Real Empowerment for Women, NOW TAX FREE!!!
I have a thing for prostitutes. A fascination that has become a demented joke among those that know me, but it didn’t start as one. After the loss of a child and rape, I can’t think of a worse situation for a woman to find herself in than trading sex for money. There is absolutely nothing empowering about servicing a dirty stranger in a dirty place for a wad of dirty money. I can’t fathom a bad act so bad that anyone deserves to endure that even once, let alone over and over and over just to survive. I don’t look at prostitution as a crime. I look at it as a symptom of desperation, a desperation none of us are above succumbing under the right circumstances. This is the part where a lot of conservatives invoke personal responsibility, which is a valid argument if the one making it has never needed a second chance. Not to mention the fact that social problems like addiction, sexual exploitation and the breakdown of the family have obvious implications on American society, regardless of the current size of government. And so, as a Christian I’m commanded to offer a hand out to anyone with a hand up, as an American it just makes sense in the big picture and any woman that could turn a blind eye to the exploitation of her sisters should be forcibly liberated of her ovaries.
Yet modern feminists spend their energy on frivolous sexual harassment lawsuits, inexplicable hatred of women like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann and the eternally obnoxious fight for forcing a woman to choose. Gloria Steinem, this is your legacy.
Meanwhile, Episcopalian priest, Becca Stevens, has been pulling women out of the gutter for for over a decade, literally. Stevens is the founder of Magdalene, a 2 year residential program for women overcoming prostitution, addiction and homelessness. Magdalene has an 80% success rate, which is astronomical compared to conventional recovery statistics. Magdalene receives no public monies, instead it’s funded by private donations and grants, as well as Thistle Farms, which sells homemade bath and body products made by the women of Magdalene.
Through Stevens’ day job as a chaplain at Vanderbilt University, she also founded the Anne Stevens School in Ecuador (named for her mother) and a nursing program for AIDS hospice in Botswana.
“Love is my grounding,” she says. “It provides the axioms, those basic truths, that inform the system and govern what I do. First is that love is the most powerful source for social change in the world. Second is that love heals. I’m not called to change the world. I am called to love it.”
Hope and change you can believe in. And if for you seeing is believing, see the fruit in the women of Magdalene.
Jenny
Lori Ziganto
somegit
Snark And Boobs 
thank you so much for writing about the program and posting the link. we love what we do and are always happy to make new friends on the way!
grace and peace from the women of magdalene & thistle farms
Hello Dahling,
Not sure you picked this up from any of my twitter posts, but I was a professional girl on and off from 20-25, back when I had the body for it. To me, it wasn’t that big a deal. I needed money, had no pimp or addictions, knew how to keep it classy and clean, and used it to pay my car off. The day I held the welfare application in my hands was the day I knew I could make the money myself. I couldn’t – wouldn’t – resort to welfare. THAT was more degrading than selling a little tail.
That’s not to defend the job, because it’s not for everyone. And if you have a pimp or a monkey driving you on, you aren’t in control and making your own choices.
RG
Just because you dont like what they do in the bedroom shouldnt be the basis for bigotry. (BTW, hetersexual couples being 90% of the population DO all those things gay couples do in the bedroom. Lots more actually because there are so many.)