Category Archives: women's movement stuff

Well. last week, I posted that piece “feminist lesbian position on prostitution” here and at the Mediacoop.ca page. In English and French, there. Also on the Policy Action Research List (Par-L) which has somewhere around 2000 subscribers, feminist-ish in leanings, but all over the map in terms of analysis and agreements. It was written by three women, Kathleen, Jacqueline and me–but informed by our combined 50 years of idea-making, arguing, listening,  organizing, agitating and providing crisis intervention and services to women escaping male violence.

Anyhow. So, it’s getting around. And we’re interested in engaging with people about it, and trying to expand our analysis and understanding of how compulsory heterosexuality operates to reinforce the patriarchy and prostitution is an integral part of that. How can we stand in solidarity with women still engaged in prostitution, pornography and other aspects of the flesh trade? So far, Vancouver does not have any exit services for women in prostitution. So far, women who get out, still get out because of a series of lucky breaks, or really fuckin’ unlucky breaks (she gets the shit beat out of her one last time and becomes no longer marketable; she develops chronic illness or pain as a result of the constant stress, anxiety, uncertainty; or she dies).

The “women’s” centre where I work, the drop-in, it also operates a night shelter. Now, this shelter, it’s set up in a place that was built as a clinic and learning centre kind of place. So it has a couple of small examination rooms, a few bigger meeting rooms, a kitchen, a library, and bathrooms with showers in them. We put out cots and blankets around 10:30 and heat up some soup. Women come in from 11 till 2 or 3 am, and grab their bedding and a bowl of soup. Some women put their cots right in the hallway near the desk where the staff sit at the phone. Some women put their cots in the furthest corner of the quiet room.

It’s a shelter. It’s a place for women to come who have no home, or who live in hotel rooms–there are no bugs there. There are other people. You share the bathroom and showers, but with other women (well. some of you have read other posts where i talk about the m-f transsexuals who use the centre–they’re at the shelter, too, some of them–and some of them, as at the women’s centre, are a danger to the women there–goddammit)–mostly. it’s safer than the street. It’s “harm reduction”. But it’s not a solution. Not by a long fuckin’ shot.

We recently heard that funding has been secured for the shelter to be open 24 hours. And my coworkers there are all happy about it and stuff.

But when i heard that, my heart sank, and I felt a little nauseous.

This is the fucking problem.There is NO safe shelter for women in Vancouver. Our place opens up at 11 at night and women have to leave by 8 am, and take their stuff with them. It is less likely your stuff will be stolen by the other people there than at a co-ed shelter, but it’s still one thing to worry about. It is less likely you’ll be raped (recently we heard of other shelters, notably one long-time shelter in a church, where women are routinely attacked and raped by men who use the shelter. http://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/learn/resources/statement-vancouver-rape-relief-womens-shelter-rapes-women-shelter-first-united-church ), and more likely you will believed if you report a rapist. women find a kind of family there, as we do everywhere…women listen to each other, even when one of ’em talks in “word salad”.

But these women don’t WANT a shelter. They want freedom from fear. They want a home. They want people around whom they can love, and who love them, too. They want off the un-merry-go-round. They might say, “oh, that’s great, we need a safe place to be 24 hours a day. That’s gonna be great.”

But it’s not great. It’s barely a beginning. maybe it’s not even a beginning. There are no safe shelters for women there, true. And there must be at least two–one for single women, one for women with children–But that’s not enough, it’s not even that respectful of women to just have shelters. You know what, with the money that flows into that neighbourhood,  all of those women could be housed in their own place, and supported with workers who can help them keep their place, develop a sense of belonging with a community, host others to a meal–make home. not shelter. HOME.

Anyhow. I kinda drifted away from my first thought, about the shitstorm stirred up by my previous post. Holy smokes. We hit a nerve, we did. Lots of people think we’re anti-sex, anti-prostitute, anti this n’ that. Because it’s on my blog now, people are reading other stuff i posted, and that’s good, I guess. But invective is flying around on crackbook. It’s painful. you know how that is, eh–most people want to be liked. I do. It matters to me what people think of me, and if they think that i’m hateful and dangerous (especially to potential allies), well, that’s difficult. Mind you, i think that some of their positions and actions are damaging–but the people aren’t hateful. No. We are all good people, and we want to do good, and be useful. I’m pretty sure.

We’re off on a different track. The “prostitution is a form of male violence” track is very far away from the “prostitution is labour” track.  If you’re arguing to me that “sex workers  want to be safe and respected in their careers as sex workers”– it is not an argument that addresses the points we raised in our position paper. Because we don’t start from the premise that prostitution is a form of labour, like hair dressing or retail sales or nursing.  So, we say, “women are routinely violated in prostitution” and you may answer that with, “women want to work in well-managed brothels”–and the second sentence doesn’t follow from the first, although both may be true. Women will STILL be routinely violated in prostitution whether they are in well-managed brothels, in their homes, or on the streets. And women presently in prostitution often would much rather be in well-managed brothels than in the streets, or alone in their own homes or the johns hotel room or car.

But why settle? We are settling for ‘shelter’, and we are settling for ‘safer’. And it’s not enough. My allies and my friends and colleagues, we want Home. And we want Free. Even if we don’t know what that looks like, exactly.  But for me, it doesn’t even include money. let alone ‘sex for money’. It does include sex, but not the coercive, commercial, ‘i get to own you for an hour’ kind. And it includes shelter, but not the ‘this is your corner for the night and keep an eye on your stuff’ kind.

One funny, random thing–(this really is random)–I’m going to be in my first triathlon this coming weekend, and there’s a woman in my gym who’s done them, too, the sprint and olympic distances–and she asked me the other day, “Have you ever transitioned?” and I said, “no. I was born this way.” anyhow. We thought that was amusing.

Okay. back to the other stuff. And you know what? About this whole “choice” business? It’s a really neo-liberal concept–and european, too. one of my advisors said the other day, she was offering me some criticism about a paper I’d written, and she said, “you really have to trouble this notion of choice here. When you consider Aboriginal women, who are really over-represented in street prostitution, the whole notion of individual choice is problematic. Aboriginal people don’t talk about ‘choice’ and individual decisions–they live in the world in a much more relational way–they talk about their relation to the land, and responsibilities to the ancestors and to seven generations hence, and relations to the community–“individual choice” doesn’t come into it.” So, you know, when you’re going on about how women can choose prostitution, it again privileges the choices of women who do operate in the world as individuals, who come from that world-view, and does not question how her choices affect her relationships to other women, to her people and community and all that.

And of course, nowhere in the comments are the choices of them men mentioned. Who are these men who buy women? who are they who are the johns and what about their responsibilities? How has he become a man who thinks it’s his right to be able to pay for sex? This kind of entitlement is also conditioned, he has learned to expect his desires to be accommodated no matter what.  Even men who wouldn’t dream of buying sex, they use pornography–it’s everywhere, everywhere. How can we be human when the pull to the lowest common denominator is so strong?

Anyhow. this is getting too long. and i’ve got papers to write.  I’ll post this for now, maybe add more later…

So. the other day, I went to a meeting of abolitionists. We’re cooking up some events and speaks and so on with one of the women who was instrumental in getting the Swedish prostitution law in place. You know the one, where the buying of sex is illegal, but the selling is legal.  And there are exit programs and stuff for women so they can get out and stay out.

the thing about Sweden is, they moved from a more liberal legalizing model to a more feminist partial decriminalizing model in 1999-2000.They never seemed to go sideways into a pathologizing/medical model. Not that I can tell, anyhow. Not like we have.

Oh it’s so fucking frustrating, let me tell you. There are all these women downtown (and i’ve been working a tiny bit more at the women’s centre lately — the one that’s not really a women’s centre, on account of all the m-f trans guys who are there–there are more and more of them–booming voices and glitter and perfume…give me strength)–and these women, they’re all on drugs of one sort or another, all struggling hard to stay afloat and they are suffering suffering. With great humour, though, you know, i gotta say. And also with only thinly concealed rage–if these women could see each other, past their own individual pain and see what they shared and work together to alleviate their suffering, if they could manage somehow to look up–we could take over. really and truly.

Anyhow, so there we are all in this pressure cooker of rage and pain and a thin stream of ribald humour flowing through, and the only thing these women have that offers even the dimmest glimmer of hope, is ‘harm reduction’. It comes from all directions, this “harm reduction” (i have to put it in scare quotes, ’cause it’s scary…)–it comes from social services, medicine and law and has leaked from those big institutions to the shelters, to the street nurses and the outreach workers and the do-gooders everywhere–even feminists, we said, “sure, let’s try out this harm reduction thing” at first, twenty years ago–We said, “let’s have some safe fix sites, let’s meet the women where they are at, let’s go there and get them”. But we haven’t.  the best we’ve done, far as I can see, is to meet them where they are at, there in the pressure cooker, and then we ALL stay there. We’re all in the soup together. uh-oh…

When the women’s centre was founded, sometime in the early 1970s, it was founded by the women who lived in the area, lots of them Chinese women, a few Aboriginal women, and some white women. I think all of the women were working-class. Not down-and-out degraded and messed up from men’s violence an melt-yer-brain-onto-the-inside-of-yer-skull drugs, just regular poor, or getting by. And these women, I don’t know much about the beginning, but i figure they knew they needed a place to be together, a space that was free of the male gaze and the threat of male violence. A place they could have coffee together and make some small discoveries of what it means to be a woman in the world of men, in that place that at the time they called “skid row”. by and by they got a little money together, with this grant and that, and they began to offer a meal once a day. Soup.  And they hired some women to work there. they tried to keep it a collective, even though some women were paid workers and some were volunteering, but gradually the divide widened and the services broadened and within a few years, less than twenty, for sure, the paid staff were credentialed and professional (‘small p’ professional, but still…) and the volunteers were do-gooders from rich neighbourhoods or the women who used the centre who couldn’t get paid work. Either women on their way up or women on their way down. Like the workers in security companies–kids on their way to the armed wing of the state, or has-beens, on their way down and out of the work force. sounds cynical, yes.

Women still  come in to the centre to be together, to be sure. But they know better than to be looking to us for a way out. They look to us for some food, a set of underwear, a tube of mascara maybe…some shampoo a shower, maybe the number to a shelter. But we’re not doing them any favours. We’re meeting them where they are, but we’re not seeing them, you know? We try.But the thing is, these women have been medicalized. the whole fucking neighbourhood is treated like a diseased and gangrenous limb. the people who live there are an infection. the gentrification is the antibiotic–okay the metaphor’s breaking down…but it seems there’s no place for them. These women, there is no place for them. They can’t see where they belong, they don’t think they’re worth better than to line up for soup, line up for condoms, line up for needles, line up for the doctor, line up for donated clothes, shoes, underwear… and they all have acronyms. PTSD, OCD, ADHD, or they’re bi-polar or schizo-affective or borderline personality (wtf–like “here’s your diagnosis, honey, it seems that you ALMOST have a personality–but not quite”)–and they have the meds to go with ’em. dear god.

So. The women who use the cetnre now, in this century, this country, they are still poor, like thy were forty years ago, but now on top of poor, they’re also crazy and sick and addicted and labeled and stapled and slotted and

Stuck.

No way out.

So instead of getting beside them, intead of pulling the oppressive forces off, or diverting the pressure of the state and the doctors and the law enforcement folk, what do we do? We collude. We end up agreeing with “The Man”.

Women’s lives are increasingly difficult. There’s less moeny, fewer opportunities, more desperation, where did it come from? I don’t know, but some of us have nice paying jobs because of it now. and there is a bigger and bigger gap between us and them. Some of my co-workers, they ask me, they say, when i start going off about prostitution and pimping and fucking harm reduction that doesn’t–they say, “well, what about choice?” One time one of my co-workers said that and I said, “What kind of coice tdo they have? between the devil and the deep blue sea, that’s no fucking choice, that’s slavery, honey-pie, and no one chooses that. They make the best of it when they get trapped in it, is what they do. Looks like choice to you ’cause you don’t wanna have to give up anything, do ya?” I was a bit harsh. I get a bit, well, riled up.

it’s not exactly accurate, my co-worker seems to like the women we work for, (give stuff to, more like)  — but really , all this ‘harm reduction’ crap is saying to them is,  ” Guess that’s right, not much else you’re good for, there, sister. We’ll work on getting you more condoms and bitty alcohol swabs so you can get fucked but keep clean. Here ya go, here’s a coffee and a sandwich and a clean needle. Enjoy your choice.”

anyhow. lookit that, i went off on a rant there…sorry. i was talking about the abolition meeting. And we’re planning for one of the women who made the Swedish law to come here. And we have a lot of questions–like what has ahppened to the women who used to be in street prostitution? Where are they? how are they? What’s it like for the front-line workers, the rape crisis workers and the transition house workers and addictions counsellors and the educators? How does it all work for the women who used to be on the streets in prostittution? And how does it work for the feminist anti-violence workers in Sweden? They don’t have such a thing as harm reduction there, do they? I don’t know, but i sure hope not. anyhow, she’s coming here, so I can ask her what she knows, and i CAN’T WAIT.

Here’s one more thing, before i finish this dog’s breakfas tof  apost–Harm reduction is the Big Thing now, whereas twenty or thirty years ago, Feminism was the Big Thing. Back when i was starting out in this radical feminist stuff, there was government money for women’s anti-violence work. Slowly, slowly, the funders got more powerful than the agents they were funding. The women started to say the things the fellas with the money wanted to hear, and it wasn’t long before the women’s groups started to believe those things that the institutions of power told us we had to say in order to get the money…

uh-oh. that last paragraph needs more analysis–and i have to go and i’ve been fiddling with this damned thing for too long already, so i’m just gonna post it. If you’re reading this and you want to ask for clarification, please do, or add to it or something, have at ‘er, there’s so much more to excavate…

god. Ontario supreme court just ruled that Canada’s solicitation laws were unconstitutional. specifically keeping  a bawdy house, living off the avails of prostitution and communicating for the purposes of prostitution. the judge, a woman judge, she said that removing these laws would keep women safer. She called them sex workers. Everyone called them ‘sex workers’. One of the main complainants in the case, a dominatrix who entered prostitution at the age of 14 because of pressure from her 37 year old pimp/boyfriend hooted that she was looking forward to spanking some bottoms in celebration. She is a complainant along with two other women who are active in prostitution. They are still prostituted(ing). They are delighted with the ruling.

It is not the law that causes their suffering. One of them said, “now a sex worker can pick up the phone and call the police if a john assaults them”. Did she even hear herself say that? What about having a job where rape is not the bloody job description? how bout that? How about stopping the john from buying access to her body in the first place? How be he just give her the money? sweet sufferin’ mother of jay-sus.

I felt sick. I still feel sick. Another sickening thing is the vitriolic spew issuing forth from women who call themselves feminists. See, the radical feminists are coming out and saying, “this is outrageous. this is a gift to pimps and traffickers and punters. Sure the laws need reform, but not all-out repeal, this does not make women any safer.” and the folks who think this is a good thing, the pro-prostitution lobby, they are saying, oh you know, the usual bullshit about radical feminists being anti-porn and anti-sex and hating prostitutes and all that. We’re fucking not any of that. well, okay, anti-porn. I’ll agree. we are anti-porn.

what the fuck is wrong with these people?

A dear friend of mine provided an affidavit–her own true story– to the Crown as evidence that the laws should not be struck, that women in prostitution are harmed by prostitution–by the practice itself. She, and other affiants, argued that the laws themselves are not the cause of the harms they experienced, but the men who bought them were the cause of the harms. Oh, and the people who did not buy them, but drove by them, and shouted to them, “whore! have you no self-respect?” or turned away, or offered disdain in the face of their suffering. That too was harmful. My friend, she said, “it’s hopeless. This is it, there is no way–we did everything we could, we gave them all we had”. She had a really hard time with her affidavit. A really hard time. Writing out what happened to her meant remembering it, almost like reliving it all. She’s tough, my buddy, eh. She’s been out for many many years, and she has a much different and better life now. But that brought up a lot for her. She has nightmares again. “I woke up screaming last week” she told me.

The people who call prostitution “work”, they say it’s just like any job in the service industry. But listen, we’ve all had shitty jobs. We’ve all worked way too hard for way too little money, or had bosses who power-tripped on us, or co-workers who betrayed us or picked fights or whatever. We’ve all had crappy jobs in the service industry. But when we quit those jobs and moved on to other things, the experiences we had flipping burgers or cleaning toilets or stocking shelves or– did not cause us, TWENTY YEARS LATER, to wake up screaming.

Prostitution is not a job like any other job in the service industry.

She told her story. She told the truth about her life. And that judge, she treated her with the same kind of flagrant disdain as did the passers-by twenty years ago when she was a young woman, doing her best, alone on the street, trying to be tough. It should have been enough. One woman’s story should have been enough to stop those fancy-ass lawyers in their tracks. And they had more stories. Many more.

The only thing i can figure, the only reason I can guess that the lawyers did NOT, the moment they read one of the affidavits from the Crown’s case, drop their pursuit of this challenge–is that they, too, are punters. They must be johns themselves. or pimps. or both. I can’t understand how they would otherwise try to chip away at the very slender protection women might have.

but i can’t for the life of me figure out why these other women are proclaiming such a victory. I can’t figure out for the life of me why they are directing such venomous spew at radical feminists–at the oldest rape-crisis centre in the country–at the women like my friend, brave and frightened, telling the truth. Why are these women, who will need our alliance, so ready to deny the alliance? We are right where THE MAN wants us to be. At each others throats.  I’m not gonna play that. I don’t like them, or trust them, but I will resist the powerful urge to throw their shit back in their faces. They are women. There is something about their own pain they are working out. I guess. Anyway, they have something to teach me. Everyone does. maybe it’s just fucking patience. christ.

The laws will not be struck down right now. The judge gave thirty days before she would recommend they be repealed. The federal government has already served notice they will appeal. It’s a conservative government, notably anti-woman, and no ally of the women’s liberation movement. But they are the only federal party which publicly states that prostitution is a form of violence against women.

it’s a weird world when the christian conservatives offer more hope for women’s liberation than women who call themselves feminists, or activists, or than the social democrats. Mind you, Rosa Luxembourg did say, early last century, that “social democracy paves the way for fascism”. mmmm. must think on that some more.

I just think of those arrogant young men in front of the strip club when we were doing the ‘buying sex is not a sport’ campaign, yelling, “c’mon in! we got pussy for sale!”

Inside. Women were inside. for sale. ya. lots safer. nausea rises. This is shameful.

we have a lot of work to do. more than i even imagined.

I’m afraid.

but that’s gotta not get in my way. my friend needs me. needs us. and we will win. we will. women are worth so much.

Okay. So the debate around these parts about prostitution/pornography/’sex work”/choice/feminism/etc/etc/etc is pretty hot. This outfit calling themselves “First: feminist advocates for sex workers rights” (or something, the name is ‘first’ for sure, am not sure of the subtitle) have recently released a short video about ‘sex workers’. in it, these five or six women are pictured, one at a time, talking about all their achievements. One is a classically trained pianist. Another is a writer. A third designs jewelry. One is pregnant with her third child. Another’s son said in a teen-boy-monotone; “I love my mom”. And so on. One of ’em, she’s the head of some ‘adult entertainment’ agency or something. Which is, as we know, just another euphemism for men buying women’s bodies. uh-huh.  There’s some text on the screen about how these women are just like other women, they are diverse and multi-everything, and … they are “sex workers” (I have to put that term in scare quotes because it helps to contain the gag reflex a bit. you KNOW i don’t think of it as work). Then after the text, these same women are shown proclaiming, “I am a sex worker”. One woman said, “I am a former sex worker”. and another muttered, “I am kind of a part-time street worker…”  The white women all smiled as they said it. One looked like she was trying for a ‘saucy, sexy’ look. None of the Aboriginal women smiled as they said it. A couple of them looked at the camera as if to say, “what are you gonna do about that? Wanna go?”

I know some of the women who are part of First. I know some of the women in that video, too. Not well. Not as well as I’d like to, some of them. Now, what i’ve noticed about those “First” women, the founders and the main spokespeople, and I don’t i know if there’s a correlation or not, but they tend to drink. A lot.

Now, ya know, I used to drink a lot too. And now i don’t drink at all and i go to these meetings and I have different ways now to deal with the rage and heartache of living in a misogynist capitalist patriarchy that hates me and all the folks who need me and whom i need. pretty much. So, given that, and my previous drug use, and my present understanding that my addiction is just over there in the corner, doing pushups–I am not casting aspersions on my sisters on the wrong side for their heavy use of anesthesia. No indeed. I disagree with them politically, and I think their ideology and tactics are harmful, but I still wish them well. I wish for them freedom from addiction. and I wish for their alliance. I don’t think i can have it, though.

i think  what they are doing; promoting prostitution as a ‘career choice ‘ for women, claiming to be ‘sex-positive’ and pro-pornography are –i think these positions are linked with active addiction. Not that all people (especially women) who hold these views are addicted, or ‘using substances problematically’, but i just notice a pattern. i can’t imagine how women can promote or condone the commodification and exploitation of women. some of these women, of course, have sons, and brothers and dads whom they love. some of ’em, these sons and brothers and dads, some of them are dangerous to women. In fact, I’ll wager that they may have raped and bought and sold and incested some of the very women who are agitating for their right to continue such behaviour. Certainly, they have had material benefits from male violence against women, even if they have done none of it themselves.

Anyhow. I’m trying to work it out. Why are these women using alcohol to such an extent? Why are they so strident in their defense of the prostitution/pimping industry? what is the connection? Is there one?

I heard one of these women speak at a book launch a couple of years ago. The floor was open for questions of the featured author and the person holding the microphone GAVE it to the “First” woman. dear me. Sister said, “My mother sold sex; my grandmother sold sex…” and went on to challenge the author about the lack of representation in her book about the real lives of sex workers. I think maybe she was not sober, and she rambled a bit. I don’t remember what the answer was to her comment.  But she made me think. She reminded me that women will reject any whiff of being regarded as incapable. And they (we) will interpret the status or label of “victim” as being synonymous with ‘incapable”. so if we say, “no. this was my mothers choice. i love my mom.” then we are saying, “she was not a victim, she was resourceful.” Of course, those of us who understand that women in prostitution are victims of male violence do not perforce consider them incapable. no. but we’re accused of being patronizing and judgmental. It’s not what we are saying, it’s what they are hearing. How can we say it different? How can we find a way to say to these “pro-sex-worker advocates” that they deserve better? We all do. It is possible to say, “I am a victim” or, “You have been victimized” or something like that, without talking down, without laying blame on the victim, without patronizing. Indeed, the POINT of saying the word “VICTIM” is to also say the word “PERPETRATOR” . If a woman has been the victim of rape, fer instance, a MAN has been the perpetrator. Rape does not just happen. it doesn’t float around in the air like a virus waiting for some hapless woman to breathe it in. Prostitution does not happen. Women do not just ‘choose’ to go out and suck dick in exchange for ten bucks. Someone is attached to that dick. And that someone, that man, he has gone out LOOKING for a woman to suck his dick. He’s gone out looking, and he’s found her among the women who are similarly responding to the demands of men for dick-suckers. She would not go out looking to suck some penis for money if  THE MAN had not sashayed up with all his entitlement and said, “hey, you. I got this here willy. It needs some hole to go into. you’ll do. here’s ten bucks.” This man, by his demand, his entitlement; he is making unreasonable demands on women and he his victimizing her. he is a perpetrator. she is a victim.

Sure she’s strong and resourceful and has all these other attributes. but he doesn’t want her for that. he wants her for her hole. He doesn’t give a rat’s ass if she’s a concert pianist or a brain surgeon. he’d rather she not be, but just so long as she shuts up about that and wanks him off, she can be anything. who cares. he doesn’t.

Take me, for instance. I drank, smoked dope and cigarettes for many years. Often i’d have a cigarette in one hand and a megaphone in the other.  I have been a feminist my whole adult life, and probably my childhood, too. i found feminism after I found alcohol, and for a while they seemed to go together. You know, drink beer, talk politics, foment revolution. There are lots of things to which i can attribute my predilection to addiction, (none of them having the least little bit to do with my mother–fyi)–and one of the significant things I think is that i am perhaps sensitive to suffering. And afraid. And pathologically optimistic. a bit, shall we say, Quixotic.

Had I been exposed to the sex-positives a little earlier in my life, or followed my youthful desire (I thought it was *my* desire, anyhow) to become a stripper (even though I really have no sense of rhythm whatsoever, and can’t even friggin’ two-step, let alone shimmy…), it is possible I would have remained an active alcoholic for much longer. Eventually, I realized that drinking was not so good for me. I had people around me who told me that i was in trouble. That I should maybe get some help. I was ready to hear it those times. and there was feminism, a foundation that was easier to stand on when i was sober and steady on my feet. radical feminism, at that, not the “you can do whatever you want” kind of feminism.

I’m really lucky. I know active, radical, disciplined and loving feminists. I’m an academic now which is kinda lonesome and confusing in some ways. Like, is this really work? am i really going to contribute something? I’m afraid a lot of the time. But I don’t have to go far to find someone who will tell me “no, you’re not crazy, you’ve got something helpful to say here. Just do it.” I think i drank so much before because, well, i became addicted, for one, and i was not sure enough of myself, my place in the bigger thing.

anyhow. I’m still working it out. there are lots of reasons to be addicted. Lots of reasons to keep using. Life is hard. hearts break. horrors abound. there is a war against women. we are women. and sometimes the only way to endure the war is to defend the enemy, try to stay on his good side, and drink up.

I want to be generous to my enemies, to hear their disagreement and criticism with an open heart. but i want them to change their minds, i want them to stop doing these harmful things. how?i can’t change anyone, but how can we find freedom with all these people in the way? littering the road with bottles and needles and used condoms and lies meant to protect the guilty?

How?