Outskirts Vol. 34, 2016, 1-21 Corresponding author: Tova Rozengarten, Flinders University Email: tova.rozengarten@flinders.edu.au No Pity Fucks Please: A critique of Scarlet Road’s campaign to improve disabled people’s access to paid sex services Tova Rozengarten and Heather Brook This article presents a critical commentary on the documentary Scarlet Road (2011). Scarlet Road promotes the value of sex work as a special service for disabled people (primarily men), and in the process addresses the stigma and marginalisation faced by both disabled people and sex workers. We argue that through its reiteration of discursive stereotypes of gender, sexuality, and disability, Scarlet Road unwittingly represents disabled people as undesirable and abject. While we oppose neither the legalisation of sex work nor the provision of access to sex services for disabled people, our position is that this does not provide an adequate solution to the exclusion of people with disabilities from sexual life. Thus, while campaigns to promote the value of sex work on the basis of its importance for the sexual rights of people with disabilities functions as a useful way to improve the image of sex workers, they simultaneously reflect and produce harmful stereotypes about disability. In 1981, Evan Kemp, a vanguard for the nascent disability rights movement, published an article in the New York Times criticising charity telethons. Controversial then and perhaps even now, “Aiding the Disabled, No Pity Please” exposed the social fear of disability underlying the mobilisation of pity in televised charity drives. Discourses of disability and charity have long been grounded in the belief that disability is the exclusive domain of the medical sciences. Medicine, in turn, presents a disciplinary model in which funding produces the discovery of treatments and cures. This understanding of disability, known in disability studies as the medical model, fails to account for social/cultural systems of discrimination. In opposition to the medical model, the social model of disability emphasises how social systems produce disabling barriers (Oliver 1990). This model separates biological difference (impairment),