[Source: BBC]

Have you ever wondered what challenges a blind person might face in their sex life? Or how they go about meeting a partner in the first place?

Actress Mared Jarman wants to tell you, all to bust myths and break taboos, about disabled people and sex.

“People don’t want to think of disabled people as sexual beings with sexual desires, wants and needs,” said Mared, who has a degenerative eye disease.

“The reality is that disabled people are just as sexual as anyone else.”

Mared was diagnosed with Stargardt disease when she was 10 and lost about 80% of her eyesight in her right eye within a week when she was 14.

Today she is almost blind in her right eye and has more vision in her left but it has deteriorated.

Sick of disabled characters being depicted either as sexless or fetishised, she wrote BBC comedy drama How This Blind Girl.

The series sees blind 20-something Ceri, played by Mared, navigate the already fraught world of dating.

Earlier this month her efforts saw her handed a BAFTA Cymru Breakthrough award.

“Disability and sex is a bit of a taboo subject,” said Mared.

“It’s just ridiculous to think that we don’t have the same instincts and drive as anybody else.”

She said all too often misconceptions were made about disabled characters.

“When I go up for roles that are ‘sighted’ a huge percentage of them have nude scenes and are sexual, the girl is flirtatious, there’s a sex scene… but I can’t remember a single disabled role I’ve gone up for where there’s a nude scene, a kissing scene, a sex scene, anything,” she said.

“[There’s an assumption of] ‘that person won’t want to have sex so we don’t have to worry around about that’ and then on the other side there’s the complete fetishisation of disabled people from devotees and devotism to very, very extreme.

“They’re both huge problems because either they desexualise us or completely sexualise and fetishise us. There’s just no in between [which is the] reality.”