Fellow OandP’ers:
Let it not be said I have a onetrack mind, but this lengthy article came to
my attention via the author, it would be just plain ignorant of me not to
share it with you all.
BTW: You saw the subject, now you can’t blame me for you going any further
than this!!!
I direct your attention to the second to last paragraph inparticular.
Not exactly light reading….
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Running head: Devotees, pretenders and wannabes
Journal of Sexuality and Disability, 1997; 15: 243-260.
Devotees, pretenders and wannabes: Two cases of Factitious Disability
Disorder.
Richard L. Bruno, Ph.D.
Director
The Post-Polio Institute
Englewood Hospital and Medical Center
Englewood, New Jersey 07631
(201) 894-3724
ABSTRACT
Despite having been described for more a century, there is no
understanding of the origin of the attractions, desires and behaviors of
devotees, pretenders and wannabes (DPW’s). Devotees are non-disabled
people who are sexually attracted to people with disabilities, pretenders
are non-disabled people who act as if they have a disability by using
assistive devices and wannabes actually want to become disabled, sometimes
going to extraordinary lengths to have a limb amputated. Two cases are
presented in an effort to understand the psychology of DPW’s and to suggest
one psychologic concept – that of Factitious Disability Disorders – that
may explain not only the obsession to be with disabled persons, but also
the desire to pretend to be disabled and even the compulsion to become
disabled. Also presented is a combined cognitive-behavioral approach to
modify DPW’s obsessions and compulsive, intrusive, illegal and sometimes
self-injurious behaviors.
Amputees; paraphilias; sexual deviations; factitious disorders;
Munchausen’s syndrome
Devotees, pretenders and wannabes: Two cases of Factitious Disability
Disorder.
Richard L. Bruno, Ph.D.
The advent of the Internet has brought to the attention of people
with disabilities individuals who had heretofore largely remained hidden:
Devotees, pretenders and wannabes (DPW’s). Devotees are nondisabled people
who are sexually attracted to people with disabilities, typically those
with mobility impairments and especially amputees; Pretenders are
nondisabled people who act as if they have a disability by using assistive
devices [e.g., braces, crutches, and wheelchairs] in private and sometimes
in public, so that they ‘feel’ disabled or are perceived by others as
having a disability; Wannabes actually want to become disabled, sometimes
going to extraordinary lengths to have a limb amputated. (1)
While the most common Internet bulletin boards, chat rooms and web
sites are for male devotees of female amputees, others are for male and
female, heterosexual and homosexual, plaster cast, crutch, leg, back and
neck brace and even orthodonture DPW’s. (1,2) An America Online bulletin
board posting entitled “Bunion Love” requested “photos, videos, or
correspondence dealing with gals [having] deformed/crippled feet, or
toe/toes amputated . . . or who have severe bunions on their feet. The
more severe, the better.”
However, the Internet is by no means providing the first information on
DPW’s. Since the late 1800’s the medical literature has described men and
women who are sexually attracted to amputees, those who limp, or use
crutches, braces and wheelchairs, as well as individuals who pretend to be
or who actually want to become disabled. (3-13).
DPW’s interest in amputation has been the most frequently documented.
Cases of men and women who are attracted to amputees, who themselves want
to have amputations and who have successfully become amputees have been
described since 1882. (3,10,11,14-17) Money (14), who has focused on the
interest in amputation, coined the terms apotemnophilia (achieving sexual
fulfillment by fantasizing about being an amputee) and acrotomophilia
(requiring amputee partners, real or in fantasy, to achieve sexual
satisfaction).
In 1983, Dixon (18) published results of the first survey of male
acrotomophiles, individuals who were customers of AMPIX, a company
providing stories about and pictures of amputees. The 195 acrotomophiles
were college educated, professional, white males, 75% of whom had been
aware of their interest in amputees by age 15. Although 55% of respondents
had dated amputees and 40% had had sex with an amputee, only 5% had married
an amputee. Fifty-three percent of the respondents had pretended to be an
amputee (11% having done so publicly) and 71% had fantasized about being an
amputee, indicating that the majority of devotees were also pretenders and
wannabes.
Consistent with these data is a recent study of 50 acrotomophiles by
Nattress. (3) Again, subjects were college educated, professional, white
males, 96% of whom had been aware of their interest in amputees by their
teens. In this sample, 41% had been married to or lived with an amputee,
more than 43% had pretended to be amputees and 22% desired to become
amputees.
On psychometric testing, the 50 acrotomophiles were found on average to
have high scores on self-esteem and intuitive thinking, but low scores on
social interest, emotional stability and personal relations. The low scores
were referred to by Nattress as “problematic behavior tendencies.” Such
tendencies have become a concern of people with disabilities since devotees
do demonstrate problematic behaviors, ranging from collecting names,
addresses and phone numbers of disabled persons, to obsessive and intrusive
phone calls, letters and e-mail to persons with disabilities, attending
and sometimes organizing disability-related events, lurking in public
places to watch, take covert pictures of, talk to and touch disabled
persons, and even engaging in predatory stalking. (1,3,19) For example,
over 85% of Nattress’ sample agreed with the statement, “If I see a female
amputee at a shopping mall I will follow her,” and over 57% agreed that,
“If I see a female amputee in a store I will try to talk to her.”
In spite of more than a century of description, the origin of DPW’s
attractions, desires, and behaviors has yet to be determined. The
following cases are presented in an effort to understand the psychology of
DPW’s and to suggest a single psychologic model – that of Factitious
Disability Disorder – that may explain not only the obsession to be with
disabled persons but also the desire to pretend to be disabled and even the
compulsion to become disabled.
Case 1: Devotee/Pretender
Ms. D. is a 48 year old white female who presented when her husband was
evaluated for Post-Polio Sequelae (PPS). (20) (N.B.: Some demographic
information and circumstances in the cases have been changed to protect the
patients’ anonymity.) She had been married for ten years to her husband, a
55 year old polio paraplegic who walked with forearm crutches and two
knee-ankle-foot orthoses. She presented crying and agitated after reading
an article in New Mobility magazine entitled “Devotees of Disability.” (1)
“I am all of this,” she said tearfully, “I can’t live with this inside of
me any longer.”
Ms. D. described herself as a devotee and pretender. She had been
interested in men who had mobility impairments since she was a teenager.
The first evidence of her interest was in high school when she dated a boy
who had a severe limp, “He was very self-centered, not very likable, but I
dated him anyway. I wanted to hold him, to feel his limp as we danced, to
touch his hip and leg.” Although they kissed, she reports not being very
sexually aroused by him and was interested, not in having intercourse, but
in being with him and potentially seeing his affected leg.
When Ms. D. went to college she would occasionally sketch men who were
naked except for leg braces and crutches. She dated a number of
non-disabled men in college and had her first sexual experience with
someone who was not disabled, which she described as “very satisfying and
orgasmic.” However, she was constantly looking for disabled men. While
visiting a museum she saw a man her own age walking with long leg braces
and crutches, “I became flushed and flustered. I followed that poor man
throughout the museum.” She became despondent when she could not figure
out a way to meet the man.
In graduate school she dated a teaching assistant who limped as a result of
an amputation, “He would walk around in summer with loafers and no socks. I
could not take my eyes off the cream-colored artificial foot I could see
above his shoe.” She reported not being attracted to this man but dated
him anyway, saying, “”I wanted to hold him, to feel him limp and his
artificial limb. I so very much wanted to sleep with him so I could see his
artificial leg.” Ms. D. suggested that they have sex but the man said he
had never had intercourse and that he would not sleep with the patient
because of he was an amputee.
Shortly thereafter, a singles magazine was mailed to her post office box.
In it was a personal ad from a man using a wheelchair. Ms. D. answered the
ad and arranged for a date. She met the man at his home and they had
dinner at a restaurant, “He was obese and I think mildly retarded. But I
was so excited to be seen in public with him.” They went back to the man’s
home and began kissing. “Incredibly aroused” at first, her ardor quickly
cooled. She excused herself, retired to the bathroom and masturbated to
orgasm by imagining herself having sex with the man, “At the time I thought
it was so strange. He was in the other room, but he did not excite me. Yet
the thought of being with him, and especially seeing his wheelchair in my
mind, is what brought me to orgasm.” They did not continue to have sex nor
did they meet again.
After finishing her graduate degree she began working for a large
corporation. She continued to occasionally date non-disabled men and had
sex that included orgasms. However, she continued to search, obsessively
at times, for disabled men. Two or three times a year her interest would
surface for up to a week, triggered by accidentally seeing a man with a
limp, on crutches or using a wheelchair, “I would follow the man down the
street or through a store, never able to figure out how to strike up a
conversation.” Occasionally, she would see a disabled man in the company
of a non-disabled woman and feel, “sad and lonely. I would think to
myself, ‘I would love you more than she does. I could take better care of
you than she can’.”
For several days after seeing a disabled man she would drive to shopping
centers on the way home from work and pass the handicapped parking spaces,
try to catch a glimpse of another disabled man. After several days of
unsuccessful searching she would become dejected and despondent, angry at
herself for “giving in” to her compulsion.
Pretending. Ms. D. rose to a position of responsibility in her company and
traveled for at least one week each month. On one trip she noticed a
wheelchair behind the front desk of the hotel, “It struck me that I could
get a wheelchair while I was in a city where no one knew me and roll around
as if I were disabled. Flushed with excitement, my heart pounding in my
ears, I went to a surgical supply store and rented a wheelchair.”
She drove to a mall, parked and pulled the wheelchair out from behind the
front seat, “I slowly and laboriously pulled myself into the wheelchair,
letting my legs drag. I was eager for people to watch me, to see that my
legs couldn’t move. I pushed myself into the mall, again looking to see if
people were watching me. I was full of emotion. I felt whole for the
first time in my life.”
As she pushed herself through the mall, she realized that what she wanted
was to encounter a disabled person, preferably a man. Not finding a
disabled person, she returned to the car and reversed the same laborious
process, dragging herself and then the wheelchair into the car, hoping that
she would be watched. She returned to the hotel and researched the
locations of other malls. Every night after her business meetings she
drove to a mall “and became the disabled person I wanted to be. I was
obsessed with being out in my wheelchair, to find someone who had a
disability ‘just like me’.”
After several days she parked next to a handicapped parking spot where a
man was getting out of his car, “He had a brace on one leg and a severe
limp. I loved his watching me drag myself into the wheelchair, lifting my
limp legs with both hands onto the foot rests. I felt an overwhelming
arousal. I was flushed, my whole body was burning. I wanted to be with
this disabled man…not sexually, although I would have. I just wanted to
be with him, be seen with him, to be disabled with him.” She did not
pursue a conversation with the man and they parted.
Ms. D. flew home, stimulated by her “adventure.” For her next trip she
decided to bring a rented wheelchair to the hotel and “arrive as a disabled
person.” She found a surgical supply store in advance of her trip, booked
a wheelchair accessible room at the hotel and picked up the rented
wheelchair on the way from the airport, “I was again flushed and aroused.
I loved the hotel staff looking at me wheeling through the lobby. The man
behind the desk and the bellmen were so kind and thoughtful to me.”
While at the hotel she went to the indoor pool, “I loved people looking at
my paralyzed legs, wondering why I couldn’t move them.” She again traveled
to local malls in search of “other disabled people.” She would return to
her room after these adventures and masturbate to orgasm while sitting in
the wheelchair, “The fantasies that aroused me were not even sexual. I
would imagine my legs being paralyzed or a man’s paralyzed legs, or picture
my being in a wheelchair, his walking on crutches, or his braces, and have
an orgasm.” She admitted that she could not remember having a masturbatory
fantasy that did not involve disability since she had been a teenager.
Her ultimate fantasy was to meet a disabled man while she was pretending to
be disabled and have sex, “I wanted to be accepted by a disabled person as
being disabled myself.” However, she denied strongly that she herself
wanted to have a disability, “I wanted to be accepted as a disabled person,
not become one. I remember sitting at a stop light and seeing a beautiful
woman about my age in the car next to mine with a wheelchair behind the
front seat. Without thinking I said to myself, ‘Poor thing. I bet she
never gets dates. I wouldn’t really want to be disabled for anything’.”
Ms. D. admitted thinking at the time that this statement was bizarre given
her desire to be seen as disabled in public and accepted by people with
disabilities as “one of them.”
Ms. D. did not rent a wheelchair on future trips, saying, “Pretending was
exciting and even sexually arousing but frustrating, exhausting and not
fulfilling.”
Marriage. When she was 38, Ms. D. met a new co-worker, “I was
waiting to begin a meeting and in came a handsome man walking on forearm
crutches and wearing two long leg braces. I couldn’t talk, my whole body
flushed and I almost passed out.” She was introduced to this man and found
him to be “pleasant and gentle, if quiet and shy.” After taking several
days “to recover my senses,” she invited him to lunch and they dated
frequently thereafter, “I was overwhelmed. All I could think about was
being with him, being seen in public with him. I loved to have him next to
me walking on his crutches. I loved to hear the metal ‘clink’ of his
crutches and braces.”
Over the next several months she went to great lengths to help him when he
had significant difficulty dealing with company politics, “It was actually
sexually arousing to me to be able to help him.” Although they kissed and
fondled each other on dates, they did not have intercourse for the first
two months, “I enjoyed kissing. I would grab the top of his braces and
pull him to me. Feeling the metal against my legs and was very arousing,
but I was not eager for intercourse. I would go home and immediately
masturbate, having orgasms remembering him on top of me and us walking
together in public.”
After two months they would take off their clothes while kissing but she
arranged for him to keep his braces on. They finally had intercourse
without his wearing braces and she was orgasmic, “The first time I was
aroused by how thin his legs were, how they couldn’t move. The second time
I missed the feel of his braces. I had to look at the braces and crutches
standing against the wall in order to have an orgasm. By the third time, I
stopped having orgasms but would go into the bathroom afterward to
masturbate, again imaging his braces or him walking with his crutches.”
After six months he professed his love and asked her to marry him. By this
time she was totally disinterested in sex but had come to care for him and
enjoy his company, “I thought, ‘You’ve found what you always wanted. Why
shouldn’t you marry him?'” They married three months later and moved into
his accessible apartment.
Over the next years they lived companionably and she provided him with sex
weekly although she stated, “I know it is ludicrous but I have to fantasize
during intercourse that I am with some other disabled man just like him,
with braces and crutches.” Their frequency of intercourse decreased to
about once a month as her company responsibilities grew and she began
traveling about 15 days a month. She still masturbated several times per
month, fantasizing about being with other disabled men, men with
disabilities identical to her husband, “I know this is ridiculous. I have
married my fantasy man. Why doesn’t he arouse me?”
Over the last 5 years Ms. D.’s husband developed PPS, with bilateral
shoulder pain from crutch walking, new arm muscle weakness and pain, back
pain and increasing fatigue. He began to use a wheelchair for distance one
year ago which disappointed Ms. D., “I had still been aroused by his
walking on crutches. This is selfish and horrible, but I know you’ll tell
him to use the wheelchair all the time and I won’t even have the pleasure
of watching him walk anymore.”
Insight: Childhood Dream of Disability. Ms. D. came to the fourth therapy
session reporting that she had had a dream in which she was a young girl
walking into her elementary school wearing long leg braces and using
crutches, “I walked into the school and felt in the dream, ‘Yes! This is
the real me. This is who I want to be: a disabled child.'”
When asked about the relationship of her dream to her attraction to
disabled men and her pretending to be disabled, she cried and began talking
about her parents, saying, “I was an accident born 15 years after my
brother. He left home when I was 2 and I was raised as an only child.”
She described her father as “unsatisfied and a demanding tyrant.” Her
father would nightly scold her mother for the mother’s flaws, “My mother
would just sit there silently, looking wounded.” Ms. D. described herself
as “a terribly lonely child,” with neither parent displaying emotion or
affection, “They basically ignored me. My father worked and my mother
kept scrubbing the kitchen floor. They never hugged each other or me or
uttered one kind word.”
We discussed why the patient wanted to be a disabled child and she
recounted an incident when a local child, who had had polio and walked with
crutches and leg braces, walked past their home on the way to school, “My
father saw the girl as he retrieved the morning paper and said to my
mother, ‘I saw poor Sally walking to school.’ ‘Yes,’ said my mother, ‘Poor
Sally’ and her eyes filled with tears. I had never seen either one of them
show any tender emotion before!”
Ms. D. also remembered a class trip a few years later when she saw another
girl who walked with crutches and leg braces, “I just stared at her from a
distance, seeing how her classmates carried things for her, how the teacher
walked with her behind the rest of the class.” After that experience Ms.
D. would play in the family garage using croquet mallets as crutches and
tying sticks to her legs for braces. She also remembered finding her old
baby carriage and pretending it was her wheelchair. The patient concluded,
“I wanted to be a disabled child so I would be loved. Pretending to be
disabled now that I am an adult – even if I actually became disabled –
cannot make up for the love and attention my parents did not give me.”
After the dream and the discussion of her childhood, Ms. D.’s interest in
pretending she was disabled and even looking for disabled men decreased
markedly, “I will get somewhat excited if I see disabled men, but I am no
longer compelled follow or go looking for them. Sometimes I have the urge
to rent a wheelchair when I’m on a trip, but there’s no point to it any
longer?”
Ms. D. is no longer aroused by fantasies of disabled men and has stopped
masturbating using such fantasies. She has for the first time begun
fantasizing about and even achieves orgasm thinking about having sex or
intercourse with non-disabled men. Ms. D. also has begun to enjoy sex with
her husband, “My husband is a good man and I do love him. I am ashamed
that I used him, that I married him under false pretenses. But I want our
relationship to work.”
Ms. D. discontinued psychotherapy just before her husband was about to
begin treatment with the Post-Polio Service so that, “he will not discover
my secret.”
Psychology of DPW’s
A variety of explanations have been offered for DPW’s attractions, desires
and behaviors. A preference for a disabled or disfigured, and therefore
less threatening, more attainable or more easily dominated, ‘love object’
is a commonly-heard explanation for attraction to disabled persons (3,7)
However, this explanation for preferring a disabled partner explains
neither DPW’s obsessive and compulsive attraction to disabled persons nor
the powerful desire to appear or to become disabled. Ms. D. had had a
number of relationships with non-disabled men and did not marry her husband
out of a fear of abandonment, i.e., that a disabled husband would ‘not be
able to run away from her.’
Another explanation for devotees’ attraction is the association in
childhood of a disability-related stimulus, e.g., an amputee’s stump or leg
braces, with a powerful emotional state. Money suggested that one
apotemnophile’s childhood fear of amputation may have been replaced by the
erotitization of the stump, transforming a terror into a joy. (21) A more
intuitively appealing mechanism would be the pairing in childhood of a
disability-related stimulus with sexual arousal. For example, one plaster
cast devotee had his first sexual experience with a girl who was wearing a
leg cast. (1). However, only 19% of respondents to the AMPIX survey
related their interest in amputees to any kind of direct contact with a
disabled person, and the overwhelming majority of devotees have reported
their interest in disabled persons began long before puberty. (3,18) Ms.
D.’s interest also predated puberty and she had had no childhood fear of
amputation or disability.
Attraction to disabled persons has also been related to homosexuality,
sadism and bondage. (10) An amputee’s stump has been suggested to
resemble a penis, therefore providing a less threatening sexual stimulus
for male “latent homosexuals” and a counterphobic protection against the
fear of castration. (10) A stump’s similarity to a penis has also raised
the possibility that a desire for amputation is a “counterphobic” antidote
for male acrotomophiles’ fear of castration, although such fears have not
been documented. (7,10,16) However, recent surveys find no increased
prevalence of homosexuality, sadism or interest in bondage among
acrotomophiles. (3,18) Any similarity between a stump and one’s own penis
would have little personal meaning for Ms. D., not only because she is a
woman but also because she was primarily attracted to men with braces and
crutches and was herself interested in pretending to be a wheelchair user.
Further, Ms. D. was exclusively heterosexual and had no interest in sadism
or bondage.
Several case studies indicate that there may be a higher incidence of
transvestites and transsexuals among DPW’s. (3,10,13,14,22,23) However,
the notion that an apotemnophile is a “disabled person trapped in a
nondisabled body” is difficult to justify, there being no
‘naturally-occurring’ state of disability that would correspond to the the
two naturally-occurring genders. Ms. D. was neither a transvestite nor
uncomfortable with her gender.
Riddle (24) suggested that DPW’s desires develop from a combination of a
strict anti-sexual attitude in the child’s household, deprivation of
maternal love and parental rejection in early childhood that creates a fear
for survival and a self-generated fantasy for security:
A comment of sympathetic concern by the mother regarding an amputee may be
the triggering event. The child rationalizes that he would be lovable if
only he were an amputee like the person his mother spoke so sympathetically
about. In his neurotic state he becomes [a] wannabe. The injured child
conceptualizes that the removal of a limb represents partial destruction of
the body [which] would satisfy his own need for self-destruction.
When puberty strikes, [this childhood] emotional turmoil is regurgitated
[and] the same solution is applied to the new problem. But this time the
solution is applied to the person to whom the adolescent feels he is
expected to be sexually attracted. From out of his subconscious the
thought evolves that to be lovable the person must be an amputee.
Ms. D.’s case supports several elements of Riddle’s model. Ms. D. did feel
a deprivation of love and emotional rejection from both parents. The lack
of overt affection between her parents, in addition to the notion that her
birth was an accident her parents regretted, do suggest an anti-sexual
attitude. Most importantly, Ms. D. remembered a specific triggering event:
seeing her unemotional parents express caring and strong positive emotion –
the only such expression in her memory – in response to a disabled child.
One can imagine the patient concluding in that moment that having a
disability was a requirement for being loved. Other descriptions of DPW’s
note the association of having a disability with parental love and
attention (7,13,14) as do DPW’s themselves:
ATTENTION. One simple word. Why do I want attention? Is there a way for
me to get that desired attention other than using my wheelchair, or
becoming paraplegic? As a child, I felt that my parents weren’t giving me
the kind of attention I wanted. There were a lot of people with
disabilities [where we lived]. I guess that the attention my parents were
giving the disabled people was more desirable in my child’s eyes than the
way I felt I was treated. I thought that if I were disabled I would
finally get the craved attention from my parents. All the rest, all the
desires I have now, the want for braces, the desire to use the
[wheel]chair, the urge to become disabled, all that stems from then. (25)
In contrast to Riddle’s model, there is no evidence that Ms. D. had
a need for self-destruction that was fulfilled by having a disability. It
is also unlikely that Ms. D. dated disabled males because she felt that
only someone who had a disability could be “lovable.” Her behavior
suggests not love for her disabled boyfriends but a compulsive desire to be
with them. She dated several men with whom she was not in love – men whom
she did not even particularly like – so that she could be with them in
public. Ms. D.’s interest seems to have been not sexual gratification but
receiving by association the love she believed would be lavished on her
disabled boyfriends. This conclusion is supported by self-reports of DPW’s
who compulsively follow disabled people, not necessarily to have a sexual
encounter, but to watch, be with or talk to them:
I have a great deal of admiration for those with…disabilities, and I
often find myself desperately wishing I could somehow get to know that
special person. [W]hen I encounter a disabled person [I] find myself
wanting to somehow let them know that I am on their side. (Italics mine.)
(25)
[W]henever I see a one-legged girl, I follow her through a street and get
feelings of exhilaration, although there is no erection or ejaculation. (13)
I will admit I like to look at a woman in a wheelchair FAR more than a man
[in a wheelchair] but it is in no way sexual for me, I’m 100% straight. I
want to BE that girl. (26)
Besides receiving love by association, DPW’s hunger for and
fascination with the details of daily living with a disability may be a
vicarious way to experience having a disability. (2,3,25) In addition,
devotees may attempt to fulfill their own unmet needs for love and
attention by projecting them onto persons with disabilities. Devotees are
renowned for being excessively solicitous of and helpful toward disabled
people. (2,3) One amputee remarked that all the devotees she has met are,
“so nice, so attentive and understanding [and] helpful;” of one devotee she
said, “The more he does for me the better it is for him.” (2) Note Ms.
D.’s sexual arousal while helping her husband at work and her sadness and
loneliness when seeing a non-disabled woman with a disabled man, a
circumstance in which she is neither being cared for as, nor caring for, a
disabled person.
Devotees’ intense interest in attending to the needs of disabled persons is
reminiscent of patients who become disabled by chronic back pain. Both
devotees and chronic pain patients are said to have an “extremely high
overachievement tendency.” (3,16,18,21,27) Overachieving chronic pain
patients provide for the needs of others “in a slave-like manner” until a
minor injury provides a “rational and socially acceptable” reason for
ceasing overachieving and care taking, becoming dependent on others and
thereby having their own needs for love and attention met. (28-30)
There is evidence of devotees’ desire to stop overachieving and be taken
care of:
We, males also, have some feminine need; for a change [we should not] have
to play the macho game all the time. (31)
This quote from a devotee/wannabe is of special interest given Nattress’
finding of a “less macho” persona in devotees and that the overwhelming
majority of DPW’s are male.
That a similar mechanism is operating in pretenders and wannabes is
suggested by the finding that the majority of acrotomophiles are also
pretenders (61%) and wannabes (51%), whose childhood experiences may have
rendered them unable to meet their own needs and caused them to conclude
that disability is the only socially acceptable reason – even the only
possible reason – for one to be worthy of love and attention (3,18):
My first really clear memory of wanting to be in a wheelchair was when I
was about twelve. I was watching TV with my family, and saw this girl,
about my age, on some telethon or fund raiser. She was in a pretty little
pink checkered dress, pigtails, just the most adorable thing, and she was
in this child-sized wheelchair, her legs in little-girl style white
leggings and braces. I don’t know why, but I remembered how much I wanted
to BE that girl. The attention she was getting, being on TV, being the
object [of] the worlds best wishes and prayers. (26)
Note Ms. D.’s desire to be watched pushing her w
