What is Inspiration Porn?

People with disabilities are often portrayed as “inspirational” in the media and among other people. They are often seen as beating the odds by achieving the seemingly impossible.

In real life, many people with disabilities dislike these depictions. They even have a name for it: inspiration porn. This concept has nothing to do with sexual pornography and everything to do with the false perceptions many people have about the disability community.

What is inspiration porn?

No one is better suited to explain “inspiration porn” than Stella Young, the late comedian and activist who coined the term.

In Young’s TedTalk, she explained that:

We've been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional.

We've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed. Or this one: "Before you quit, try!" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn.

And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person."

These images objectify disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren't so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective.

People with disabilities aren’t doing anything out of the ordinary. They are just using their bodies to the best of their capacity. So is it really fair to objectify them in the way that we do, to share those images?

No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never. Smiling at a television screen isn't going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. It's just not going to happen.

Emily Ladau’s take on inspiration porn:

Disabled disability activist Emily Landau agreed with Young, writing that:

Unfortunately, mainstream media rarely tells stories about inaccessibility because it isn’t the narrative the general public cares to hear. Instead, my voice is drowned out by the endless noise of “inspiration porn.”

People can read or watch inspirational stories, click the “share” button, and go on with their day. But what happens after the quick hit of warm, fuzzy feelings? They may be moved to grab tissues in that initial moment, but most likely sure won’t be motivated to take real action.

She also added that:

When you’re bombarded with media depictions of people with disabilities deemed “inspiring” for “overcoming” their “suffering,” developing a healthy and realistic self-image can be a challenge. On the one hand, there are stories about disabled people climbing mountains “in spite” of their disabilities, and suddenly I feel like I have to live up to some impossibly high standard to be viewed as valuable. On the other hand, there are people who gasp in amazement at the thought of disabled people having the will to live another day. There’s a constant tug-of-war between incredibly high and incredibly low expectations.

Honestly, some days I do feel like I can take on the world. And other days getting out of bed leaves me feeling like I’ve already climbed a mountain. But the narrative of inspiration never acknowledges this kind of nuance of the day-to-day disability experience.

A parent’s take on inspiration porn

There is a cultural trend of able-bodied people congratulating themselves for remembering to include people with disabilities. You might call it a celebration of someone doing a good deed or a feel-good story. But many people in the disability community call it inspiration porn. They don’t want to be the subject of your inspiration, and I don’t want my kid to be that either.

The posts that celebrate able-bodied people who go out of their way to be nice to disabled people reinforce the status quo, which is that people with disabilities are other or less than, and that it’s heroic to be inclusive or kind.

When you see my daughter, please do not praise her for doing things you do every day. She uses a walker, but with it, she walks. She uses a wheelchair, and it keeps her mobile just like your legs do. She isn’t doing anything out of the ordinary.

Please understand that even though you may find her inspiring, heaping praise on her for merely existing says more about how able-bodied people view her than it does about how great she really is. It says that she is a stereotype, not an individual. Calling her out for being so incredibly special actually feels like a condolence to her and makes her feel frustrated and deficient. She wants to be recognized for the things she does that add value to the world.

Why can’t we see those? Why can’t we be inspired instead to make sure streets and stores and buildings and parks and schools are accessible? Why can’t we find better ways to integrate classrooms? If more than 12 percent of the population in the United States has a disability of some kind, why can’t we do more to see disability as normal?

I’m not telling you not to acknowledge her differences. She’s different and pretending not to see that would ignore a critical part of her. But see her. Take a moment to get to know her as a human and not as the objectified, impossibly adorable little disabled girl you think she is.

Closing thoughts about inspiration porn

As the above writers have said, inspiration porn is the product of a society that struggles to see people with disabilities as multi-faceted, full-fledged human beings. It’s the result of a culture that wants to use people with disabilities as a commodity for entertainment without giving them any benefits from that consumption.

I would also add that inspiration porn is society’s inadvertent admission of guilt. When disabled people’s successes or social inclusion is breaking news, that means that disabled people’s experiences with inequality and isolation are the opposite of news. They’re simply the norm. Furthermore, when society pats itself on the back for treating disabled people with basic decency, it shows how lowly they view people with disabilities. Those with anti-disability biases are telling on themselves.

People without disabilities can help stop inspiration porn: they can write to the media to encourage better representation, and they can educate others about the dangers of inspiration porn. This way, we can get closer to a more disability-friendly society.