It's Just Nerves by Kelly Davio

Author:Kelly Davio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: humor, healthcare, feminism, essays, disability, doctors
Publisher: Handtype Press

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KYLIE JENNER AND HER GOLDEN WHEELS

I saw it first in a train station: the poster of a woman who looked like a contemporary Marilyn Monroe ascending a staircase. Her platinum hair was sleeker than anybody’s I’d ever seen in windblown London, and her black dress hugged her the way every woman imagines a dress one day will but never does. What interested me the most about the image, though, was the fact that, as she turned her head over her shoulder and threw up a saucy eyebrow at the camera, she balanced on a pair of forearm crutches—standard-issue aluminum with cuffs and handgrips. I don’t often see depictions of women using mobility aids looking powerful and fashionable, so I stopped in the middle of the mob shoving toward the train and looked a little longer.

Flanking the woman were two beefy bodyguards in what I took to be designer suits. The men braced the woman, holding her up on either side, as though without their help she’d tumble down the stairs. At the bottom of the shot were the model’s feet, trussed up in a pair of strappy platform heels.

The debilitating condition that put her on crutches, the viewer is meant to understand, was the height of her designer shoes.

Talk about a letdown. What I’d taken for a badass image of a woman unapologetically occupying space with mobility aids was something else entirely. It was just one more advertisement suggesting that women manipulate themselves in some way or another in order to look pretty. Which is to say, another advertisement, period.

I adjusted my pair of sneakers and started slowly up the stairs in the Underground station, grabbing onto the handrail so that I wouldn’t take an actual tumble on my actually less-than-mobile legs. I didn’t have any bodyguards in Armani suits to hold me up, after all.

After seeing that ad, it probably shouldn’t have surprised me to see Kylie Jenner—she of, well, inexplicable fame—striking her own disappointing pose a few weeks later when she appeared on the cover of Interview magazine. It’s an odd enough choice for a stylist to give such a young woman a hair-and-makeup combo that make her look like she’s about to sing “Blue Velvet” in a David Lynch film, but never mind that—the most bizarre feature of the photo was that the able-bodied girl, shiny in her latex corset, sat perched in a golden wheelchair. What would possess a healthy, abled person to have her picture taken in a wheelchair—one from which she’s free to hop up at any moment—I couldn’t say, but if you believe scores of supportive fans and their internet chatter, the image was meant to symbolize her limitations.

I don’t claim to know what limitations Ms. Jenner has experienced in her life, but I feel confident that they have nothing to do with wheelchairs. Or with canes or walkers or hearing aids or any of the other devices people use to get on with their lives. These aids are tools of freedom in the world, after all, not markers of restriction.

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