‘As a society we have continually failed to provide Deaf children and their families with enough resources and support for their language development.’ (Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

I want to talk to you about porn. No, not that porn. I’m talking about inspiration porn.

Coined by the disability activist Stella Young (who gave this incredible TEDX Talk), inspiration porn happens when a disabled and/or Deaf person is reduced to a one-dimensional being for heart-warming pleasure and as inspiration for everybody else.

Inspiration porn isn’t new. Back in the day, it was Tiny Tim in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Nowadays, all sorts of inspiration porn is being blared, non-stop, on our social media feed: the prom queen who gave her crown to a girl with Down syndrome, and ‘Your Excuse is Invalid’ memes, and this high school senior who gave his friend with William’s Syndrome a toy cement truck.



So these inspiration porn videos in your social media feed keep you entertained for a few minutes and make goosebumps prickle on your arms. What’s the big deal?


Though it doesn’t appear so at first glance, inspiration porn is damaging to the disability and Deaf communities in so many ways. The narratives espoused in inspiration porn are almost always created by able-bodied people, depriving disabled and Deaf people of their right to create their own stories and decide how they are perceived by the rest of society.

And not surprisingly, these narratives often paint a distorted picture of reality for disabled and Deaf people. They promote stereotypes and misconceptions, and fuel negative societal perspectives of disability.

With inspiration porn, you are never getting the whole story. You see a moment frozen in time in a single snapshot, or a few minutes captured on video. Yet it’s these brief glimpses stolen from disabled and Deaf people’s lives that dominate the narrative and determine how we’re viewed by the rest of society.

Think about that. Whole lifetimes, the experience of entire communities and millions of individuals, reduced to a few moments.

Take my favorite example of inspiration porn: ‘Baby hears for the first time.’

Odds are, you’ve probably seen one of these videos before. A Google search returns nearly 40 million results, including this video and this one and this one. There’s even this compilation video that lasts 16 minutes.

These videos present these moments as miraculous moments of healing, bona fide turning points in these babies’ lives. When these videos end, the viewer is left imagining a lifetime of happiness and ease for these babies, now ‘cured’ of their hearing loss. Take the description of one of the videos, which brightly chirps: ‘The world is whole now.’

Every time there’s an inspiration porn video of a deaf baby hearing for the first time, I’m going to share a video of a deaf baby recognizing and acquiring an actual language… that is sign language. pic.twitter.com/kABwZzLhO1 — Nyle DiMarco (@NyleDiMarco) December 17, 2018

This view of these stories is dangerously incomplete.

Zoom out of the microscopically narrow lens of these inspiration porn videos, and you’ll find years, even decades, of auditory-verbal training and speech therapy, in these babies’ futures.

They will spend most of the formative years of their lives trying to program their brains to decipher the new sounds coming to their ears by way of technological devices. They will spend hours in front of speech therapists learning how to utter sounds, syllables, then words and finally, coherent sentences.



Some succeed in their training and therapy and some don’t – the success rate of those who use technological devices to hear, including hearing aids and cochlear implants is highly variable.

Zoom out further and you will see thousands, maybe millions, of Deaf individuals deprived of linguistic abilities. This phenomenon, more commonly known as language deprivation, occurs to Deaf people of all kinds, including both those who use technological devices to hear and those who don’t.

This is the story not told in these inspiration videos. Acquiring language skills is a significant, if not the biggest, roadblock that deaf children face on the path towards lifetime success.

As a society we have continually failed to provide Deaf children and their families with enough resources and support for their language development, especially in the ‘critical period’ of ages zero to five, when children’s brains are so plastic they rapidly develop language.

The long-term effects of language deprivation are brutal. Multiple surveys and studies report that half of Deaf people graduate high school with an English reading comprehension level below the fourth grade. Deaf people often struggle to find success, especially in employment: nearly half of Deaf Americans (47 per cent) are not employed.

These ‘baby hears for the first time’ videos are romanticising the wrong thing. Understand this: there’s nothing wrong with Deaf babies hearing through the support of technological devices. But it becomes problematic when it’s viewed as an end in and of itself. Being able to hear is an additional tool for Deaf people to acquire language.


That’s what we should really celebrate: the true meaningful and impactful moments in Deaf children’s lives when they get a taste of language.

Look how this Deaf baby bursts into joyful laughter watching her grandma sign. Or how much fun these Deaf kids are having helping me read a book out loud.

Now that’s truly inspiring.

MORE: Stop referring to people with disabilities as ‘inspirational’ – my body does not define me

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MORE: StorySign smartphone app transforms reading for millions of deaf children and their families

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