I’ve noticed that many addicts, be it to alcohol or drugs or porn, can get sober through 12-step meetings but turn quickly into sexual predators when given half a chance.<\/p>\n
There’s no good thing that can’t be perverted. Not Orthodox Judaism and not 12-step meetings.<\/p>\n
From TheFix<\/a>: The young people\u2019s meetings I went to all over Los Angeles featured a revolving cast of men that I would call perverts. They weren\u2019t the obvious kind of creeps, either, with windowless white vans and long trench coats. They looked like everyone else at the meetings: tattooed and cool and smoking cigarettes. <\/p>\n These men swarmed me, as they did every other newcomer too young and inexperienced to distinguish between the loving hand of AA and the clammy hand of a predator. They welcomed me to the meetings, they gave me over-long hugs, they offered me smokes when I was still too young to buy my own. I felt absolutely enveloped by the program. I had never had so many people pay attention to me in my life.<\/p>\n But what I thought of as harmless flirting\u2014and all flirting is harmless when you\u2019re 17 and your curfew is 10 pm\u2014these men rightly interpreted as vulnerability. <\/p>\n There was J, who asked me to his house to \u201cread the Big Book.\u201d When I arrived and asked what we were going to read, he laughed and showed me to his bedroom. I let him kiss me and grope me because I didn\u2019t know I was allowed to say no. He was a grown-up; I was a kid. He\u2019d been sober 15 years; I\u2019d been sober a few months. He was in his 30s; I was 17. My parents had taught me to respect adults, and that\u2019s what I thought I was doing. It can\u2019t be wrong or immoral if J is doing it, I thought; he has a million sponsees and he\u2019s a grown-up.<\/p>\n There was C, who was 36 and also had double-digit sobriety. He had a daughter a few years younger than me. It\u2019s strange to look back and call it rape\u2014because I\u2019ve been assaulted under much less ambiguous circumstances\u2014but that\u2019s absolutely what it was. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve noticed that many addicts, be it to alcohol or drugs or porn, can get sober through 12-step meetings but turn quickly into sexual predators when given half a chance. There’s no good thing that can’t be perverted. Not Orthodox … Continue reading