Too Pretty to Be Disabled

"Pamela Anderson has more prosthetic in her body than me, but nobody calls her disabled," says Aimee Mullins, athlete, activist and actor born without fibular bones in her legs. Aimee has had prosthetic legs essentially her whole life. And today, she's transforming the limits of the human body and art.

Maybe that's why I came across her this week. I've done the opposite of transforming the limits of my body all week. I've been sick with some kind of flu bug — the kind of sick where you lie around all day, but aren't bored because you can hardly stay awake. But now that I'm coming out of the sick fog, I'm having one of those euphoric days when I'm actually aware of how amazing bodies are. We are ridiculously resilient. And watching Aimee talk about her relationship with her body takes the idea of resilience to a whole new level.

She's a world record-setting athlete. She's been told she's too pretty to be "disabled." But she's over that. She's forcing her audience to ponder what human beauty is and what it means to be sexy. Mind you, some of her pairs of legs (She has over a dozen.) tower her over six feet tall in stilettos. And she clearly embraces her femme sex appeal.

Um, wow:

But she's gone beyond merely making an amputated body acceptable as mainstream femme sexy. She's begun to see her body as a form of art, her legs as "wearable sculpture" to "provoke the senses."