with whom to have a relationship;

3. perhaps most disturbing, as she says she would prefer that whatever girlfriend he gets not have Down syndrome, that "normal" people have a higher commodity value than disabled people and should be sought over others.

Beyond the scope of true disability, this mother seems to have a problem with any sort of freak, i.e., anyone who deviates from the "norm," and she seems to have a very narrow idea of what "normal" is. Apparently to her, if you're not having sex, you're a loser. If you're not a parent, you're a loser. If you're not like everybody else, you're a loser. It's sad, really. And it's particularly sad that she, and many others no doubt, believe that she is truly sympathetic to people with disabilities, when in fact, she is the worst kind of bigot.