Once, I was really bored and new to town. So I created an account on a fairly popular dating website. (I’m embarrassed, but, hey, we’ve all done it once, right?) I figured that I could take all the fun quizzes to waste time and maybe meet interesting people nearby. When I was filling out my profile, I mentioned that I was deaf.
Boom, I soon got messages from creepsters. They said things like:
40/m/LivesAnHourAway
hey i saw on ur profile that ur deaf. i know asl, i took a class on it once. it is such a beautiful language. want to meet? my asl is rusty but i would love to practice more!
[Translation: "I took one semester of ASL 20 years ago, and the only word that I remember how to say is 'shit.' Also, because I know ASL, this is a really brilliant excuse to justify hitting on a guy half my age!"]
35/m/NextStateOver
Hello, my name is [full name] and I live in [very specific neighborhood]. [Blah, blah, blah... 500+ words about himself and how wonderful he is]. By the way, I looked at your profile and noticed that you are deaf. I am interested in meeting all sorts of different people. Do you want to come to my apartment sometime and talk about your experiences as a deaf person? I have never met a deaf person before, and it is so fascinating to me. I love the diversity of human experiences out there.
[Translation: "I clearly am a special and unique man who will render you mindless with pleasure, duh. By the way, do you want to come to my apartment so that I can add you to my harem (literally) of special and diverse partners so that I can brag about having screwed a deaf guy?"]
…etc.
Don’t get me wrong – I also got creepy non-deaf related messages. Regardless, I would say that 90% of the creepy messages that I got mentioned deafness. In many cases, there were multiple things that were offputting about these people, like the fact that many of them were messaging somebody 10+ years younger than them (ew), but their focus on deafness really stood out to me.
Here’s the problem with these people: They, in typical creepazoid fashion, were seeing me not as a whole and complete person, but as an object. I’m not an ASL textbook; if that’s what you really want, go to the damn library and check out one. Likewise, I’m not a “Deaf Culture 101″ book – I’m willing to share my experiences with others, but not if that’s the only basis of our friendship. Curiosity is natural, but it is not okay to dehumanize somebody by making assumptions about them and demanding that they educate you every hour of every day.
This is a pretty universal complaint about creeps, though: they objectify. So here are some things that bother me about creeps who specifically target deaf people.
It is not possible to learn ASL overnight from one semester of lessons – in fact, I find it borderline insulting that people seem to think that ASL is so simple. We do not just “mime” our words or anything like that; we communicate in a syntactically complex language.
On one hand, this tendency to claim fluency in another language is not uncommon – I have seen people say “I know Spanish!” when they only took three semesters of it in high school and can’t say anything more complicated than “My name is ___” and “How are you?” True fluency comes from being able to read books and hold nuanced conversations, not from being able to pass a standardized vocabulary test. So, to some degree, the “I know ASL!” phenomenon is also seen in other languages.
On the other hand, ASL has had a difficult history: it was not even considered a language for a very long time. (It still is not, in some circles.) Early oralists said that using ASL slowed the student’s acquisition of English – according to their logic, this was undesirable because English is a true language whereas ASL is nothing more than filler. Hence, deaf people were not allowed to communicate in ASL for a very long time and were actually, in some cases, punished when they tried to do so.
So that is why, when somebody claims to know ASL despite the fact that he or she has taken only a few classes in it, I can’t help but wonder if they truly consider ASL a language or if they only see it as a silly amusement. Sadly, a lot of hearing people tend to see it as a novelty, not a language.
Sure, it’s really sweet when somebody meets me, then tries to learn some signs so that we can communicate more fluently. I appreciate this in friends and romantic partners alike. The key difference, though, is that they have first met me and decided that they like me as a whole person. Creeps, on the other hand, obsessively focus on one aspect of me – my deafness.
Another assumption that these creepsters made was that, because I am deaf, I therefore know ASL. Because, you know all deaf people are born knowing ASL.
Okay, first of all, I have met plenty of people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing and don’t know ASL. Just because somebody can’t hear doesn’t automatically mean that they consider themselves a member of the Deaf community or that they can sign.
In my case, it is true that I know some ASL – but the key word here is “some.” I know enough ASL to get by, but I’m not fluent anymore. I grew up signing, but I haven’t interacted with other Deaf people in such a long time that I have become super rusty. In fact, other Deaf people tend to ask me, “Are you hearing?” upon seeing my accent. I’m pretty sure that, if I lived among Deaf people again, I would regain fluency, but I’m just not at that point right now.
That’s another blog post for another day, though. The point here is that I did not come out of my mother’s womb signing ASL fluently. I worked to learn the ASL that I do know, and I am not 100% fluent. Even if I were fluent, though, the obsessive focus on deafness and ASL is creepy.
Unfortunately, this isn’t a problem that’s restricted to online dating websites. I’ve encountered it in real life too, albeit not as frequently. Online, the solution is easy: delete the person’s message. In real life, though, it’s not that easy. Thankfully, there’s enough awesome people in my life to outweigh the yucky creeps of the world.
