beatrice_otter | That Heartwarming But Ableist Porcupine Cartoon (Reply)

So there’s this sweet and heartwarming animated video of a porcupine going around social media.

There’s a school for animals, and the porcupine is the new kid. Poor porcupine, the desks are too close together for its spikes! And it can’t sit next to the other kids on the bus because the bus jerks and they fall into its spines and get hurt, so it has to sit all alone in the back! And it can’t play soccer because the ball just hits its spikes and deflates! Poor porcupine is all alone! So, for Christmas, all the other little animals show up at its door with a Christmas present.

The porcupine opens the present, and it’s ... styrofoam peanuts. For the porcupine to put on its quills so it can hug and play with the other little animals. Isn’t that wonderful?

It is sweet, and heartwarming, but it also turned my stomach, because the whole thing is basically one giant ableist trope.

Here’s the thing: the reason the porcupine can’t participate is that the world is poorly designed for porcupines and everybody just accepts that. The desks could be moved apart. The porcupine could have a bench on the bus to itself, with its friends sitting across the aisle. They could have played games with the porcupine that didn’t use equipment that would be damaged by the porcupine’s quills. These are all really simple things to do. This is not rocket science. And you know what? NONE of them are even considered in the video.

The video is framed as “the porcupine is lonely because it’s different and can’t participate” instead of “the porcupine is lonely because it lives surrounded by people who never bother to take its needs into account.” And the cartoon’s “solution”? The people who can’t take two minutes to consider “gee, maybe we can do things a little differently so the porcupine can participate” give the porcupine a “gift” that will allow the porcupine to participate like the “normal” animals, but which also requires lots of time on the porcupine’s part to achieve (how long does it take to put all those styrofoam peanuts on?). We love you and want to include you, the cartoon says ... but only if you figure out how to fit yourself into what we consider “normal.”

How generous of them.

I am autistic. The world is designed by neurotypicals. And that causes problems for me. And the standard attitude of the world is ... that’s my problem, not theirs. And most people want me to be “normal” and will exclude me if I’m not, and think they should be given all kinds of credit for being generous by “helping” me be more normal. Or being generous by moving approximately 3% of the way towards me, and expecting me to do the other 97%.

How generous of them.

This is not to say that fitting in to the norm is always bad and the wrong thing. Maybe the porcupine's favorite game in the whole world is soccer, which you need an inflated ball for, which would require him to cover his quills. But requiring assimilation to be the ONLY solution--and then praising it as being "heartwarming"--is ableist in the extreme. It puts a huge burden on the person who is different to "fit in." It assumes that difference is the problem and ignores all the times that it is society's design that is the problem. It frames the people forcing the assimilation as good and kind and generous people.

Can we have different stories now, please?