Is this a ^feminist^ issue?

Pretty shocking.They are rightly looking at life imprisonment although I imagine AA do prison visits....
It seems to harbour, not surprisingly, some real idiots as well, like this one a couple of posts previously:

ARRESTED AT STATION The Peterborough Examiner, 2010
www.thepeterboroughexaminer.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1772058&archive=true

FRANCE -A Frenchman is facing drunk driving charges after taking his car to a police station to distribute Alcoholics Anonymous leaflets.
Police said the man -who had a previous conviction for drunk driving -smelled of booze when he arrived to drop off the AA pamphlets. A blood test revealed the man had nearly double the permitted alcohol level. Now, he?s facing up to four years in jail and a fine greater than $14,000.

I had a neighbour who managed to stay sober for a couple of years through A.A. but was attending a meeting somewhere almost every night. He also had a "sponsor" who seemed to act as a free surveillance unit and was overbearing and a little creepy. I met him once and thought he was a control freak, to be honest.

There are indeed cult-like aspects to AA. The advice to keep going back to meetings even when you've been sober for years is (to me) bizarre and seems calculated to prevent the alcoholic from ever really moving on in life past their addiction. I stopped smoking three or four years ago but if I regularly went to meetings where other smokers and ex-smokers sat around talking about smoking, cigarettes would continue to dominate my thoughts and I suspect I'd find it a lot harder to stay off them.

The thing is though, AA undoubtedly works for some. For some others all it does is replace one life-dominating addiction with another one, albeit one that is less deadly. For many others it doesn't help that much if at all. AA is very much more about a particular form of spiritual growth than anything else. I think it is quite illuminating that the one glaring omission from the 12 Steps is "Put the damn bottle down".

I also suspect that part of AA's continuing popularity is that it's free. A friend of the family paid for my ex to go to rehab for a couple of months at a cost of over £6,000. As well as group sessions within the rehab centre itself, part of the "recovery programme" was mandatory daily attendance at outside AA meetings. I understand that this is far from unusual.

A.A. always seemed to me to function much like an organised religion with the insistence on attending meetings, giving your ?testimony? etc. Like religion, it helps some quit a destructive habit but the few I have known over the years to have gone through it, seemed more miserable as a result.
How do they re-word their patronising babble in all women AA groups?
I?ve known binge drinkers to learn moderation but I doubt that an alcoholic can return to his drug and use it responsibly.

AA helped a friend of mine. She is three years sober, medal, goes to meetings religiously. It helped her.

Privately I have wondered about aspects of it, it seems she will have to keep going, but never asked her about it for fear she would relapse.

Oh I see

From the link on the OP, HerBeX. It's called Stinkin Thinkin. There's a link back in the comments.

STers?

Oh, and we've been spotted!

Right, I've read the link in the OP and I am blown away by how spot on the author has got the recovery movement. Absolutely nailed it. The Orange Papers go into a lot more detail, but I think friendthegirl has perfectly captured the nuances that are sometimes missed in other commentary. And of course, the feminist take, of which I don't think I ever really read anything.

I am not a drunk, but my ex was and I immersed myself in al-anon and an on-line recovery community for a while. I just typed out a big rant about the whole thing, but deleted it because I think it was for my own catharsis more than anything.

What I will say is that I think that the 12 Step movement is a relic, rehabs are are con, and the many of the messages and a lot of the people within the programmes are anti-women and certainly anti-feminist, although there is a veneer. I wonder whether it is because the predominant life experiences brought into 12 Step groups are highly gender-stereotypical. Reading the recovery boards is reading the patriarchy in action. Hell, the one I was on even had an ex-drunk male moderator (on a female dominated board for people dealing with mainly male drunks), who nipped in the bud any kind of disagreement with variations on the phrase "Calm down, ladies, this isn't very becoming." Because that was the 12 Step way. I got booted out not long after he was made mod.

Luckily for me, the whole experience (with my ex and with the recovery community) was what brought me to feminism, so no hard feelings.

Hmmm, very very interesting article. I've always wondered why AA is so uncriticised in mainstream media. It works for some people but it's by no means the be-all and end-all of recovery and apart from its very dodgy premise about powerlessness over alcohol, it also puts a whole load of people off I think, who might benefit from recovery, with its insistence that you have to stop drinking altogether. That's just not true. I remember reading somewhere that a third of alcoholics recover to such a degree, that they actually go back to being social drinkers, which isn't something AA likes to admit. And also, its insistence on people standing up and breast beating, doesn't work for everyone.

I can only assume that so many people in the media are part of the fellowship, that they are reluctant to criticise it.

Not sure if the 13th step is an inducement or not. Not, probably.

Jingo, somewhere between dwelling on how rubbish one is and, at the other extreme, positive affirmations is where I'd like to be. Apart from when I revel in self loathing of course.

The "13th Step" is when someone in AA starts a relationship with someone else in AA. It happens so often that it's become a cliche. Incidentally, there are women-only AA meetings.

The "powerlessness" thing is odd. I'd only heard of it in direct relation to powerless over alcohol as that is what the first step says. As I understand it the idea behind it is that many alcoholics will battle for years in trying, and failing, to control their alcohol intake.

Once they admit to themselves that they cannot reliably control how much they drink, and that once they start drinking they are powerless to stop, that then opens the way to the realisation that the only sensible option is to simply not drink. I'd not heard of it advocated as an all-encompassing approach to all aspects of life except in terms of a "take care of your own life, let other people take care of theirs" kind of thing.

For what it's worth, I'm coming at this from the viewpoint of someone who attended Al-Anon (the friends and family offshoot of AA) for quite a while and who knows a number of people who attend(ed) AA. I found Al-Anon quite helpful but I didn't buy into all of it nor was I ever pressured to do so. I do know that Al-Anon meetings do vary in tone and content quite a lot and so I'd be astonished if that wasn't the case in AA.

Oh yes, I like that sort of thing - making lists of things I have achieved and remembering how it felt at the time. They're not the longest lists in the world but they do help to counter the 'I am completely incapable of anything useful' type thoughts that are ever willing to surge up from nowhere.

Less keen on the 'let's pretend everything is fantastic and I don't have any character flaws' school of positive thinking.

I didn't realise positive affirmations were supposed to be good for you. I thought the first step was simply admitting you needed help?

Those recovery programmes have always seemed a bit weird and cultish to me, have been to an open AA meeting with a friend which was interesting and emotional.

What is the 13th step?