Latest Palmer Musical Project Exposes Disability Prejudice

Reading through Amanda Palmer’s blog, which features a lengthy story about rescuing a pair of conjoined twins from the depths of oppression and sexual exploitation, one could believe that the former Dresden Dolls artist is one heck of a Good Samaritan. She and musical collaborator Jason Webley not only liberated the duo from somewhere near Seattle, they also went so far as to coach the twins to achieving their lifelong dream of becoming singer/songwriters. Happily ever after for everyone, right?

Except that the twins, named Eva and Lyn Neville independently but preferring to be referred to as “Evelyn” jointly, don’t actually exist. As it turns out, Evelyn was conceived for Palmer’s next big musical project.

Which would have been fine, if that tiny bit of information had been shared with Palmer’s fans. Instead, Palmer took spin doctor to a whole new level by writing several blog entries sharing the supposed backstory of the exploited sisters, a gritty, nerve-wracking account of being orphaned, serving as a sideshow attraction (because, really, we haven’t moved beyond the Age of Barnum, it would appear) and an unwilling dalliance into child pornography. All that was missing from the twins’ tale of woe was a thread into the Holocaust, September 11 or Hurricane Katrina.

According to Palmer, when the twins weren’t busy being sexually exploited or abused in their traveling circus act, they were sharing their musical prowess on MySpace, which is how they were “discovered” in the first place.

Sleuthing musical fans eventually figured out that the Evelyn Evelyn project had been fabricated by Palmer and Webley (maybe it was the Charlie Chaplin-esque photo that emerged, showing the two crammed into an over-sized dress with exaggerated Little Tramp make-up) and brought the project to the attention of various communities. From a variety of sources, despite the stellar cast appearing on the forthcoming Evelyn Evelyn CD (including Frances Bean Cobain, making her singing debut) the feedback has been anything but positive.

For good reason. Ignoring for a moment that Palmer and Webley did everything possible to make the twins appear legitimate (at one point, Palmer suggests that the two are going to start a legal fund to punish the perverts who peddled the Neville sisters into porn) the ableism and exploitation of sexual violence survivors is galling.

But hardly unsurprising. As it turns out, both sexual violence and disability have apparently become requirements for creating an “inspirational” character.

The poor depiction of disability has previously been discussed in “Avatar,” but even this site has been remiss in engaging the dialogue on the actual state of disability discrimination in the status quo. Disabled prejudice is probably the least-talked about, due in no small part to a serious lack of national attention to the issue. In fact, one can only wonder if those of us with ableist privilege have even thought about disability discrimination, beyond griping about the inability to access a closer parking space.

Part of the difficulty, and understandable error beyond Palmer’s concoction, is that Americans really don’t know how to talk about disabilities, especially with those who are disabled. The discourse surrounding disability resembles the early days of cancer, when Gilda Radner and Julia Sweeney tried to rely on humor to break the taboo of such an ugly, frightening medical condition. There’s some obvious differences, and a serious hit-and-miss to utilizing this tactic in the ongoing education about disabilities. First, individuals with cancer may cause some discomfort, but chances are high that they’ll never be asked to leave a church, school, or airplane for the effect they’re having on those around them.

Second, disability humor has become the new punch line for off-color jokes and raunchy comedies. Whether it’s Alan from “The Hangover” purposefully mispronouncing “retard” or Ben Stiller capitalizing on intellectual disabilities with his character Simple Jack from “Tropic Thunder,” or Lady Gaga dancing with metal braces in the video for “Paparazzi,” disabilities are so obviously hilarious that those who are offended are just too sensitive.

Consider the fact that Palmer and Webley themselves don a giant, custom-made dress to indicate that they’re joined together. Defenders of the musicians have cited the photograph as the evidence that everyone should have known from the beginning that the Neville twins never actually existed. Yet disability advocates have opined, and rightly so, that the photograph is nothing more than modern blackface, creating an exaggerated cartoon of what disability actually is.

It’s not an experience limited to more physical appearances of disability. Most of my life, I’ve struggled with dyscalculia, a learning disability that prevents me from reading numbers correctly. I struggled with math for the vast majority of my childhood, never understanding how mathematical concepts seemed so Greek and beyond my understanding. It wasn’t until I was 17 and formerly tested that we finally had an answer: it wasn’t that I was stupid or lazy, but simply couldn’t prevent my brain from omitting, transposing and inverting numbers.

As it turns out, dyscalculia impacts my life in a variety of other ways. Despite coming from a musically-talented family (my paternal grandparents were vaudevillians who toured with the Rat Pack, and my twin taught himself the harmonica, piano and saxophone) I cannot read music or understand a map. Due to so many years of being undiagnosed as having a learning disability, I have a lot of insecurities where my intelligence is concerned, and have not taken a math class since entering college. Though I have over 120 credits, I doubt I’ll ever actually obtain a bachelor’s degree because I have a paralyzing fear of taking another math class.

Sadly, this is huge source of amusement for people in my life, who are fond of asking me to do complicated equations in my head, tell the time from an analog clock, or memorize a complicated dance move. They don’t quite understand asking me to perform these tasks is akin to slashing the tires of someone’s wheelchair and asking them to roll forward, because there is a pervasive idea that disabilities are strikingly optional in our society. I would love to be able to conquer the gripping fear my disability has instilled in me and confront that college algebra class, but until I can stop reading 3s, 5s and 8s as identical, that’s probably not going to happen.

Disabilities are certainly a divider in the status quo. I can’t ask for a non-disabled person to understand what suffering through a learning disability is like, just as I can never really understand the experiences of a man, or even those of a physically disabled person. I have enough privilege that my disability isn’t immediately obvious, and as such, I have an even greater imperative to call out the privilege of others like me when I see it.

Perhaps, if Palmer had chosen to execute this project with an empathetic understanding of disability (say, Daniel Day-Lewis in “My Left Foot,” or even Jack Nicholson in “As Good as it Gets,”) instead of another item in the buffet of the twins’ weird backstory, the disabled community would be more behind the project instead of opposing it. It isn’t so much that the twins are disabled, but rather that their disability is executed in a manner to suggest an even greater “otherness” from those who are “normal.”

Instead, she spins it into an album that may very well be brilliant, but one that completely ignores the input of individuals with histories eerie similar to the one she merely invented (indeed, several sources are interpreting her half-baked apology as more or less insisting people chose to get offended, instead of owning up to having been offensive).

I suppose it’s possible that I “just don’t get it,” as so many rabid Palmer fans are sure to insist (and, well, have) but what I do get is that the attitudes and dialogues towards disability are demanding a change, which isn’t something that the Evelyn project is going to accomplish.