A few years ago I was interviewed by an up and coming reporter for an accessible media company. It’s a fairly large, well funded non profit that has a close working relationship with the government. I liked working with them, they did a lot of coverage of para sports. One of their presenters was a gold medalist in my sport. All around great organization with good careers and so damn easy to go on from there to government, media or a sporting organization.

The reporter was a younger disabled woman who had been on this track for a while. Inspirational speaker as a kid, her college had made a video and wrote about her when she attended there for media studies, she had gotten this great job right out of school, she was able to produce her own segments after not too long. I don’t think disability is a brand, but she was kind of the young face of her particular disability, she had a national profile.

Maybe two years ago the company produced a feature length documentary about her experiences where she interviewed the doctors, her family, coworkers. This was a big deal, after this I could very easily see her getting on with the Minister of Sport and Persons with Disabilities or something like that.

Then, almost exactly a year ago she started posting less carefully managed social media about work, career, slice of life stuff, and started posting about being a girlboss. Then it became more about her empowerment not in overcoming disability per se, but being ... sexy despite being impaired I guess you could say? Nothing that bad, nothing that would jeopardize your career.

She started being more woke. She made local news when she claimed she was denied an Uber ride because of her disability. This is a woman who prided herself on her independence and made fun of people who centred their disability.

Then she started pole fitness, first as a segment where she showed it was possible for people with her disability, as she had done with skiing, cycling and whatever. Slowly it took over her social media. She stopped wearing workout clothes and doing the workouts that were about flexibility, coordination and strength, and started doing ... well pole dancing shit in heels and a g string. Her captions were less about fitness and “people with disabilities can do cool workouts too” and more about... being an empowered slut or whatever. More idpol stuff, sex workers yadda yadda.

Anyway, she changed her bio to announce that she has an only fans, under her very easy to google real name. It shows up alongside years of media work, glowing articles, panels, speaking engagements.

“Your favourite (Nationality) (Disability) Stripper Slut - Welcome to the (Name) experience where you get DAILY POSTS of my my curvy body sucking, fucking, dancing, and more.“

She’s just thrown her life away and I can make no sense of it other than through the lens of idpol. She was teed up for professional respectability in government or media and there is no coming back from this. Her ex-fiancée worked for an intelligence agency and I’m getting a sympathy stress headache thinking about this coming up in his security review. She won’t be able to get into government or national media after this one.

It sure looks like being a sex positive girlboss disabled sex worker was worth more than any other consideration. It can’t be that simple, can it? Validation alone can’t have been worth jeopardizing everything else, could it?

I cannot glean any insight at all into this, so I thought I’d ask here. What could be guiding this decision making? Is this a one-off or could any woman with a good career, education and every professional advantage possible go off the reservation one day?