SafeHouse Podcast

Season 2 Episode 04

Busting Addiction and Its Myths

The purpose of Safehouse podcast is to help families learn the truth about addiction and alcoholism so that they can take the right action to help the addict they love and to help themselves at this critical time in their lives. Exposing the truth about addiction and alcoholism also requires that we bust the myths surrounding both addiction/alcoholism and the recovery process.

AA is a Boys’ Club, Right?

Season 2 – Episode 04

Back in December 2019, a woman reader of the New York Times blasted AA as a boys’ club, or in her words, a patriarchy, apparently misunderstanding the concept of powerlessness and using this twisted logic to turn the argument against AA, claiming that AA was a bastion of male chauvinism whose main purpose was to deny power to women and keep them in their place.

When I read that, I said: well that calls for a reasoned response and even though I didn’t rise to the bait, several readers who demonstrated a solid understanding AA did, in fact, offer a defence in far more eloquent ways than I ever could. Here is just a sample of what they said:

“For anyone who has attended more than a handful of AA meetings, Ms X’s opinion that the organization is patriarchal makes little sense. While it was founded by a group of men almost a century ago (we know it be 1935), today’s AA is non-hierarchal and run by diverse groups of volunteers, including many women.”

Other Episodes: 01 | 02 | 03 | 04 | 05 | 06 | 07/1 | 07/2 | 08 | 09 | 10 | 11 | 12

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