1. Admit, ye higher-ups who run American Apparel, that you are powerless over Apparel: that your attempt to become ever-more-ironic and stay ahead of the aesthetic standards of The Man has become unmanageable and unwearable and that your immature antics are serving to undermine and overshadow genuinely progressive labor practices - thereby doing a disservice to your avowed mission. (Also, that your clothes fall apart and you've discontinued like half of the tee shirts in favor of rubberized leggings.)

2. Come to believe that a Power greater than yourselves could restore you to sanity: to wit, employees who are less interested in sucking up to an arrested adolescent than in propagating the company's more laudable aims; who recognize that your aesthetic jumped the shark three years ago; and that gold spandex is not the outward manifestation of a liberated consciousness.

3. Make a decision, American Apparel, to turn your will and your lives over to the care of said people as you understand them.

4. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of yourself, which is different from having a massive persecution complex, invoking Magna Carta, and talking self-righteously about your work for immigration whenever someone mentions jacking off in front of female employees and reporters, firing people you find insufficiently sexy, or the sexualizing and sexual subordination of pubescent-looking models.

5. Admit to the UK Advertising Standards Authority, to yourself, and to another human being - preferably not on your payroll - the exact nature of your wrongs.

6. Be entirely ready to have lawyers, re-merchandising, new art directors and spokespeople remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly ask a Salvation Army pickup truck to remove all short-shorts, our tube-tops, hot-pants, thong bodysuits, bloomers and ironic scrunchies. Oh, those vintage Penthouse spreads can go, too.

8. Make a list of all persons you, American Apparel, have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all. This will take a long time, but let's start with any employee fired based on her looks, all models who've been placed in compromising positions, everyone who had to look at that gross billboard on Houston, Woody Allen, teenagers who now think seersucker bloomers are acceptable eveningwear, those of us who have been wearing big glasses for years, those forced to sympathize with Woody Allen in nebbish-weight cage match, employees who were sexually harassed, employees forced to hang out at the company apartment, lawyers the company slandered, hipsters whose style you commercialized, and every 1980s Bar Mitzvah who you mocked in the service of tired irony.

9. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others or involve their wearing said terrycloth underpants.

10. Continue to take personal inventory and when you, AA, are wrong promptly admit it. Not just by taking down certain billboards of a woman in tights and no pants apparently being frisked, or throwing money at recurring sexual harassment charges, or claiming philanthropy and support of immigration reform make it okay to do whatever the hell you want the rest of the time.

11. Seek through prayer and meditation (okay, that's negotiable) to improve your conscious contact with actual women and reasonable people as we understand them, asking only for knowledge of their wishes in wearable clothing, in respectful work conditions, and the power to carry that out. "Legal means" will work, too.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we hope you, American Apparel, will try to carry this message to all customers, employees, teenagers, models, and to practice these principles in all your affairs.

Building A Brand By Not Being A Brand [NY Times]
ASA Adjudications [ASA]
Buy or Boycott? [Newsweek]
Billboards: We See Through American Apparel's Latest Ad [Racked]
We Predict More Lawsuits in Dov Charney's Future [Gawker]

Living On The Edge At American Apparel [BusinessWeek]

IS DOV-Y TOO LOVEY? A LOOK AT AMERICAN APPAREL'S CEO [Blacktable]
Sexy Marketing Or Sexual Harassment? [MSNBC]
Earlier: American Apparel Ads: Sexy Or Sexist?
American Apparel Will Make You Look Like A Fat Hooker
Two Nebbishes Enter, One Leaves ($5 Million Richer)
American Apparel Now Sponsoring Bloggers & Porn Stars (NSFW)
American Apparel's Plans For Recession Success: More Sex, Please
Dov Charney's Sexual Harassment Woes Are A "Grave Injustice"

American Apparel Ad Succeeds [Gawker]

According to Maia Szalavitz, writing for Time:

But according to 10 students, two separate parents, and a current part-time employee interviewed by TIME - some of whom are involved in the state inquiry - Mount Bachelor Academy regularly uses intensely humiliating tactics as treatment. For instance, in required seminars that the school calls Lifesteps, students say staff members of the residential program have instructed girls, some of whom say they have been victims of rape or sexual abuse in the past, to dress in provocative clothing - fishnet stockings, high heels and miniskirts - and perform lap dances for male students, as therapy.

The school, naturally, denies the charges.

Mount Bachelor's executive director, Bitz, says her school uses widely accepted psychological treatments to help children overcome their problems. "We also use a psychodrama treatment approach designed to do one or both of two things," said Bitz in her statement, "get a student to embrace qualities of their character (such as beauty or courage) about which they have doubt, or assist them in recognizing qualities that are unproductive (such as selfishness or conceit) about which they have little insight."

One student described the "psychodrama" treatment.

One 18-year-old former student and victim of rape wept while recounting what happened to her during a Lifestep seminar. Jane, who asked not to be identified with her real name, left the school in March. "They had me dress up as a French maid," she said, describing an outfit that included fishnet stockings and a short skirt. "I had to sit on guys' laps and give them lap dances," while sexually suggestive songs, such as "Milkshake" by Kelis, played at high volume.

"They told me I was dirty and I had to put mud on myself for being raped," she said, in reference to a separate Lifestep session. "They basically blamed me for getting raped."

Unfortunately, slut-shaming for the enjoyment of the male students is hardly a new therapeutic technique at Mount Bachelor.

[Melissa] Maisa attended Mount Bachelor between 1992 and 1994 under largely the same management that runs the school today, and graduated the school with honors. She was sent there in part because of promiscuous behavior as a teen, which Maisa associates with being a victim of child sexual abuse and date rape. "Mount Bachelor made me feel even more dirty and more shameful than either one of those experiences ever did. I just want to make sure the things I suffered through there never happen again," Maisa says.

She describes a Lifestep in which she says she was required to perform an exercise called "the holidays." "I had to stand up in the sluttiest way possible and strut over to every male in the room," including the counselors, Maisa says. She was instructed to sit on the floor before each man, place her left foot on his right knee and say, "This foot is Christmas." She then placed her right foot on his left knee and said, "This foot is New Year's. Do you want to meet me between the holidays?"

Maisa says she performed the holidays more than 250 times. When she failed to show sufficient enthusiasm, Maisa says she and her peers were punished, each having to repeat their own humiliating skit.

The bad treatment plans aren't limited to rape and abuse survivors either. One girl, who turned to drugs and alcohol after the death of her sister, describes what counselors put her through.

According to Ozier and others, in a Lifestep called "Forever Young," students were placed on a mattress and taunted with painful information about their childhood that they had previously revealed, an apparent attempt to trigger regression to infancy. Once more, Ozier was instructed to recall her sister's death against her will. "That was probably the thing that traumatized me the most," she says, describing how she thrashed on the mattress until she vomited. "They prey on people who have already been hurt."

Sounds more like aversion therapy than regression — and certainly it's probably made her rather averse to therapy.

So where the fuck does this kind of "therapy" come from?

Synanon began as a drug rehabilitation program before morphing into a controversial cult and is credited with putting forth the idea that confrontation and boot-camp-style breakdown tactics could cure teen misbehavior and addiction. Synanon's confrontational techniques influenced est and LifeSpring, which began selling weekend seminars designed to prompt emotional breakthroughs in participants.

Food, sleep and access to the outside world - sometimes even to the bathroom - were strictly controlled. Using intense role-playing, humiliation and physical experience, the seminars attempted to liberate people from victimhood by teaching them that they are ultimately responsible for everything that happens to them, including being a victim of child abuse or rape.

Mount Bachelor's Lifesteps appear to share these tactics and philosophy. Several of its top employees formerly worked at a now defunct chain of troubled-teen programs known as CEDU, which was founded by former Synanon members.

I think that's known as "a cult."

As an aside, Szalavitz posts in a related piece on the Huffington Post that Mount Bachelor's parent company — through Aspen Education, owned by U.S. Aspen, owned by CRC Health — is actually Bain Capital. Does that name sound familiar to you? It might, since it's the company founded by former (and possibly future) Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. And while he's been retired from the company since 1998 (before it took over CRC Health), he still receives income from Bain, which it is getting by charging parents to dress their daughters up in slutty costumes to make them accept responsibility for their rapes.

The state of Oregon is reportedly investigating the abuses — but this isn't even the first time they've done so.

In 1998, Mount Bachelor was investigated by the Oregon DHS based on claims by several former employees that students were "subjected to frequent obscenity-laced screaming sessions by staff members; students were deprived of sleep; a group of girls emerged from one group therapy session with bruising on their arms after they were ordered to clasp their hands in front of them and pound a mattress for an extended period," according to the Bend Bulletin. The Oregon DHS cleared the program following the investigation.

Of course they did. Because, after all, it's a bunch of fucked up kids — and mostly girls — making the allegations.

An Oregon School For Troubled Teens Is Under Scrutiny [Time]

Related: Do Lap Dances and Humiliation Treat ADHD— and Should Public Schools Pay? [Huffington Post]
Millionaires-in-Chief [CNN]

[Picture via Buy Costumes]

Since the 1986 "War on Drugs" kicked off and introduced mandatory drug sentencing , the number of women in prison has risen 400 percent - amongst black women, the number is twice that. Of the women in prison, 80% have addictions, and more than 60% have minor children.

Addicts who give birth have it hard: because a woman can be prosecuted for using while pregnant, many avoid the prenatal care that their babies, in particular, need. What's worse, recovery programs, afraid of costly lawsuits, routinely refuse treatment to pregnant women. Once born, newborns who test positive for drugs are immediately put into foster care under the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act. Mothers entering treatment often have to waive all custody rights to their babies in order to get clean; the result is what the "Moms Living Clean" website refers to as "a generation of legal orphans." As one might imagine, the situation in prison is hardly less grim: from the mandatory handcuffing of women giving birth to the instant removal of new babies, the process is punitive and impersonal.

As an alternative to these traditional approaches, the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, a Division of Federal Health and Human Services, has funded 35 innovative residential treatment and recovery programs for pregnant women and mothers of young children, all non-violent drug offenders. A new documentary, Moms Living Clean, by filmmaker Sheila Ganz, spends three years with the patients at one such experimental program, Center Point, Inc. Women and Children's Residential Treatment in San Rafael, California.

The 40-person facility provides a 6 month residential program, transitional housing, and medical, psychological, educational and vocational counseling. The six women chronicled - an abuse victim, one mother trying to break out of prostitution, several introduced to drugs by parents - thrive in the new atmosphere, gaining confidence, independence and forging relationships with their children. Says program director Dr. Sushma Taylor,

I have a 100% success rate, because as long as they're with me, they're clean, they're living a happy life and they are with their children. And that is success. I equate long term success with family reunification and the self-esteem enhancement that we're able to provide for our women, who perhaps have never worked in their lives, perhaps are third generation recipients of public benefits. We attribute that to instilling a value system… that starts with hope and has a lot of love attached to it. We believe that there is goodness in our clients when they don't believe they're worth too much. And since we believe in them, they begin to slowly believe in themselves. And when they believe in themselves there is empowerment.

As the documentary would have it, the story is unilaterally feel-good, a triumph of good over indifference, people over policy. And that's great. But given the amount of care, counseling, and funding expended upon each woman, it seems hardly likely that the government will be willing to institute such programs across the board. Then too, these are six women we are seeing, and very possibly six women specially selected as good candidates for the experiment; it's hard to say whether a larger-scale operation would run as well. That said, the real barriers are philosophical: the "war on drugs" makes enemies of addicts, casts their illness in moral terms, and its policies hinge on the notion that someone who's subjected her child to such risks is, by definition, unfit. Prisons are not in the business of redemption; that's why it's still a story when it happens. But these are stories we need to hear - and in this case, see. Feel good? Sure. But sometimes that's earned.

Moms Living Clean [Babble]
Moms Living Clean [Official Site]

Says Benoit Denizet-Lewis,

To much of the general public, sex addiction is a punch line, a pop-psychology diagnosis or an attempt to explain away recklessness and perversion. But my sex addiction is unfortunately very real; it has cost me a job, romantic relationships, friendships and, on many days, my sanity and self-respect. I have checked myself into inpatient sex-addiction treatment centers twice. I have set up Internet blocking software — the kind designed for children — on my computer, only to buy another computer when the urge to go into chat rooms became too strong.

In one of the more raw and wrenching "Modern Love" essays The Times has run, Denizet-Lewis describes a trajectory of broken relationships, lost jobs and a search for oblivion, attempts at rehab and a final, desperately difficult road to recovery. His addiction begins with the validation he receives in chat rooms, then quickly spirals out of control.

But there were never enough reviews, never enough guys, never enough validation. Within three months, I had hooked up with 20 guys from online. Within six months, I was routinely skipping out on friends so I could spend nights in chat rooms. Within a year, I had essentially lost the ability to control the time I spent on the Internet. For the life of me, I couldn’t sign off.

As the author describes it, this is indeed real addiction, as uncontrollable and devastating as any substance abuse. But Denizet-Lewis himself seems to touch on part of its bad rep. "When I told one boyfriend, he said, 'Oh, aren’t all guys sort of addicted to sex?'" he recalls. In a sense, this is no more and no less than the ancient notion that men's passions are essentially bestial; as such, an inability to master them is in some ways a particular weakness - everyone has these feelings, society seems to say, you just can't control them. (It doesn't help that the term's probably been tossed around a time or two as an unconvincing excuse.) And because there is no obvious chemical opiate at work, the emotional "frailty" of this addiction can seem more glaring; an emotional neediness not veiled by any other vice.

But is sex addiction essentially a male vice? In this account it is:

We were a diverse group, including an affable husband and father arrested for soliciting a “minor” over the Internet who turned out to be a cop, a sexually abused and deeply traumatized gay man in his 30s who had started cruising parks when he was 11, a married corporate executive who couldn’t stop cheating on his wife, a minister who was fired from two colleges for viewing pornography at work and a cantankerous retired community-college professor addicted to pornography and prostitutes.

Not a woman in the bunch, although "nymphomania" is generally regarded as a female purview. But then, "mania" and "addiction" are two different things, and this in itself probably says a lot about our perceptions of sexuality. When women succumb, they are corrupt — when men do, they are weak. Sex, more than almost anything else, is still inexplicably tied to morality, as this account shows; however open we become, legally and societally, it can always be rendered something on the brink of sordid, held from it only by invisible tethers of control and 'healthiness.' As the author points out, even the 'cure' is different from other addictions — unlike, say, alcohol, sex isn't something an addict is encouraged to swear off of altogether; rather, they're expected to develop a healthy and 'normal' attitude towards it. Which is, after all, hard enough for anyone.

Facing My Obsession, in the Flesh [New York Times]