I was pregnant, swollen, and tired. I couldn’t get comfortable. I lay on the sofa and loudly said some version of, I’m so swollen and tired. I can’t get comfortable, and dramatically piled pillows beneath my feet, hoping my husband would magically appear with a glass of water. That my legs would swell was expected—it’s part of pregnancy, as any pregnant person will tell you—but because my ankles are damaged from years of corrective surgery for severe birth defects, they’re swollen even when I’m not pregnant. When my husband failed to appear, I turned on the television. Things immediately got weird.

Here is what I beheld, in all its bizarre glory: Pamela Anderson, tan and blond and busty in a crop top, slowly spinning the spokes of a wheel. A dude—inexplicably wearing an open, sleeveless shirt, also tan and blond and muscly—appeared beside her, his abs glistening as he lowered a visor, wielded a welding torch. Sparks, in every sense of the word, began to fly. More Pamela. More slow, seductive wheel spinning. More welding. Once I realized that the result of this collaborative project was a beach-ready wheelchair, I lost my shit screaming for my husband—Get in here! I’ve found softcore wheelchair porn!—at the top of my lungs. This time, my husband appeared in the living room. Oh my GOD, he said, squinting at the TV. Are you watching Baywatch?

The truth is that I can’t reliably work any remote control, so that night on the sofa I got stuck on a channel that only played one show—and that show was, in fact, Baywatch. The first time those red bathing suits and slow-motion running montages filled the screen, I expected lifeguards to simply save drowning people. But, as I quickly learned, watching the water for potential drownings is just a fraction of how these LA County lifeguards spend their time. Lifesaving on Baywatch is an expansive, multifaceted endeavor. Sometimes it involves making sure everyone wears sunscreen. Other times it involves stopping a jewel thief. “Lost and Found,” season 6, episode 18—the episode I first stumbled across—involves sexy welding.

In this episode, C.J. Parker, played by Pamela Anderson, and Cody Madison, played by David Chokachi, take it upon themselves to address an issue that plagues beaches everywhere: accessibility. A disabled comedian named Jess, played by Chris Fonseca, approaches the lifeguards about building a ramp to the beach so everyone can access it. Instead, C.J. and Cody decide to build a beach-ready wheelchair. Of course, they don’t ask for Jess’s opinion. The lifeguards just know everything will be better if they grant Jess access to the world’s sexiest able-bodied stage not by building a ramp, as he requested, but by taking on this secret project. So, appearing extra shiny and tan, exchanging serious looks, they get down to lifeguard business.

Jess is not a regular character on Baywatch, only the focus of this one special episode. He’s first introduced in the episode’s opening moments, rolling his chair toward the beach. He stops when he reaches the edge of the walkway, unable to traverse the sand. But while Jess is stalled at the edge of the path, some jerk is bothering C.J., hot lifeguard that she is. The viewer stops worrying about Jess and starts worrying about C.J. Who will save the lifeguard from this pest?

It’s Jess who intervenes, running over the man’s foot with his wheelchair. You’re lucky you’re in the chair, says the man, who is apparently fine with harassing women but draws the line at punching a cripple. That’s what I tell myself all the time, Jess replies. When C.J. expresses surprise at Jess’s intervention, he asks her, Who’s going to hit me?  

When I lived in Southern California during college, I never noticed a lifeguard on a beach. This is likely not a reflection of reality, but of my own preoccupation with everything else the beach entailed. As a person with limited mobility, navigating sand is an irritating task. It is not relaxing, and it is not sexy. When you can’t move your ankles, it feels like, I imagine, what it might feel like for an able-bodied person to walk in quicksand. But Southern Californian beaches have one thing going for them that the New England beaches of my childhood don’t. They are fairly level, and the sand is fine enough not to hurt my highly sensitive feet. On the beach as a kid, it wasn’t until I was completely submerged in water, floating and weightless, that I’d begin to relax. The sexiness, though, never arrived.

In California, the relative ease with which I could reach the water was one way I could avoid confronting my own physical limitations. Attending college far from home was another. I figured if no one knew me in Los Angeles, I could arrive at a version of my life where, even if I knew it wasn’t true, my body appeared as unremarkable and ordinary as everyone else’s. 

It almost worked: For those four years, I was as pain-free and mobile as I’ve ever been, and surgery was, at least briefly, in the past. I could pretend that I belonged among scarless, tan bodies—the ones running and playing volleyball. I could sit down, hide my feet in the sand, and enjoy the spectacle of the beach. But there always came a moment when suddenly the spectacle was me.

I am not a regular wheelchair user, and I know the fact that I can access a beach at all is a real privilege. No one stares as long as I’m wearing long pants, and rarely does anyone notice or comment on my scars, my limp, or gait. But the places those things are most visible are places bodies are most vulnerable. Part of being a woman on the beach is trying to gauge whose staring is harmless and whose is dangerous; who is registering your body with ordinary appreciation and who feels entitled to it. Part of being a visibly disabled woman on the beach is watching someone register you as a woman, then watching their expression shift when they register you as a disabled woman. There’s a moment when desire—or even just a glance that establishes your body’s presumed normality—turns to something else: disgust or curiosity, wonder or confusion. This is a moment I’ve never gotten used to, despite how many times it’s happened. A moment that living in California didn’t alter, or let me forget.

There’s an unspoken hierarchy of awful behavior, in which hurting a disabled man is worse than harassing a woman. Jess knows this. C.J. doesn’t. But the scene where Jess defends C.J. gets weirder. When C.J. tells Jess she’ll see what she can do about building a ramp, he handcuffs her to himself. Handcuffs himself to her? Who is the subject, who the object? I’m exercising my First Amendment rights, Jess says, as if the freedom to petition is best exercised by preventing a county lifeguard from returning to her post on the beach.

When other lifeguards show up to cut off the handcuffs, C.J. doesn’t even appear mad at Jess—which makes me mad. Instead, she offers to talk to him when she finishes work. In the hierarchy of awful behavior, if a disabled man handcuffs himself to a woman in protest, the able-bodied world presumes he is so harmless, so inconsequential, that the woman isn’t angry or afraid. The woman should probably think about ways to help him. Or maybe that’s just part of being a lifeguard.

We’re supposed to find the lifeguards sexy and kind, supposed to believe that rendering a beach accessible is a good thing. Which, of course, it is! But we are not invited to consider the implications of access, to consider disabled bodies sexily alongside able-bodied people, to consider Jess’s desirability. When Cody sees Jess with C.J. and introduces himself, Jess responds, Don’t believe the rumors, we’re just good friends. Of all the fantasies the show enacts, imagining a disabled man as a lifeguard’s love interest isn’t one of them—instead it’s the punchline to an unspoken joke. We don’t get a slow-motion montage of Jess in a wheelchair sexily rolling through ocean spray. We get a montage of a partial wheelchair, and its able-bodied builders fill the frame.

The first time I watched the welding scene, without any additional context, I laughed so hard I was practically in tears. It hadn’t yet really occurred to me that the body most like mine had been replaced with an inanimate object. I could already see the problematic simplification of disability, of course, but I hadn’t seen the earlier part of the episode yet. I didn’t know I was watching a woman being kind to a man who physically detained her—not because she was scared of him, or attracted to him, but because disabled men must need charity. 

Obviously, access to the beach doesn’t fix ableism. It just means more ableism now happens at the beach, disabled bodies hyper-visible among the able-bodied throngs. Those moments when I see someone register my body as deviant are awful because they mostly happen silently, unacknowledged by anyone else, and I am alone in the awfulness while able-bodied people around me are slathering on sunscreen, blissfully unaware of my momentary fear, my persistent shame.

But sometimes these moments aren’t silent. Sometimes people ask, What happened to you? I always explain—especially to men, because I don’t want to get called a bitch for saying that’s none of your business, which has happened—because I’ve learned it’s my job to make my body make sense to others. After I’ve made myself legible, this person goes back to their day at the beach, and I’m stuck in a weird loop of talking about my body and trying to avoid talking about my body. My desire to simply forget I even have a body is eclipsed by a larger need to make it palatable for everyone else.  

Baywatch isn’t only about desire—it isn’t porn—it’s about living by a code of ethics. The lifeguards on Baywatch believe their job is a calling, and the show positions them as the best among us: the strongest and most fit, the most beautiful and handsome, and, more importantly, the people who embody classic ‘90s American values like stopping crime and cultivating the power of kindness and friendship. It was these kinds of stories that overtook living rooms across the country and the world, as 1.1 billion global viewers tuned in at the show’s peak in 1996. 

Baywatch aimed to generate desire, while simultaneously mitigating the audience’s presumed shame: If you derive pleasure from watching scantily clad lifeguards, what saves you from having to admit you enjoy low-budget smut is that they are also good people who do things like weld a wheelchair in their spare time. But the show does want you to feel shame about characters’ (and presumably your own) moral shortcomings. Before she enlists Cody to help her build the chair, C.J. hides from Jess behind her lifeguard tower, not because she’s afraid of him, not because he handcuffed himself to her, but because she is ashamed she hasn’t helped him. When she relays her embarrassment to Cody, that embarrassment is meant to extend to all able-bodied viewers. 

But, like C.J., the viewer knows we can’t just make beaches uniformly accessible. The world isn’t for disabled folks. Not today, and probably not tomorrow either. But there’s still time for shame to transform into kindness and care. That’s what Baywatch is all about. 

And that’s where sexy welding comes in. If the lifeguards—the show, America, you, me— can’t build ramps because they can’t actually commit to scalable accessibility, then they can at least get one of those harmless, inconsequential, sexless people onto the beach, where he might enjoy getting sunburned like everybody else. At least until the able-bodied world asks some version of the question what happened to you? because accounting for your body is the true price of admission.

I made it through my pregnancy without any major loss in mobility, and my daughter was healthy. Her legs and feet aren’t made like mine. This is a source of relief for me, but that relief is also a source of shame. Of all people, shouldn’t I be ready to help her celebrate and navigate life with a disability? Shouldn’t sexy welding offend me? Yes. But at the end of every interminable day with a newborn, I popped the baby in her little swing, drank a Negroni, and let Baywatch take me away. 

At first, I watched the show because it was comically bad, and because I kept asking myself questions, sometimes out loud, like, Can a lifeguard actually tell the coast guard to stand down? or, Is this episode with a surfboard-stealing octopus actually about eating disorders? and before I knew it, I was telling my colleagues and anyone else who would listen all about what was happening at Baywatch HQ.  

The show is just so sincere, so self-serious. The lead lifeguard, a former Navy SEAL named Mitch (played by the inimitable David Hasselhoff), is also a single dad, and his relationship with his son centers single-parenting, challenging our cultural notion of good childrearing. I wondered if there was anything this show didn’t do.

But so much of what the audience was supposed to find quintessentially kind, generous, or brave merely perpetuated the very thing a given episode sought to avoid or illuminate, including ableism. To its credit, Baywatch did, for the most part, cast people with disabilities to portray characters with disabilities, but even then, they often didn’t cast people with the same disabilities as their characters. (Chris Fonseca, the actor who plays Jess, was born with Cerebral Palsy, but this is not part of Jess’s character arc—he was injured in a car accident.) In other instances, the show missed the mark entirely. It featured Mila Kunis as a blind child who is saved from a fire by Mitch’s son; it included a host of dwarves playing Santa’s elves. 

One of the reasons I never saw Baywatch in the ‘90s is that I was in and out of the hospital for the better part of that decade, and the show wasn’t a popular choice in the pediatric ward. I missed a lot of the ‘90s. Coming back to Baywatch lets me in on a trashy, problematic version of the decade. But when I’m laughing at sexy welding, I’m also laughing at Baywatch’s depiction of women and disability—I’m laughing at Pamela Anderson, and at the spectacle of her body, which became the iconic pin-up of straight male desire in the ‘90s. I’m laughing at misogyny and ableism, which the show tries to sell to me as feminism and advocacy. I’m laughing at both the depiction and absence of my own body—I recognize parts of myself in both C.J. and Jess’s characters—and I’m persecuting them both for the very things I’ve criticized in myself: her sex appeal and ability to perform the role of desirable woman; his inability to mask his disability, his reliance on others, his desire to be among the flawless figures on the beach. His desire to be mistaken for one himself. 

On my father’s desk, there’s a picture of me at four years old, twirling on the beach in South Carolina. My father loves this photograph because it captures the first time both my feet were completely flat on the ground, the first time that maybe the promise of a normal childhood was beginning to come into view. 

The child in that picture is not ashamed, shy, or scared. She doesn’t know about Baywatch, or boobs, or welding, or ways to dress to hide scars. She doesn’t know about ableism. In this picture, she’s far away from all that. She’s at home in her body. She’s learning how good it feels to dance on the beach. 

My daughter turns four next month. Already she is performing some weird ableist nonsense, claiming her legs don’t work, saying her ankles hurt—really milking it. I know she’s just imitating me. In her paradigm, my body is centered, and I don’t want to erase that, either. And though I absolutely plan to watch After Baywatch: Moment in the Sun some night when she’s asleep, I’ve come to think my daughter probably shouldn’t watch Baywatch.

In the final scene of the episode, after Jess has been helped into the water to live out the fantasy of returning to his able-bodied youth (in these kinds of awareness-raising episodes, it’s unimaginable to feature a disabled character who didn’t tragically become disabled), the lifeguards gather around Jess at Baywatch Headquarters. He performs a bit from his sit-down stand-up gig. In a restaurant the other night, I started choking, he begins, waving his arms around wildly. And wouldn’t you know it, I accidentally proposed to a deaf girl. The lifeguards laugh, the credits roll. 

The episode ends with a disabled man telling an ableist joke, throwing other disabled people under the proverbial bus. So much of the episode hinges on this: Jess doing the work of making people comfortable, making disability a joke for everyone else. Every time the episode approaches confronting real ableism, it relies on Jess’s internalized ableism to excuse the show from doing the real work. If the disabled person won’t do the work for you, then you don’t have to do it either. The collective failure to prioritize accessibility, to center disability in any meaningful way, isn’t your fault.

Listen: I want to write about the ridiculous things in Baywatch because I don’t want to have to do the work of translating disability anymore. And yet I can’t stop doing it. I’m still making disability smaller, more palatable, so that an able-bodied reader might be more comfortable. I can always point the reader away from disability. I can say, Look! Cody moonlights as a bike mechanic! with the same enthusiasm I might say, Wow, I had no idea you could touch your nose with your tongue!

But what if I don’t do that? What if, instead, I tell you that right now I’m waiting for a flight wearing thick, knee-high compression socks on a 90-degree day, because I’d like to be able to disembark the plane? What if I make you sit with Jess’s joke at the end of the show? The joke makes me cringe. But it’s also powerful. It makes plain the uncomfortable truth that ableism is so pervasive that disabled folks internalize it and erase ourselves. When the credits roll, that discomfort is loud and central. It fills the room.

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