Despite limited resourced for disabled intimacy, twelve percent of adults in the U.S. have a mobility-related disability that causes serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs.
If you or your partner are in a wheelchair, there are likely more logistics to navigate in your sex life. Here are our general tips on how to have sex in a wheelchair.
Sex Tech and Tools
Utilizing different toys and tools can expand your options for pleasure and stability. Some people in wheelchairs enjoy having their feet linked with a spreader bar and leg restraints to help stabilize their legs and add a little bit of a BDSM experience.
Sex toys are a great way to increase accessibility and sensation. Vibrators can allow people to give or receive clitoral stimulation if it’s difficult to do so manually (or if you just like the sensation of a vibrator).
People who have a difficult time using their penis or those who don’t have a penis but want to penetrate their partner can try using a strap-on dildo that wraps around their thigh, or even penetrating them with a toy in hand.
Play with Positions
Being in a wheelchair may require you to be more creative than the average person when it comes to sex. This can help create opportunities for kink, playfulness, and thinking outside of the box. That’s the case when it comes to sex positions in a wheel chair.
Here are a few position ideas if you’re having sex with someone else:
Oral Sex
Being in a wheelchair can be the perfect position for receiving oral sex. With your hips at the edge of your seat, your partner will simply find a comfortable way to kneel down and go down. If you want to give oral sex to someone, being in a wheelchair likely puts you at a good height for your partner to be able to straddle your chair, giving you access to their genitals.
Sex Chair
A wheelchair can conveniently be used as a piece of sex furniture (just be sure to lock it). If you’re looking to penetrate your partner, they can sit on your lap facing forward or backward, these can be arousing even if without penetration.
Masturbation
Sex in a wheelchair can also mean masturbation. Wedged a vibrator between your intimate areas and the wheel chair, or try a remote-controlled sex toy that can be controlled by a partner. Wearing it in public or private is entirely up to you.
Communication is Key
As with any relationship, communication is key when it comes to having sex in a wheelchair. Discussing wants, desires, and boundaries, as well as the logistics of having sex with limited mobility is important to set the foundation for your experience.
It’s just as important to talk about what someone wants out of a sexual experience and what turns them on as it is to talk about the mechanics of having sex in a wheelchair.
Your partner should be someone who is willing to grow, take direction, and understand the nuances and limitations of sex in a wheelchair. Communication, understanding, and a willingness to grow are things that everyone should look for in a partner, wheelchair or not.
Self-Love
So much of feeling comfortable with a partner while having sex comes down to how you feel about yourself.
Having a supportive and understanding partner is crucial, but you can also help deepen your sexual experience by addressing what mental blocks you may have around your confidence and pleasure. This may be especially true for people who lost mobility at an older age.
Seeing a therapist or sex therapist can help you navigate the emotional and mental aspects of sexuality, while someone like an occupational therapist can give you practical tools for having sex based on your specific needs.
It can also be helpful to find communities, whether they’re online or in person, so you can connect with other people in wheelchairs or with other disabilities and talk about the realities of sex and relationships.
Sex can be awkward and funny no matter who you are, so be flexible and have grace for you and your partner. This should go without saying, but everyone deserves love, connection, pleasure, intimacy, and sex – if they want it.
Making Sex Accessible
Being in a wheelchair is not a homogenous experience. People in wheelchairs have varying degrees of movement throughout their bodies, and they may change with certain medications, surgeries, treatments, and other medical procedures. Some may be quadriplegic (paralyzed from the neck down), paraplegic (have control of their upper bodies), amputees, or have other disorders that limit mobility.
Even if someone doesn’t have “normal” use of their genitals, they can still give and receive pleasure in many other ways. It’s impossible to reflect every person in a wheelchair’s experience or capabilities in one article, but we hope to shed some light on accessibility as a whole.
People in wheelchairs or those with certain disabilities may be overlooked by some people or thought to be asexual or unable to have sex. While this may be true for some, it’s certainly not the case for many people.
A lot of this comes down to starting conversations and sharing tools and resources on how to have sex in a wheelchair and the many different ways people can experience pleasure and connection. Sex can mean oral sex, or using toys, hands, or really anything that feels right for you and your partner (if you have one). You get to define sex for yourself and create an experience that reflects your desires, needs, and abilities.
*We want to acknowledge that while LELO makes efforts to be as inclusive as possible, this article was written by an able-bodied writer who may not be aware of the many nuances of being in a wheelchair. Please share any feedback or advice in the comments.