chapter 12

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 <h1>CHAPTER 10</h1>
 <h2>Twelve Steps Into the Fog</h2>
 <p>In many cities across the United States, I have spoken with feminist therapists who have told me - cautiously, almost fearfully, because 12-step programs are now sacrosanct, the new religion - that these programs are not freeing the women they see in their practices. They would agree with Diana Rabenold who argues that such programs</p>
 <blockquote>...emphasize family background and 'damaged' personal histories as the major culprits... at the expense of examining the political nature of the problems. Psycho-dynamic therapy lacks a cohesive analysis of power, a theory of internalized oppression... An approach which over-emphasizes past and personal history often overlooks the ways in which behavior patterns are being reinforced <i>in the present</i> by social and economic factors.<a href="#fn1">[1]</a></blockquote>
 <p>To talk about social/interpersonal/political aspects of women's oppression as addiction is to keep us on a treadmill of meetings and "support" groups that don't seem to be pointing the way to liberty. All of us know women in our communities who have been in recovery groups for years, who feel as if they cannot miss a meeting, whose lives revolve around their victimization, their addiction, or their co-dependency, who align themselves with the most negative aspect of their lives by defining themselves <i>as</i> it: I am an alcoholic, I am a co-addict, I am a relationship addict, I am an incest survivor.<a href="#fn2">[2]</a></p>
 <p>Where is the recovery program for addiction to the 12 steps? Perhaps it is better to be dependent upon Alcoholics Anonymous than upon alcohol, but it seems to me that the better goal is to be dependent upon oneself. What I see happening in this country is that women's reliance on 12-step recovery and support groups is causing a pre-Movement fembotitude to set in.</p>
 <p>I think we must recognize that no male institution is essentially different from any other. I think we are required to hold none of them exempt from our fiercest, most self-loving scrutiny. Alcoholics Anonymous is simply another male institution, different in neither quality nor kind from the churches or schools or political parties or from any other group dedicated to maintaining men's oppressive and destructive value structure and hierarchy.</p>
 <p>There are no new values there, nothing that is recognizable as nonparadigmatic to patriarchy. Particularly appalling for what it says about the integrity of a group that purports to care about human well-being is that there is no reverence for the body, no honor given to its health, no generalizing from the effects of alcohol to coffee and cigarettes; instead, AA exhibits as much scorn of the material world, of women's creation in it - human bodies - as any Fundamentalist church.</p>
 <p>Recovery groups - particularly when they center around the 12 steps of AA - often have the same self-abasing, powerless, external focus, and ultimate rejection of responsibility inherent in male religion and politics. I perceive little difference between AA's "turning our will and life over to the care of God," christianity's "resting in Jesus," and the reliance of millions on legislators and presidents.</p>
 <p>Some feminists tell me they replace "god" in the steps with "higher power," by which they often mean their "higher Self." This has no meaning for me, since apparently unlike theirs, my Self doesn't come in high, medium, and low like a hairdryer. I am whole, all of a piece, all at once. This, at least, is my desire and my direction, and therefore how I must speak of and perceive myself.</p>
 <p>But though I cannot live as if it were true, I am aware that many of us feel as if we are still only coming together, that the wise old women inside us are still apart from us, informing and instructing us seemingly from outside our conscious minds, that there is much to be said for turning hard questions over to them and relaxing in trust, knowing that they will lead us to the answers.</p>
 <p>In my present interaction with my wise woman, I am learning to keep hold of the reins. My role as a member of our team is to be awake and to test the assumptions at the center of my perceptions, beliefs, and behavior. I formulate the questions (sometimes needing her nudges), listen for answers, and am then very much involved, very actively part of the decision-making process. Putting the ultimate onus on anyone, anything, even on my wise old woman, would be an abnegation of responsibility that would make and keep me ill and victimized.</p>
 <p>It is crucial for me to remember that the <i>conscious</i> Sonia is responsible for her life, no matter how strongly her Self speaks to her from what unconscious depths.</p>
 <p>Another problem with the fact that the phrase "higher self" implies a "lower self" is that it maintains intact the hierarchical, dichotomous mind, the one-up/one-down, sadistic paradigm. In this light, the concept of a "higher" self is quintessential patriarchy. It is very important for me as a feminist to remember at all times that my wise old woman is not "higher." She is my peer.</p>
 <p>The addiction movement's ideas seem to me to come out of a mind very like that of Fundamentalist religionists. I see no important difference between the addiction addicts who say, "You are all <i>sick</i>!" and the preachers who thunder, "You are all <i>sinners</i>!" It is the same model. The political model, the medical/therapeutic model, the religious model - all of them the patriarchal model.</p>
 <p>In this model, norms are based on "sick" people, on victims. When sickness is the norm and we are all sick, the perception is that sickness is inevitable, that we can never be entirely well, and certainly can never save ourselves but need ministers and doctors and therapists and countless programs and support groups to rescue us and keep us at coping level.</p>
 <p>And that we need them not just for awhile but for years or even for most of our lives, because, we are told, once born we are always sinners, once alcoholics we are always alcoholics, once victimized in whatever way, we are victims for life. In this way we can always put the blame for our misery on something external, refuse responsibility, and choose to be weak, unable to stand on our own, in constant need of support, never free.</p>
 <p>It seems to me that in such groups women's lives center around a healing that is perpetual, that can never be completed: recovery programs in which no one ever recovers, in which recovery is not even the goal, not even considered a possibility, programs, in fact, in which to be a "good" and accepted member one must always assert one's illness, one's pain, one's inability to recover.</p>
 <p>In patriarchal models, health and joy are not posited as options; we can only hope to be less unwell, in less pain, to cope, to have ordinary lives.</p>
 <p>But, obviously, concentrating on sickness can never make us well, any more than concentrating on sinfulness can make us feel worthy. Defining ourselves <i>as</i> our oppression both <i>in</i>ternalizes and <i>e</i>ternalizes our oppression, viewing ourselves as sick keeps us sick. To keep us from finding the tools of liberation, patriarchy always begins from sickness to describe "health," from addiction to describe liberation.</p>
 <p>Feminism, the most profound deprogramming, the most thorough revolution of ideas, thoughts, and feelings the world has ever experienced, does not allow us to underestimate the scale and depth of patriarchal conditioning in our lives; it will not let us go to sleep again. It will not allow me to speak of its enormity, as it manifests itself in our every interaction with ourselves, others, and the world, in the same breath as I speak of addictions to chocolate or even to alcohol or cocaine.</p>
 <p>When in the past I have ventured hesitantly to say to true 12-step believers that "the program" seemed over-poweringly in the old paradigm, they have pooh-poohed me into silence. "I just ignore all that stuff," they shrug. But they can only have said that out of an ignorance of the dynamics of terror-induced brainwashing, out of ignorance of its subtlety, its pervasiveness, its invasiveness.</p>
 <p>Or out of denial. Like women in the churches, like women in the political parties, like women in the universities, women who belong to any organizations set up on male models to serve men, they woefully underestimate their vulnerability to the barrage of propa-gandistic disease and psychic maiming that rips into them from the very sectors to which they have turned for health and wholeness and "support."</p>
 <p>In order to do this, they must accept the patriarchal chicanery that meaning can be separated from form. The fact is that meaning and form are inextricably fused. Meaning dictates form; in return the form, when it is not the entire meaning, is always a significant
 part of it. Form and meaning are causally intertwined in such a way that to understand one the other must always be taken into account. Since the form of AA, churches, and universities is patriarchal, any overt nonpatriarchal meanings that may be conveyed there will be canceled out by the meanings inherent in the format (for instance, hierarchical and competitive), the purpose, the setting, the values expressed by the format, purpose, and setting, and so on.</p>
 <p>Members of AA talk a good deal about "denial," but I have noticed that women who are ardent worshipers at the foot of the 12 steps - "It saved my <i>life</i>!" - fiercely deny the profoundly masculinist world view inherent in those steps.</p>
 <p>What is most noticeable about the steps at first reading, for example, is their thoroughgoing negativity: in the first step the words "powerlessness" and "unmanageable" appear; in subsequent steps, adherents guiltily confess to "wrongs," "defects," "shortcomings," admit having "harmed" and "injured," and concentrate upon making "amends" and on admitting when they are "wrong." The steps fairly groan under their load of self-abasement.</p>
 <p>Women want and need a new world, a life ennobled by self-love. We do not need further humbling. For 5,000 long years, men have carefully trained our eyes upon our shortcomings and our faults, our evil proclivities and our weaknesses. They have taught us how to scrutinize ourselves for wicked intent and behavior so well that we came long ago to the point of searching out faults we didn't even have, inventing shortcomings to please the men, to feel righteous and god-fearing. We learned our lesson of self-hatred all too well.</p>
 <p>We do not need to look any longer at what is wrong with us, because as long as we do we will never rise out of the slough. We need to see what we are doing <i>right</i>, what we are doing that is strong and good and loving and free. <i>That</i>'s the "fearless inventory"<a href="#fn3">[3]</a> women need to make of our lives.</p>
 <p>And then, of course, the woman-hating male god lurks in nearly every line of the 12 steps, ready to pounce upon the unwary, vulnerable psyche, the maleficent presence that women in AA-like programs (and churches) deny changes their feelings about themselves at all. I often wonder what makes them more immune to brainwashing than the rest of us. Although the steps purport to give one the option of thinking of god as one wishes, the text is riddled with unambiguous male god concepts and language, saturated with a rigid patriarchal worid view.</p>
 <p>It is also very other-directed. Since men have not been socialized to think of others, to be as concerned about the welfare of others to the extent women have, this may be fine for them. But women, who have been deeply conditioned to put everyone else's needs and wants before their own, to take responsibility for everyone and everything except their own freedom and happiness, women, who apologize when men step on their feet or run into them, who apologize to posts they run into - women need to <i>stop</i> feeling apologetic about living and learn to think of and put their own welfare first. They need no more brainwashing to consider others' lives, no more mandates to apologize.</p>
 <p>Negativity, remorse, repentance, giving up of ultimate responsibility -i.e., immersion in patriarchal power politics - can never lead to independence and personal power, can never free from conditioned assumptions.</p>
 <p>"But," women protest, "the 12 steps help <i>me</i>! And my reality is valid for me." I was once a Mormon, and for a large part of my life I perceived the church as "helping" me. I had what I thought of as "spiritual experiences" in relation to it. I had what I regarded as answers to prayer. But when I no longer believed in god, when I no longer thought the church was holy and full of power, I sat on its benches and felt shocked at its barrenness, its echoing emptiness.</p>
 <p>I knew then that what I had once regarded as the doctrine's rich, sacred, and transcendent stuff was in reality my <i>own</i> rich, sacred, and transcendent stuff: I had answered my own prayers, I had filled the church with my own glory. But I had projected all this onto the church because I could not conceive of myself as so powerful. I could not accept my own divinity. I had been taught to externalize my power and to call it god and his priesthood, to give it up to that figment and his priests so that I could never claim it for myself. By doing so, women threaten to bring down the whole house of cards around the men's heads.</p>
 <p>Neither AA nor any other patriarchal organization will ever be the first with the good news about how to make deep and lasting change in our lives and in the world. In my opinion, women who get well through AA get well because they so desire health that out of themselves they pull the threads of self-love that form their web of safety. I believe that motivated women have learned to use any impetus, any excuse, to grab any plank in the heaving seas, to get well. Unfortunately, AA has been almost the only plank floating by.</p>
 <p>Women have been angry when I have said this about AA, insisting that though they can see all its defects, it has after all helped many women, and they are glad that it is there. I tell them that during my long life as a Mormon I heard countless people bear testimony that the church had saved their lives, but I do not now conclude, for example, that because Mormonism keeps millions of people from drinking, everyone with a drinking problem should join it.</p>
 <p>These women then often respond that they know AA is not good in many ways, but it is already there and they are too frazzled from trying to make a living to take on organizing some group based on more feminist principles. Now <i>that</i> seems to me a far more legitimate reason for a woman's attending AA than any other I have heard.</p>
 <p>Fortunately, at least one group other than the depressingly moralistic christian AA exists for women with drinking problems, a group based on the knowledge that men's comfortable reality is alien territory for women.</p>
 <p>Though I could wish that it contained a more thoroughgoing woman-centered political analysis, Women for Sobriety, a national organization exclusively for women is based on the understanding that women have been programmed differently from men in patriarchy and that feelings of self-worth, not self-mortification, are basic to our ability to free ourselves from alcohol.</p>
 <p>Women for Sobriety's 13 steps<a href="#fn4">[4]</a> are as different from men's 12 as night from day. They are present-time oriented (women are not asked to rehearse their drinking histories), positive, self-affirming and self-directed, guilt-free, and have some metaphysical sophistication:</p>
 <ol>
 <li>I have a drinking problem that once had me.</li>
 <li>Negative emotions destroy only myself.</li>
 <li>Happiness is a habit I can develop.</li>
 <li>Problems bother me only to the degree that I permit them in.</li>
 <li>I am what I think.</li>
 <li>Life can be ordinary or it can be great.</li>
 <li>Love can change the course of my world.</li>
 <li>The fundamental object of life is emotional and spiritual growth.</li>
 <li>The past is gone forever.</li>
 <li>All love given returns two-fold.</li>
 <li>Enthusiasm is my daily exercise.</li>
 <li>I am a competent woman and have much to give others.</li>
 <li>I am responsible for myself and my sisters.</li>
 </ol>
 <p>This program keeps what is good about AA and dumps the rest. Using women's life experience as the norm, it is designed by a woman specifically to give women what they need to recover - insisting on women-only meetings, for instance. Jean Kirkpatrick, founder of Women for Sobriety, understands that women's problems "are tied to the male-female relationship"<a href="#fn5">[5]</a> and that these problems cannot be thoroughly explored in a mixed group; that in mixed groups men do most of the talking, giving women little chance to speak about what is bothering them; and that men consider women's frustrations - crying children, no adult company - petty and boring and not deserving of a place in the general discussion. In short, patriarchy prevails in AA as it does in most mixed support groups.<a href="#fn6">[6]</a></p>
 <p>But according to Kirkpatrick, the most disabling patriarchal characteristic of 12-step programs for women is that they attack their already diminished self-esteem. Recognizing that a woman's self-image is the most accurate predictor of her ability to change, Kirkpatrick tried consciously to build positive steps toward self-respect and independence into Women for Sobriety.</p>
 <p>"The program is an affirmation of the value and worth of each woman," she writes.</p>
 <blockquote>It leads each woman to assert her belief in herself, to see herself in a positive and selfconfident light, as forceful and compassionate, assertive and warm, capable and caring, resourceful and responsible.<a href="#fn7">[7]</a></blockquote>
 <p>Kirkpatrick, an active alcoholic herself for 28 years, tried nearly every available therapy, dropping twice out of AA. By the time she kicked the habit, she was convinced that none of the programs addressed the problems of America's five million women alcoholics.<a href="#fn8">[8]</a> In her opinion,</p>
 <blockquote>All women in our culture feel a modicum of guilt for not being "perfect," for not fitting into the unrealistic mold that American society has cast for them. For alcoholic women, this guilt is almost unbearable at times. When the feelings about this guilt are shared with other women who also experience it, it can be alleviated, become a thing of the past. Women alcoholics have this strong feeling of having failed as a wife, as a mother, as a sister or daughter, as a woman. Their alcoholism and recovery are all involved with the removal of this guilt.<a href="#fn9">[9]</a></blockquote>
 <p>She believes that the reasons men and women drink are also entirely different. "Men drink for a sense of power," she says, "while women drink out of frustration, helplessness and dependency."<a href="#fn10">[10]</a></p>
 <p>In Women for Sobriety groups, women introduce themselves by affirming their dignity and self-respect: "My name is Jean and I'm a competent woman." Instead of repeating the lord's prayer, they conclude their meetings by joining hands and affirming: "We are capable and confident, caring and compassionate, always willing to help another, bonded together in overcoming our disease of alcoholism."</p>
 <p>Another difference is that this group, in a more holistic, womanly sort of way, is interested in improving and maintaining each woman's health in every way, not merely in keeping her alcoholism at coping level. Part of the program emphasis, for instance, is "the use of meditation, taking vitamins, avoiding candy, drinking little or no coffee, and cutting down on smoking" - i.e., loving oneself, including her body, and taking her body and health seriously.<a href="#fn11">[11]</a></p>
 <p>But predictably enough, Women for Sobriety gets little recognition and less prestige, primarily because it does not include men, and almost none of us is able to take womenonly groups as seriously as we do those that include men. Neither is it based in men's value system. It is unacceptable and even fear provoking because it comes out of women's mind, is based on women's experience, and is directed toward women.</p>
 <p>Because it does not have the masters' imprimatur, because it is positive and affirming and therefore does not sound familiarly and comfortably like patriarchy, many doubt its efficacy. AA goes beyond this and actively persecutes individual members as well as the organization itself.<a href="#fn12">[12]</a> It is very hard for women to believe that women understand us better, know better what we need, and can provide it better than men - evidence of our internalized oppression, our self-hatred, our slave mind.</p>
 <p>Why has men's 12-step program - negative, other-directed, conventionally blaming the victim, mortifying and abasing, god-oriented - been perceived by some women as lifechanging? Perhaps it feels comfortable and right to women precisely because it is the same old extemalization of power, the same old powerlessness, the same old negativity, the same old moralistic, abject, lack of self-love (any feminist who sits through the lord's prayer several times a week - even once a <i>year</i> - does not honor herself much in my opinion), and when we are in pain we find solace in the known, in the echoes from our childhood.</p>
 <p>But more likely women find strength in any 12-step program simply because it <i>is</i> a program. When we feel as if our lives are out of our control, when we are in emotional chaos, finding such a solid, rigid structure must feel like coming upon a life raft in a shipwreck. Perhaps it didn't need to be the 12 steps of AA for those people to feel so welcome and safe; perhaps the relief would have been the same if <i>any</i> process had appeared, any dependable program in which there was group support and acceptance. As I say, thousands of people join the Mormon church yearly for this exact reason.</p>
 <p>Though the Women's Movement began with consciousness-raising groups, since then it hasn't answered the conditioned need for external structure, programs, dogma, and ritual. Feminism has routinely required each of us to bring this forth for ourselves out of ourselves, but never insisted that we not have company as we do it.</p>
 <p>Doing our own individual internal work, whether alone or with a group, is extremely difficult. In patriarchy, we are accustomed to having someone else set up for us what we need to do - parents, churches, schools, preachers, nuns, teachers, TV ads, how-to-do-it manuals - it seems as if in every direction we turn we are being told what to do and how to do it, given a regimen to follow: to get good grades, to win god's approval, to lose weight, to keep fit, to have satisfying sex. We hardly need to listen to our own internal voices at all anymore; certainly society neither encourages nor gives us any practice.</p>
 <p>So it isn't surprising that women are attracted to one more program telling us how to get our lives in order, trusting in yet another externally imposed blueprint for success, rather than accepting that it is finally necessary for each of us to find our own internal map, to listen to our own voice, and to establish our own unique and individual regimen. Following someone else's plan has never yet worked for us, and I think never will, though we might get some ideas from it.</p>
 <p>But we <i>do</i> need one another, we do need to be in the company of other women on similar journeys. Perhaps this is why the women's spirituality movement is having such success. It may be a group process that is providing a transition from the outer-directed, externally structured patriarchal world to the less structured, more ambiguous, freer, more open and ever-changing inner world. I believe that feminism postulates anarchy of the spirit - self-rule, self-government, an anarchy that will ultimately result in political, social, economic, and religious anarchy.</p>
 <hr>
 <p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Diana Rabenold, "Love, Politics, and 'Rescue' in Lesbian Relationships," pp. 1-2.</p>
 <p><a id="fn2">[2]</a> It would be a good idea to cast the word "survivor" out of our vocabularies altogether. As
 a relational word, as a word that throws the mind instantly back into some dread,
 powerless past experience(s), the word "survivor" perpetuates women's feelings of
 powerlessness and their perceptions of themselves as victims. Words are energy. I would
 like to see us use them to create our own powerful, free reality. For instance, Susan
 Horwitz suggests that we use the word "thrival" instead of survival.</p>
 <p><a id="fn3">[3]</a> One of the 12 Steps is that people will make fearless inventories of their lives.</p>
 <p><a id="fn4">[4]</a> The 13 statements were originally published in Dr. Jean Kirkpatrick's book, <i>Turnabout:
 Help for a New Life</i>. Doubleday and Co: New York, 1978.</p>
 <p><a id="fn5">[5]</a> <a id="fn6">[6]</a> Jean Kirkpatrick, <i>Women for Sobriety: A New Self-Help Program</i>, 1978.</p>
 <p><a id="fn7">[7]</a> Jean Kirkpatrick, <i>Turnabout: Help for a New Life</i>, p. 64.</p>
 <p><a id="fn8">[8]</a> "Finding AA Too Male-Oriented, Jean Kirkpatrick Heads a Movement to Aid Women
 Alcoholics," <i>People Magazine</i>, June 29, 1987.</p>
 <p><a id="fn9">[9]</a> Jean Kirkpatrick, <i>Turnabout: Help for a New Life</i>, p. 83.</p>
 <p><a id="fn10">[10]</a> "Finding AA Too Male-Oriented, Jean Kirkpatrick Heads a Movement to Aid Women Alcoholics."</p>
 <p><a id="fn11">[11]</a> To contact Women for Sobriety, write P.O. Box 618, Quakertown, PA, 18951, or call (215)
 536-8026.</p>
 <p><a id="fn12">[12]</a> Conversation with Jean Kirkpatrick, August 1988.</p>
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 <h1>CHAPTER 11</h1>
 <h2>We Are <i>Not</i> Sick!</h2>
 <p>Nineteen eighty-eight was the heyday of the addiction experts. They were everywhere, solemnly assuring us that the villain in our lives was co-dependency and that to banish it we all needed a support group - or two or three - of the 12-step variety.</p>
 <p>But some of us were not convinced. We had observed our women friends who were devotees of these groups and we hadn't liked much of what we had seen. What disturbed me most was that the thinking of many of these women seemed to become more and more conventional, less and less adventurous, with every meeting.</p>
 <p>As I thought about it, I concluded that 12-step programs fail to encourage emotional daring and independence in women primarily because both the addiction model and the terminology of its attendant theory are powerless before the depth and scope of our internalized bondage. They are unable either to explain or to soothe the heartache we suffer all our lives from harboring the self-hatred that is patriarchy in our souls.</p>
 <p>Radical feminism posits that patriarchy is the poisoned well from which all maladies and miseries flow. It is neither a disease nor a substance. To reduce it to an addiction propagated by white males, or to the "dysfunctional family," not only trivializes it, but also obscures its true character: <i>sadism</i> is patriarchy's basic social pathology.</p>
 <p>It should come as no surprise that the addiction model does not address sadism. No model coming out of patriarchy as this one does is going to take on hierarchy in any historically or politically accurate way. I personally refuse to use addiction terminology because, like all patriarchal dialects, it is designed to cloak the political realities of oppression in women's lives.</p>
 <p>Patriarchy is hierarchy and hierarchy is oppression - a basic feminist contribution to modern thought. Patriarchy is also a <i>particular</i> hierarchy/oppression, a world view and global ontology that translates into an omniracial, omninational, omniclass system of female slavery. It is a terrorist regime in which females are kept internally subjugated from birth by continuous threats of external assault and murder.</p>
 <p>Mere threats, however, could never have achieved the degree of terror-based compliance we observe and experience in ourselves and in other women. Patriarchy is a deadly serious, brilliantly organized and endlessly funded all-out war against women; total war against our bodies, our minds, our spirits, our emotions, against the very essence of our femaleness. For millennia we have been prisoners of war almost everywhere on this planet, political prisoners, hostages. And as such, from birth we are unceasingly tortured: raped, incested, sexually enslaved, humiliated, impoverished, battered, verbally assaulted, sexually harassed, ignored or viewed as sources of amusement, regarded as nonhuman -objects - and as nonindividuals - clones, scapegoated for all men's failures, and murdered.</p>
 <p>We are not only tortured in the ways <i>men</i> define torture but also in many ways that only <i>we</i> recognize. We are, for instance, tortured by having to use our masters' woman-loathing language, by trying to express our boundless slave sorrow in an alien and hostile tongue in which there are no words large enough, strong enough, brave enough to mourn or to celebrate our courageous, our splendid out-caste women's lives.</p>
 <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>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>
 <p>The incalculable gift of feminism to women and to the world is the clarity with which it reveals misogyny as systemic, not as an isolated problem of individual women brought about by their being "addictive personalities" or "co-addicts" or by lack of courage or by general worth-lessness or ineptitude or because of hereditary weakness or by membership in a "dysfunctional family."<a href="#fn1">[1]</a></p>
 <p>Feminism, by depersonalizing women's bondage and generalizing our experience, refuses to blame the victim. Feminism tells us that it is not a matter of blame but rather of looking bravely at the truth of our lives. And the truth is that there are perpetrators, there are those who profit, and profit hugely - materially and psychically - from our subjugation.</p>
 <p>Feminism provides us with the knowledge that women in every sizable society in the world and most of the others are kept enslaved by massive violence, by brutality so implacable, on such a scale and to such a depth that it is, for most of us, not wholly imaginable, barely thinkable. Teaching us that as women we were deliberately <i>made</i> slaves, helping us understand how we are deliberately <i>kept</i> slaves, and promising that we can end our slavery, feminism hands us three essential tools: truth, self-esteem, and hope.</p>
 <p>The genius of radical feminist theory is its understanding of the "seasoning" of women to be slaves, of the training of men to be masters, of the consequent total corruption of perception, thought, and feeling, and therefore of human liberty on every level of life.</p>
 <p>Any hypothesis, any explanation of our difficulty not based on or considering or recognizing the centrality of radical feminist theory, ignoring that all thought forms and institutions, all private and public behavior are gender-control based and set up to maintain the slave economy of the planet, cannot finally point the way to liberty for anyone. Any such theory is, in fact, harmful in its denial, in its erasure, of the political, social, and economic facts, of the structure of women's public and private lives in every race, every class, every nation of the world.</p>
 <p>This structure, this system, may have been brought to its acme by white men, but men of all races and classes have perpetuated it with singular virulence for thousands of years. Chinese men seasoned Chinese women to maim each other horribly for one thousand years, hundreds of years before white men became ascendant in the world. Black men brainwashed Black women to punish themselves for being sexually creative, for having the power to give birth, by cutting their genitalia off and out. These women were not and are not addicted to such self-mutilation. Evidence that it is a conditioned response is that their behavior was at the time, and still is in many cultures, perceived by most people as "natural," inescapable, inevitable-reality - and the necessity for it <i>felt</i> as a matter of life and death.</p>
 <p>The element of choice and the absence of perpetrators is perhaps what most distinguishes addiction from conditioning. Choice enters into physical/medical addiction in a way that it does not enter at all in the brainwashing necessary for oppression. Nobody <i>makes</i> us an addict. Despite massive propaganda to become dependent upon some substance, despite foreign troops' bringing drug wars to our inner cities, many people are <i>not</i> addicted: do not smoke cigarettes or pot, do not drink alcohol or coffee or tea or colas, do not take tranquilizers or other addicting "legal" drugs or meddle with street or designer drugs. Though circumstances can be extremely conducive, outside of actual torture chambers no one can finally be <i>forced</i> to become an addict.</p>
 <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>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>In AA, as in most mixed recovery groups, the reality of the uniqueness of female experience is obscured if not altogether obliterated. The obliviousness to gender-based privilege in these groups is keeping male reality the norm to which women must conform once again, is losing women to our identity again, hooking us back into patriarchal forms and values and diverting us from our own movement.</p>
 <p>Among the most unsettling features of using the physical addiction model to describe nearly every unpleasant phenomenon is that addiction has become, at this time in the history of the disenfranchised and emarginated people of color of the inner cities, for instance, a matter, not of overeating or loving too much, but of genocide. To call such primarily white, middle-class problems as these "addictions" seems not only preemptive
 but callous. In the face of the grief and confusion, the unspeakable anguish of families of any color who have one or more members with brains permanently scrambled by PCP or horribly dead from physiological addiction, of desperate human beings whose neighborhoods are occupied by foreign armies of drug dealers waging war against their children, of families who are taking a long bath in hell and can't see any way out-in the face of this nightmare, to lump all societal problems together as "addictions" is to make a mockery of those who are suffering lives shattered by addiction and carelessly to erase their experience.<a href="#fn2">[2]</a></p>
 <p>Another major objection to using the medical addiction model to describe nearly everything wrong is that it gives women the most disabling message possible: you are sick. In patriarchy, to be female is automatically to be "not well." Every day in thousands of ways men's system conveys to every living woman that femaleness is a disease, a disgusting, hideous deformity, and encourages us in every way possible to get "well" - to turn into silicon Stepford Wives or junior men.</p>
 <p>Assuring us that our dissatisfaction with society is sickness, that our refusal to conform and be totally obliterated is sickness, patriarchy attempts to "cure" us of our outrageous and dangerous womanliness with guilt and blame and therapists and institutions and shock treatments.</p>
 <p>For this reason, unless I am speaking of illness that is physically manifested, I do not choose to use the term "healing," as in "healing ourselves." Though women have been ferociously brainwashed and abused by a sick culture, the distinction is that <i>it</i> is sick, not <i>us</i>. We are oppressed, we are nonfree, but we are not sick. I understand why women use the word "healing," and I know that for many of them it seems to have very positive connotations. But I also know that healing presupposes illness and that patriarchy teaches us to view ourselves as sick and weak and vulnerable so that we will then behave weakly and vulnerably.</p>
 <p>So hearing everywhere again nowadays that we are all sick in one way or another, all addicted to something, sets my alarm bells clanging. I know that the sickness model does not come from women's culture. Because obsession with-fear and consequent causation of - sickness and death on every hand is men's contribution to the world, perceiving the world in terms of individual responsibility instead of co-dependency changes reality. To affirm health and joy and freedom as our norms is to make health and joy and freedom possible.</p>
 <p>No matter what new person's throat they come out of, I recognize those old voices that tell me I am addicted and sick, and I don't trust them. They are the voices that lied to me in the past. But I hear a voice in my soul that never lies to me, a voice I know I can trust. That voice says very clearly and unequivocally that <i>I am not addicted to anything</i> - relationships, food, drugs, endorphins, or sex. I am not and never have been co-dependent. Though it tells me that I have been, like every living woman, deeply programmed, it also congratulates me for daily freeing myself of old assumptions and patterns that keep me tied to patriarchy.</p>
 <p>My inner voice also assures me that I am not sick, but instead am robust and strong, becoming stronger by the hour.</p>
 <p>Women are not sick; <i>we are brainwashed</i>. The difference is critical. It is the difference between success of the She/Volution and failure, the difference between life and death.</p>
 <hr>
 <p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> As if any institution of patriarchy can be said to "function" to promote human well-being on any level!</p>
 <p><a id="fn2">[2]</a> Conversation with Mary Ann Beall, August 1988.</p>
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 <h1>CHAPTER 12</h1>
 <h2>The Scarlet O'Hara School of Social Change</h2>
 <p>Women often ask me to tell them what they should do to change the world. When I suggest that they should live today according to the values they wish governed the world, they often turn away to hide their disappointment.</p>
 <p>I suppose I could tell them that we definitely cannot change the world by doing more of the same things we have been doing. I could predict that we are each going to have to continue to live our own individual, private lives in a radically different way. I could explain that the least of this is that we are each going to have to begin following whatever path it is that we already know is a more advanced way for us, paths that will refine and sculpt us into the women we not only desire to be but must be to fulfill our destinies.</p>
 <p>But too often women who assure me fervently that their greatest passion is to change the world and who are well along in their internal revolutions are still not living with full integrity in their own personal worlds. They do not want to think today about making the changes they know they must make; like Scarlet they plan to think about it tomorrow.</p>
 <p>But tomorrow will never come. So it is critical to live <i>now</i> as we know we should: scrutinizing our personal relationships for damaging emotional clutter and cleaning it up; resisting acquisitiveness by not piling up the "mountains of things" Tracy Chapman sings to warn us about; performing such simple and transformative acts as recycling everything recyclable, conserving water and other resources, walking and bicycling whenever possible, and generally simplifying our lives; discovering and claiming our full spiritual selves; respecting and listening to other women; honoring our bodies by eating correctly (an immensely political act - if not being totally vegetarian, for instance, then at the very least refusing to eat meat from commercially-raised animals), getting enough rest and exercise, laughing often, and - particularly - breaking addictions to such destructive substances as nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, sugar, marijuana, antidepressants, and tranquilizers.</p>
 <p>Women all over the country are facing up to addictions and trying to break them. Certainly no one would argue that addictions help us free ourselves. Yet I hear feminists whom I perceive as earnestly engaged in the search for freedom say, for instance, "I can't get started in the morning without my coffee," or "food always tastes better with wine," or "marijuana is a nonaddictive, spirituality-enhancing herb,"<a href="#fn1">[1]</a> or "I can't get to sleep without Valium." Where we have to start breaking free is from our coziest chains - our morning coffee, our evening drink or smoke, our liqueur with dessert. These are patriarchy's implements to stupefy and finally to incapacitate us, not to mention its diabolical scheme to use our money to destroy our own and others' lives.</p>
 <p>If we want a world in which no one's life or health is destroyed by habituating substances, we must make that world possible now in our own private lives and as a group and Movement. Knowing that at least 50 percent of Lesbians have problems with alcohol, and that many women are at this moment freeing themselves of addictions by great and difficult dedication to loving themselves, we show respect for them and celebrate their move along the path to freedom by serving only healthful food and drinks at our functions.</p>
 <p>It is reasonable to ask that our events demonstrate our rethinking of values and conventions, that they model a new way of relating to ourselves and others, that they prove that we take women's lives and health seriously.</p>
 <p>This suggestion is often countered with concern about curtailing freedoms and about not accepting "difference." But these arguments no longer tempt me to connive in or to condone other women's self-destruction. I think we need to be clear about this. We need to be clear that it is all right to make judgments and decisions based on our beliefs. Sometimes <i>not</i> judging is cruel and irresponsible.</p>
 <p>If we are alarmed that this allows no choice, we need to remember that when we plan events we can at best provide for a finite number of choices. Since we will have to leave out most things anyway - no one worries about not providing frijoles, for example, or cucumber sandwiches - let us leave out what we know does not promote women's health. By paying respect to, by honoring these bodies of ours, we take a giant step out of patriarchy.</p>
 <p>Each one of us knows at least a dozen more obvious ways we could live according to our biophilic value system, more aware of all other life forms, more connected to them and to ourselves. The only way I have found of becoming more conscious is by acting on the consciousness I already have. If there is a better way of refining the perceptions, the senses, and the judgment, I haven't heard of it.</p>
 <p>And unless we begin to practice <i>today</i> what we already know is most respectful and loving of ourselves and others, we cannot expect our witch/goddess Selves to reveal further ways to us <i>tomorrow</i>.</p>
 <p>Treading water is good exercise but it's boring and it doesn't get anyone anywhere in particular.</p>
 <hr>
 <p><a id="fn1">[1]</a> Many women have told me of their struggle to break free of marijuana. Those who believe it is not addictive need to follow me from speech to speech and hear some personal testimonies about its destructiveness in women's lives.</p>