Hollywood Is Fetishizing Blind People with This Trope
I’m never going to ask to touch your face. No blind person is - at least not in the way you’ve seen blind people do in movies and television.
This is something I’ve wanted to discuss for a long time. A recent TikTok trend gave me the opportunity to address it.
If you've seen a film or show where a blind person is a main character or a love interest, they undoubtedly have asked to touch someone’s face so that they can “see” what that person looks like. Except, that’s not what’s happening at all. That’s not the director/writer/whoever’s intention. We know this from context clues.
These scenes always occur between people who are about to fall in love. That seems fine, doesn’t it? Touching someone’s face is an act of intimacy. But in this specific trope the touch is often the thing that escalates the relationship. A blind person’s touch is life-changing in these moments. Sometimes these scenes lead directly to sex. Music swoops in to give you all of the feels the moment the touch happens. The able-bodied person’s body language changes. They can relax. They can be themselves. This blind person “sees” them for who they really are.
Nothing about these scenes echoes a blind or visually impaired person’s life experience. They are all about fetishizing disabled experiences for the enjoyment of the abled-gaze.
Blind people get a “sexy” edit in media and myths. We get to throw on a pair of sunglasses and retain our desireableness in a way not a lot of disabled people do. We also get to be seers, mystics, oracles, etc… These things are never for our own empowerment. We don’t see a sighted person taking off someone’s sunglasses and telling them that the physical presentation of their blindness is beautiful - not that media would allow a blind love interest to have a physical presentation of their disability.
These scenes are always about how the abled person feels. We cannot write this off as main character energy. How the abled person feels is tied intrinsically to the fact that the other person is blind. This formula, as I described above, must always equal catharsis for the sighted person. Have you ever encountered a scene where a sighted person breathlessly whispers, “let me touch your face so that I know what you look like” and the music sweeps in and after a few touches the other person’s body relaxes and eventually they kiss?
No. Because sighted people don’t behave that way.
Actual blind people don’t either.
Let’s go back to the initiation of the touch. Although, it immediately leads to romance in one way or another, it is never presented as a romantic action. It is always presented as a non-romantic way for the blind person to gain information about the other person. On the surface, this seems like it should be okay.
I touch things a lot. If you see me in public, I frequently have one hand slightly out to the side so that I can tell how close I am to an object. I pick up items in stores more frequently than the average person. I get a lot of information about things from my hands.
Things.
People are not things.
The information that I need to know about a person comes from what they say, how they act, what they do.
Touching a person’s face is literally only going to tell me that they have bones and skin. I might discover that they have facial hair, but beyond that, it’s not going to give a blind person a huge amount of information. Certainly not in the way that these interactions are portrayed on screen.
You never see a blind person fingering someone’s eye socket to figure out how big their eyes are, or fumbling around with someone’s nose to see if it’s huge or small. On screen, it’s the cheeks that get the gentle touch.
Wow. You have cheekbones. I’m shocked. Shocked I tell you.
And then it’s the lips for some sensuality and then cue the music.
Again, if you wanted to be realistic, a blind person touching someone’s face to get a “visual” wouldn’t be romantic in the least.
These scenes are a big clue that film makers don’t consult with blind people and if they do, they don’t care about how we really behave, because what’s important is sexualizing the touch of the magical blind person.
Have you ever seen a blind person in media ask to touch someone’s face and it not launch the pair into a romance?
It’s not about representation. It’s not about what the blind person needs or what real world blind people experience. It’s about what a disabled body can give to an abled person.
The next time you see this interaction on your screen, I encourage you to not see it as romantic, but to see it for what it is, exploitation.