Dear twenty-year old Stella,

Work hard on learning to ask for help.  It’s the only way you’ll ever  break free.  No one ever does anything alone.  You don’t have to.

You’ll learn how to make the men happy.  The happier they are the nicer they treat you.  You’ll get very good at being a hooker.  But when the Johns say “baby you were born for this” that doesn’t mean its true.

Now when most men come near you  feel a stabbing at your eyes, your throat, and your gut that you know isn’t real.  You don’t want to admit it but you’re terrified.  You start, you tremble.  Your hands shake.  Think about it, you’re being stabbed a lot these days.  This is a quite reasonable reaction to being used by man after man, day after day, in this prison of a brothel.  It doesn’t mean you are so miserably flawed that you can’t do anything but be a hooker.

Being a hooker doesn’t make you subhuman.  It’s not OK for your (white) pimps to smack you and tell you they’ll kill you.

You have to work up the nerve to pay a cashier for a soda.  You’re too scared to ask that guy behind the deli counter to make you a sandwich.   This isn’t weakness, it’s biology.  Trauma changes your brain.    Your hippocampus, where you form narrative memory in the brain, shrinks.  This is a symptom of PTSD –  a neurophysiologic response to repetitive trauma –not evidence that you deserve to be in prostitution.

In the middle of the winter in the middle of the night when that guy in the Doubletree suite invites you to sit while he pours you a seltzer trust your gut and back out of there before the five guys you can’t see who are waiting in the bedroom have a chance to get between you and the door.

Being vulnerable means you’re alive.   There’s no shame in it.  It doesn’t mean you’re a terrible person.  You don’t have to apologize for doing what you must to survive.

When Samantha tries to stop working for your pimp Johnny.  make her get out of the city.  Otherwise two weeks later Nicole, the madam who works with Johnny,  will show you Samantha’s diamond initial ring and tell you Johnny murdered her.  Though you’ll always hope she was lying, you doubt it.

You’ve lost all sense of the linear — time  disappeared and you felt it leave.  Now you’re living in the immediate and eternity.  It’s scary and bewildering, but you need this — you need each moment to stretch infinitely so that you can be acutely aware of each man’s tiny movements and shifts in expression,  which can reveal a threat before it happens.  This hyperawareness will save your life.  One day you’ll see this being untethered from time as a kind of grace.

When that shiny classical pianist you meet at Au Bon Pain says he wants to know everything about you don’t believe him.

A lot of what’s happening doesn’t make sense now but it will later.  That habit you have of writing poems in your mind to the beloved you haven’t met yet as you’re riding in cabs to calls?  There’s something to it.

Your ability to perceive beauty is part of your resilience and survival.  When a man is on top of you watch the wind-swirled leaves out his window.  Seize the gusty joy you feel as you

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Getty Images/ Political commentator Rush Limbaugh, left, and Sandra Fluke, a third-year law student at Georgetown University and former president of the Students for Reproductive Justice group there, are shown in these file photos.

Today is Mother's Day, 2012, the same year as election year, the same year women's concerns over reproductive freedoms, healthcare coverage, economic equity in pay, etc. are under attack. A war on women? An attempt to relocate the notion as a war between women?

Today I read Huffington Post's article by Pauline Arrillaga titled 'War On Women' 2012: Amid Controversy, Women Ponder How They Became Campaign Issue  which recaptures a good deal of the imagery and energetic that swirls around what many women and men thought a non-issue, something as a nation we've already determined and a matter for families to decide privately and for women to shoulder responsibly and without invasive coercion from outside by dominator forms of religious and government imposition. 

The article recaps "Susan G. Komen ending cancer-screening grants to Planned Parenthood (quickly reversed). And disputes over laws designed to protect women against wage discrimination (Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker last month signed a repeal of his state's equal pay law, while a U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan called a federal equal pay law a 'nuisance')" along with bringing back into the fray the very evident assault on abortion rights. I note the article articulates how, what many thought was an issue already decided, returned with "the historic Republican gains during the tea party-driven 'red tide' of 2010." Although someone else may have already made this connection, this is the first time I've seen in print what I intuitively already understand. 

Now it appears the 2010 red tide "teaparty-bringing" activism to culture in socio-political surfaces in a "war on women" has become a "tea garden"―but written, "teegarden" as in Karen Teegarden, the woman who launched UniteWomen.org. Its mission statement: "Help defend women's rights and pursuit of equality." Her activism comes to the fore in the infamous and insensitive Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke slut-calling fiasco.  Teegarden's response comes at a critical juncture in a larger call to social activism for men and women.

If you didn't know it, Teegarden's UniteWomen.org used social media and internet to organize protests in cities across the country on April 28th, 2012. My locale, Phoenix, took part where coat hangers were on display featuring a plea: "Keep Abortion Safe & Legal."  Photos of coat hangers inudated Govenor Jan Brewers office in protest to the Govenor's signing of a bill, HB 2800, unfunding Planned Parenthood. She did this at a gathering of the Susan B Anthony List, a grassroot activist organization intending the systematic defunding of Planned Parenthood. No "war on women," eh? Or "the only 'war on women' is the one being waged by the left," eh?  Saying such things to we, the people is called gaslighting, telling people what they really see isn't really going on. But, who's nuts?

Of central importance is supporting and sustaining Planned Parenthood as an important, primary source of women's healthcare and it must not be covered over, something I think the phrase " 'Sluts' over 'Nuts' " taken as metaphor and turned diaphorically, suggests. My thought is that an amplification of the mythologem which underlies this notion may dwell within its “depth-nature”