America's next top medical model

Can blind people be beautiful?

I remember meeting my first blind model. He was a visually striking guy, with pale skin and dreadlocks. He accosted me from across the polo field at Coachella. He accused me of “faking” blind. He didn’t think I actually needed the white cane that I was using to navigate the throng of people outside the Sahara tent. I didn’t “look” blind to him – something plenty of people have said to me before but surprising coming from someone in the same boat. It turned out to be Shaun Ross, the first well-known male model with albinism, who you might also know if you follow modeling.

Today I got fired up and decided to check in on the dishearteningly small pool of blind models, and ask the question that, I’ll admit, troubles me more often than it should:

Can blind people be “beautiful?”

Don’t freak out. Anyone can be beautiful, I know. I’m beautiful, you’re beautiful, your Uncle Jeff is beautiful and so is his golf caddy Albert. But the people who we decide to pay to sell our clothes, who we adorn with our most beautiful creations, who we pick as the faces of new products, that’s really what we’ve all been taught, deep down, to think is really beautiful. Anyone want to argue with me, I’ll see you in the comments.

Hot, hot, hot

Here at Blind Alley, some posts are of a personal nature, some are well-researched, and some are posts of passion. There are about 12 posts I currently have in “draft” mode, waiting to be unleashed on the world when the time is right. But occasionally, something comes across my desk and cuts the line.

This was one of those days, when the clickbait-y headline popped up in one of my usually more mundane industry newsletters:

“20 Disabled Models and How They Got Their Starts”

You can imagine my interest. HOT DISABLED PEOPLE! What a concept. It seemed like it was certainly incumbent on me, my duty as a journalist, a scribe of disability culture, to take a look and try to assess critically, with my own limited vision, if these up-and-coming D&I debutantes were, in fact, hot.

Caption: The “bionic woman” Rebekah Marine is known for her prosthetic arm (image: Uproxx)

Ah, the absurdity, the self-destructive internal struggle of when a mostly-blind person such as myself sits in their home office zooming in on their screen, magnifying the curve of a perfectly airbrushed nose until it takes up my whole screen, trying to make my own objective judgment on whether or not they’ve “got it like that.” But this isn’t actually about how any of these people look. It’s about the fact that we know about them at all.

Here I should say, I don’t mean to take away from these peoples’ accomplishments whatsoever. Scrolling through, each has a unique, compelling arc of achievement that is clear they did not reach through affirmative-action loopholes or without some struggle. They all have fairly symmetrical faces and deep, meaningful glares, as I suppose is sort of a big part of being a model and maybe the reason why, to my great dismay as I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled…

There were no blind people. In the whole list of 20, not one.

From down syndrome to cancer, muscular dystrophy to car accidents, the disabled models list is a veritable rainbow of medical, situational and ethnic diversity. And yet, not one hint that might imply visually impaired people were even in the running for a top spot in what our society agrees is, conventionally or unconventionally, “beautiful.”

This is, on one hand, an oversight: I’m aware that blind people like Molly Burke or Lucy Edwards have landed professional modeling gigs for brands from Dove to Covergirl, and a quick Google will turn up the stories of a few other accomplished blind models, namely Amanda Swafford who made her name on America’s Next Top Model. I was also recently introduced to blind bikini model Brittany Culp, and then of course Shaun Ross, the flag-bearer of a growing group of accomplished models with albinism-related blindness.

So the point is, being a blind model is not impossible by any stretch. But for some reason it’s not en vogue, pardon the pun, certainly not in the same way that you might see accolades for a once-able-bodied victim of a car accident making their proud comeback with the help of a gold prosthetic. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that story. But why are blind people on the runway relegated, it seems, to inspirational fodder and charity fashion shows?

The eyes have it

There’s an easy answer; That we fetishize eyes more than any other body part. Which is not wrong, but I think there’s more to it than that. Perhaps it’s that models make us feel “looked at” while we’re looking at them – make us feel a deep connection to beauty that we feel like we might be lacking in our daily lives. If the model is blind, lost, disconnected in as the stereotypes would suggest, maybe the viewer detaches, too?

Or maybe it’s pure logistics. The ins and outs of walking a runway, following directorial instructions, looking your best. These are maybe slightly more compelling arguments against blind modeling but, in many ways, they’re much more surmountable barriers; hurdles that I know Zoomers like Anastasia Pagonis are leaping with every TikTok post or Instagram spread. Pagonis might be young, but her brazen, devil-may-care approach to putting herself out there seems to be the future, a future where blind people don’t really give a damn, or give a second thought to the idea that maybe our physiques, our faces and our non-normative eyes are things that people actually find attractive.

At the end of the day physical beauty, the way we’ve constructed it here in America at least, is visual – and right now the taboo of a beautiful person without eyesight seems too great for capitalist appropriation to see an opening and use it to start selling Gucci slides. So for now we have to stay mad, and put the celebration on pause, until there are a hundred Shaun Rosses, a thousand Amanda Swaffords.

I can’t shake this idea that the attraction to peoples’ eyes is actually self-obsession in disguise – a need to be looked at in order to feel love or joy – which is maybe not totally surprising but still slightly unsettling. Perhaps for blind beauty to truly reach parity, we’ve got to stop looking at ourselves so much. Maybe we have to look at our models of beauty as exquisite creations unto themselves, with their own origin points and their own stories, as opposed to simply reflections of what we wish we were.