<p>Like all prisoners, under torture we have bonded with our torturers against ourselves and one another, internalizing men's hatred of us and to some degree or another applying their model of subjugation to all our interactions.</p>
<p>Therefore, to shrink patriarchy to a "dysfunction," to list aspects of this unspeakably monstrous daily experience of millions of tortured women over many millennia, as various "addictions" - addictions to relationships, to food, to sex, to love, to power, to men, to security, to abuse, as well as to drugs - is to give evidence of the nonseriousness, the total lack of respect with which our lives are regarded. It is as dishonorable as calling the plight of South African Blacks, or Jews in Nazi Germany, "addiction." In so belittling our experience, in ignoring both its political context and content, calling gynecide "addiction" effectively erases it.</p>
<p>Dominance and subordination - sadism - is not an addiction. It is an artifact and tool of global patriarchal culture as well as its modus operandi; it is a model that saturates all our thought and behavior, planet Earth's prevailing paradigm.</p>
<p>To maintain that nearly every problem is either an addiction or the result of one, to assert that addiction is the major category of which all else are specific examples -this is not only immoral but ludicrously inaccurate. <i>Oppression</i> is the category, addiction one specific example or manifestation of it. Addiction is possible <i>because of</i> oppression, not the other way around.</p>
<p>Oppression is maintained, not through addiction, but through conditioning, through brainwashing. Hierarchy/tyranny, totally dependent upon brainwashing, is promulgated and perpetuated by it in every aspect of our culture and society. Conditioning defines human nature, our relationships to one another, ourselves, the universe, the divine. It dictates every assumption on which we base our lives. It is the way a world view is maintained, the way "reality" is structured and accepted. Both oppression and its minion, brainwashing, are virtually invisible and thoroughly invasive, assaulting every cell of our bodies and minds.</p>
<p>To maintain that nearly every problem is either an addiction or the result of one, to assert that addiction is the major category of which all else are specific examples -this is not only immoral but ludicrously inaccurate. <i>Oppression</i> is the category, addiction one specific example or manifestation of it. Addiction is possible <i>because of</i> oppression, not the other way around.</p>
<p>Oppression is maintained, not through addiction, but through conditioning, through brainwashing. Hierarchy/tyranny, totally dependent upon brainwashing, is promulgated and perpetuated by it in every aspect of our culture and society. Conditioning defines human nature, our relationships to one another, ourselves, the universe, the divine. It dictates every assumption on which we base our lives. It is the way a world view is maintained, the way "reality" is structured and accepted. Both oppression and its minion, brainwashing, are virtually invisible and thoroughly invasive, assaulting every cell of our bodies and minds.</p>
<p>Our conditioning determines what we see and what is not evident to us, what we deem possible, what we consider important, what we pay attention to, what we believe - i.e., how we live every moment of our lives, <i>all</i> of us. There is already and has always been another reality in our midst, one of beauty and peace, happiness and power, kindness, abundance, and creative joy. Our brainwashing is what keeps us from seeing and living in that world right now though it is all around us, <i>right before our eyes</i>, present and available, just as "real" as our hands in front of our faces, as real as the beating of our hearts this moment, our blood pounding through our arteries.</p>
<p>Brainwashing, not addiction, is what is keeping every member of the human race in thrall, in total and grimmest captivity.</p>
<p>Naming this phenomenon "addiction" would be laughable if it were not so irresponsible and dangerous, preventing as it does our picking up the tools with which to free ourselves. To talk about social/interpersonal/political aspects of women's bondage as addiction is to deprive us of the equipment necessary to do our relationships differently, to dismantle patriarchy within them and within our lives.</p>
@ -26,7 +26,7 @@
<p>In the absolutely pervasive global brainwashing to hate women and all things womanly, however, there <i>are</i> perpetrators and <i>everyone</i> is profoundly affected. For all of us, it begins at birth and there is no escape, no choice. The men who control the world brainwash everyone to a greater or lesser degree - as they themselves have been brainwashed; they brainwash everyone thoroughly enough for patriarchy to have gone lurching along for 5,000 wretched years.</p>
<p>There is also an enormous difference between oppression and addiction in the process and difficulty of recovery. Brainwashing is invisible on every level, addiction is not. Despite the denial that we are addicted, we see that others are, we can <i>see</i> addiction; our own condition may be invisible to us, but addiction itself is not invisible. And when we stop denying and choose to rid ourselves of it, we can and do. We either stop smoking, stop drinking, stop using cocaine or taking Valium, or we don't. It is clear whether we have or not, if not to ourselves, at least to those around us.</p>
<p>No one underestimates the difficulty of breaking a physical addiction, but it is nevertheless done every day by thousands of people. Though hard to break, these habits have a decided, luxurious simplicity about them not true of the process men obfuscate by naming "socialization" and that feminists clarify by calling brainwashing, conditioning, seasoning.</p>
<p>Because of the invisibility that renders it effectively nonexistent, keeping it a nonissue for most people, and because of its total camouflaging pervasiveness, deprogramming is far more difficult than becoming non-addicted - is in fact part of recovering from any addiction; it is perhaps the most difficult of all human acts. To discover the assumption, to posit other possibilities, to perceive, to <i>feel</i>, and to believe another reality while being blasted with this one - in short, to recreate oneself and the universe from scratch-this is what is required to "recover" from the brainwashing of oppression. Viewing addiction as The Problem, rather than as one symptom of the problem that is patriarchal oppression, ensures the invisibility of male supremacy and <i>actively</i> oppresses women.</p>
<p>Because of the invisibility that renders it effectively nonexistent, keeping it a nonissue for most people, and because of its total camouflaging pervasiveness, deprogramming is far more difficult than becoming non-addicted - is in fact part of recovering from any addiction; it is perhaps the most difficult of all human acts. To discover the assumption, to posit other possibilities, to perceive, to <i>feel</i>, and to believe another reality while being blasted with this one - in short, to recreate oneself and the universe from scratch-this is what is required to "recover" from the brainwashing of oppression. Viewing addiction as The Problem, rather than as one symptom of the problem that is patriarchal oppression, ensures the invisibility of male supremacy and <i>actively</i> oppresses women.</p>
<p>This is to say that calling all patriarchy's manifestations the result of addiction is to have no feminist political analysis and therefore to be part of the cover-up, to collude in and perpetuate the brainwashing necessary for patriarchy's survival.</p>
<p>At the base of the social addiction model that has been extrapolated from the medical model lies the assumption that males and females of the same class and race have essentially the same experience in a society. This assumption, by making women as a caste invisible again, succeeds in disorienting and confusing us. Female alcoholics, for instance, do <i>not</i> have the same experience with alcohol as male alcoholics of their same social level and race; every moment of it is colored, predetermined, if you will, by the fact of their inferior status and the consequent skewing of their internal worlds.</p>
<p>Male children of alcoholics do <i>not</i> have the same experience in any family as female children. Though they may have horrible ordeals, their maleness causes these to be <i>different</i> ordeals - both in fact and in perception.</p>
<p>I had finished this book and sent it in to the publishing firm that was originally scheduled to publish it. It had been edited and was ready for my final corrections before being sent to the typesetter. Though I felt vaguely dissatisfied with the last Part, I couldn't pinpoint what was wrong. So I shrugged and gave up. I had done my best.</p>
<p>The last chapter contained several examples of community projects women are working on in this country. None of these was perfect, of course, but then, I rationalized, we are in a peculiar time, an interim space - one foot in and one foot out of patriarchy.</p>
<p>Then as I was doing a final check of information, a woman whose project I had described at length mentioned that she was still searching for funding. Somehow this coalesced my reasons for discontent with the chapter. I knew at that moment that most of the material I had included in it did not belong in this book, and I knew why.</p>
<p>First, my motive was wrong. I was giving in to the pressure to "give examples" of what might "really" be done, trying to alleviate the anxiety that is natural to the terrific ambiguity of being feminists at this moment in time. Ambiguity should not be dispelled even if it could be. It
is necessary.</p>
<p>Second, in giving examples I limited the possibilities. None of them was an example of a genuinely new mode, a distinctly different order. All of them were variations on women's age-old accommodation theme - how we can live easier <i>in patriarchy</i>, how we can get the system to work a little better for us.</p>
<p>Third and most important, I had not thought wildly enough myself. Specifically, I had not dared out into the wilderness beyond the bounds of money. The moment I knew, however, that I had to discard the whole last Part as it then existed, I knew what had to take its place. I had to examine the blocks money sets up in our minds and in the ecosystem before I could see how we could reestablish the flow of energy in our lives and in the life of the planet. In Chapter 20 I had mentioned Genevieve Vaughan's work on this subject. Now I knew that I had to do more than mention it; I had to make it the basis of the entire section.</p>
<p>As usual, it had taken my mind a couple of months to digest, understand, and bring to consciousness the significance of an idea that was destined to change my life.</p>
<p>What follows, then, is the best gift I can give at this time toward recreating women's abundant universe.</p>
