Meet Ellen Stohl

The letter (reproduced below) bounced around the office for a while. It had opened up an area of debate in which no one stayed neutral. Some editors were impressed by Ellen Stohl's pluck. Just as the movie Coming Home--about a disabled vet--had transformed our views about love and even lust, so did Ellen force us to reassess our view of the handicapped as "victims." Here, after all, was a woman who refused to let a disabling accident spoil her dream. She embodied true grit. There was, however, a vocal minority of editors who worried that running Ellen's pictorial would leave the magazine open to charges of questionable taste. Surely, the argument went, people would misunderstand, would fail to see the celebration of life in these pictures. We hope not. Meet, therefore, Ellen Stohl. She's a full-time student, a part-time actress, model and a public speaker; she drives a car, rides a horse, skis, studies martial arts--and is confined to a wheelchair.

When I came here to Cal State Fullerton, in 1982, I was fresh out of high school. At that time, I was walking." Ellen is introducing herself to the members of a class in the psychology of human sexuality on her university campus. She and two friends, also wheelchair-bound, have agreed to participate in a panel on the sexuality of the handicapped--or "gimps," as they call themselves with a kind of gallows humor.

At that time, I was majoring in theater and doing modeling," Ellen continues. "I became a contestant in the Miss Anaheim pageant right here in California and had just signed a contract to do an aerobics video tape for a production company in Los Angeles. Then, during winter break--in January 1983--I was involved in an auto accident. I broke five vertebrae in my neck and for about a month and a half, I was paralyzed from the neck down. Then, slowly, I started getting a little bit back, into my hands and arms and abdomen and lower back. But I never regained the use of my legs." As she speaks, Ellen is cheerfully matter-of-fact, betraying little of the mental anguish and just plain hard, sweating work it has cost her to get from that hospital bed to this classroom stage--and onto the pages of Playboy.

I've always been a scrapper," Ellen had told us over fajitas at a nearby Mexican restaurant before the class. "I was always into sports--the tough, make-it-through-anything type. And when I was in the hospital, I told myself I was going to make it. I was going to walk again. And then I realized I wasn't going to walk again, and I went through some really tough times." A lot of those tough times, Ellen was surprised to realize, had to do with her feelings about sex.

Especially since my accident, I've felt that sexuality is the very essence of who we are," she says. "When you're born, the first thing people want to know is, 'Is it a boy or a girl?' People treat you differently according to whether you're a boy or a girl; and from the way they react to you, you begin to build your image, your self-esteem. And if somebody or something takes away your sexuality, you don't know who you are or where you fit in. I was 18 at the time of my accident, and I was a virgin. I was a late bloomer, just beginning to realize my sexuality, and suddenly it was taken away from me." For Ellen, the accident took a toll far beyond the physical. "I was a child again, and people treated me as such, not as a woman. After the accident, the first thing I asked my mom was, 'Will I live?' and the second was, 'Can I have sex?' And I cried with my mom for a day and a half over the fact that I was still a virgin and it was all over."

As it turned out, it wasn't all over. "I was really lucky in that two orderlies in the hospital harassed me relentlessly--tried to pull my sheets off and stuff. They treated me like a woman. One of them, whom I ended up dating a couple of times, told me that he'd never thought of having an affair with somebody in a wheelchair until he met me. And that opened doors. I started going out and meeting people, and as I gained more confidence in myself, I started becoming more sexually interested. I had my first sexual relationship a year and a half after the accident. I think I was quicker to get involved in sex than I would have been if I hadn't had the accident, because I was curious. I had thought I'd never be able to have sex, and now that I was getting the opportunity, I certainly wanted to see what it felt like. So I got involved in that relationship, and it was wonderful. It lasted for about eight months. Since then, I've been involved in other sexual relationships, and they get better, more exciting, each time, as I learn more and can communicate more."

Communication, in fact, has become Ellen's specialty. She's majoring in it, along with advertising, and she is using her skills to spread her message about the importance of sexuality in the lives of the handicapped. Several times a month, she's called upon to speak somewhere. "It all started when I had a social-psychology class for which, instead of taking one of the tests, we could do an oral report. This was about the time I posed for Playboy, and I had been thinking about my reasons for doing it. And I thought, I'm explaining the importance of this to the people from Playboy but I'm not doing anything in my own back yard. To change the world, the back yard's the best place to start. So I did a report for the class. And next the teacher said, 'I teach a class in the psychology of human sexuality. Would you like to speak on a panel?' So I said, 'Sure, that would be great.' And another couple of friends and I got together a panel. Since then, I've done all that teacher's classes and have been asked to do others. The more that people know, the fewer problems for me. If people are educated, I don't have to educate them every time I go out--which becomes a pain in the butt. And they'll treat the next handicapped person they meet like a person instead of like a wheelchair."

The questions people toss at Ellen aren't exactly marsh-mallows. "I've been asked at a club, by someone who'd just met me, 'Can you have sex?' And I feel like saying, 'Yes, I can engage in sexual activity. But what is this, a prerequisite to buying me a drink? If I can't, I don't get the drink--is that what you're saying?' Sometimes, in a classroom setting, it's hard for people to ask questions. I remember one time, a man asked me what my favorite position was. I told him being on top, because when you can't move your legs, you can still move your upper body, and then you're a more active participant. That really opened up the questioning."

On this particular night at Cal State, Ellen and her friends Jan and Jim field the students' questions with practiced ease. Jim tells the class that he's in the process of getting a divorce, partly because his wife feels he's oversexed ("I don't agree with her"). Jan describes how her life has seesawed in the past ten years, from pre-accident virginity through episodes of drugs and promiscuous sex to her present state of commitment to one lover. A questioner asks the trio how their sex lives were affected by their respective paralyzing accidents.

Ellen replies: "When you go through something like this--well, I read every book out there on sex. I learned how to do things that a lot of people still don't know how to do, because I was so unsure about what I could do. I wanted to make sure I could compete with the able-bodied women out there. You kind of overeducate yourself, so that you know all the tricks. You get really good at oral sex. I think that's pretty true of everybody I've talked to. You just become a whiz." Jan and Jim nod in agreement. The audience laughs. Another question: "Do you have sensation in your lower body?" "I have heightened sensitivity in my genital area, and that's great--I admit it," Ellen answers. "But even where I have lessened feeling, on my legs, if I can watch a lover touch me, I can be visually stimulated. Orgasms really happen in the brain, after all. I can tell whether or not a guy is really interested in me by where he touches me. A guy who just wants a physical thing will be all over my upper body, whereas somebody who's really interested in me will be touching my feet, asking, 'Can you feel this?' "

The next question, directed at Jim, is predictable. "Can you get an erection?" "Yes, but it doesn't last as long as I would like it to." Observes Jan: "Does it ever?" To more laughter, the class comes to an end with Jan's parting advice to female students: "Well, girls, Jim's getting divorced pretty soon. He's going to be single, and you just heard him say he can get it up."

It's going on ten P.M. now and Ellen maneuvers herself and her collapsible yellow wheelchair into her '79 Mustang. We're headed for Crackers, her favorite hangout, where everybody from bouncer to bartender to lead singer obviously adores Ellen. One brawny fellow swings her out of her chair and onto a barstool. "It's funny," she tells us. "If I sit in my wheelchair, a lot of guys don't want to approach me, because they don't know how. But if I'm on a barstool, I'll be ripped off it and asked to dance. And I'm not doing anything different; I'm just sitting in a different chair." Ellen's friends at Crackers are looking forward to her Playboy appearance. What kind of reaction does she expect from the public? "Oh, I suppose there'll be those women's libbers who say, 'I don't want to be seen as just a sex object.' No, of course you don't want to be seen as just that. But would you want that taken away from you? What does that make you? I think every woman wants to be a sex symbol of some sort. When you take that aspect away from us, we're not whole."