wildfire/17_chap11.html

<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>

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<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>