Thank you so much for this insight, I have thought at times it could be due to lack of visual stimulus to that part of his brain. Not sure how correct I am, just a guess.

When my mind wanders, my hands usually end up at my chin. Sometimes my fingers will be over my eye covering my forehead, but I've never pressed my eyes out of habit. I usually only do this when I have an extremely bad headache that hurts behind my eyes.

Thank you so much! Haha, I had the same when it comes to the physical aspect of a relationship, at some point he is going to care enough to find a need to stop. He is quite the social butterfly and only this year has his social game been mucked up by his behaviors.

You were quite helpful! I appreciate your input very much! I hope we can too, but if not, it's not the worst habit in the world 😉

Where to begin?

First off, I think characterising these behaviours as blindisms is faulty to start with, since there are individuals who are not blind and engage in them too. Autists are one example. The reason I raise this, is that there's often a double standard imposed on disabled people, where compensatory behaviours that others engage in with no problem, are regarded as signs of inadequacy. If a sighted person can't drive and doesn't like walking a lot, it's just the way they are; if a blind person does it it's the end of the world, etc.

A behaviour being off-putting is a value judgement. There's no particular objective reason why rocking is off-putting but tugging on one's beard, or braid, or drumming one's nails on a desk, is not. The position that purely aesthetic judgements should impinge on people's own bodily autonomy is a very bad starting point. Similar stances over things like tattoos, piercings, unusual hair dyes, were common, and are fortunately being dissolved, without these people having to belong to specific designated groups or have a separate culture of their own. Likewise, social impositions, often on women, like shaving one's legs, or wearing high heels, are slowly being seen for what they are: aesthetic preferences without normative force.

A blind job-seeker is going to have all kinds of obstacles. If, however, any other consideration than they being able to perform the job is used to discriminate against them, we should push back, not say that it is their fault and society should determine that an aesthetic preference overrides someone's right to employment. Likewise, a blind person who has unusual eyes shouldn't be forced to cover them up.

> To imply that blindisms should be accepted as social norms implies that you consider blind people belong to a fundamentally distinct group.

It doesn't. People with blue hair don't constitute a distinct group, and I don't think they should be barred from employment either. Same for people with deep scarring on their faces, or who are unusually shaped and do not conform to aesthetic norms.

That said, there's merit in saying blind people constitute a somewhat separate group within society. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this conversation, since there wouldn't be common behaviours to speak of and the word blindisms wouldn't occur to anyone.

That people do not identify as non-blind doesn't mean much. People do not identify as cis, either; it's trans people who brought this identification into the foreground.

Finally, I'm against stigmatising any behaviour that doesn't cause harm to individuals or to society. When you say, should people rock without stigma, to me the immediate answer is, tell me what harm rocking causes, and then we can see why it should be stigmatised. Just like people shouldn't be stigmatised for having blue hair or a tattoo on their body. The comparison with queer people is interesting, in that many behaviours that people consider characteristically queer were long stigmatised, without having any impact on job performance or anything else, and this is fortunately slowly disappearing, not through queer people adapting to aesthetic arbitrary standards, but through people realising it doesn't matter and is not their business. That blind people are often considered to have problems working is true, but rocking is immaterial to that, just as women not having been regarded as able to do a man's job has nothing to do with them having breasts.