People with cerebral palsy are often mistaken for having a mental impairment, although the two are not necessarily linked. I have a speech impediment and awkward gait. My disability is visible, but not necessarily significant. I do have some physical limitations, but am able to do most things that a typical person can do. My primary difficulty has been with people’s negative reaction, or what disability-studies scholars call the “social construction” of disability. This primarily means that the main challenges disabled people face come from societal prejudice and inaccessible spaces.

Recently, the popular feminist Jessica Valenti published a memoir titled “Sex Object,” which focuses on the toll the “male gaze” has taken on her. She wrote an article on this theme for this paper, “What Does a Lifetime of Leers Do to Us?” Ms. Valenti describes a life of sexual harassment beginning at adolescence. She writes of what seems like countless instances of men exposing themselves to her on the New York City subway. She describes constantly thwarting unwanted advances from men in all areas of her life. Ms. Valenti currently has a 5-year-old daughter, and she wrestles for a way to prepare her child for an onslaught of male harassment. She takes for granted that this will happen.

My experiences have been quite different, nearly the opposite, of Ms. Valenti’s and that of most women. I was never hit on or sexually harassed by my professors in college, or later, by my co-workers or superiors. I have not felt as if my male teachers, friends or colleagues thought less of me because of my gender. I’ve never been aggressively “hit on” in a bar, despite the fact that I have frequented them alone throughout the years. In fact, I’ve rarely been approached in a bar at all.

I do remember being sexually harassed by a man on the street. Once. I was 18 years old. I was waiting for a bus, and a man pulled up and offered me a ride in his car. When I declined, he got hostile and asked me if I was wearing panties. I was more startled than anything, and I left the curb to go to the nearby movie theater where my friend worked. I didn’t tell my friend what happened, but waited with him for the bus. This was very frightening, but I wouldn’t say the incident traumatized me, nor is it something that deeply affected my life. And it happened only once.

Let me rephrase that: It happened only once while I was visibly inhabiting my own body. Virtually, it has been another story.