Pubdate: Thu, 08 Jan 2015
Source: North Coast Journal (Arcata, CA)
Column: The Week in Weed
Copyright: 2015 North Coast Journal
Contact:  http://www.northcoastjournal.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2833
Author: Linda Stansberry
Note: Linda Stansberry is a freelance journalist from Honeydew.

WOMEN IN WEED

Trim bitches.

Grow hos. Potstitutes. If you know what those terms mean, you know 
that our county's most prominent industry has what politicians call 
"a woman problem." But it's probably not the problem you think.

There's something that raises our collective hackles about a woman 
gaining the favor of a rich man by dint of her beauty and youth.

Gold diggers, we call them: scorned bearers of an unearned status, 
threats to the basic building block of social harmony that is 
marriage, debasers of true affection.

Matrimony, after all, is a calling. Prostitution is a profession. The 
gold digger is one of our cherished societal tropes, and it's little 
wonder Humboldt County is awash with lurid stories of women in 
leather boots and tight jeans who prowl the hills during the fall, 
searching for weed-rich sugar daddies.

When we talk about weed and women we don't talk about the single 
mothers who trim during the fall so they can buy school clothes for 
their kids. We don't talk about the pioneers - grandmothers now - who 
moved here in the '70s and scratched a living out of the hillside, 
praying that the sun would shine and CAMP helicopters wouldn't darken 
the skies above their homesteads. We don't talk about the fact that 
grow culture - for all of its inherent problems - celebrates 
egalitarian domestic partnerships where couples share the 
responsibilities of maintaining both a home and a family business.

We don't mention that growing weed is one of the few careers that 
offer parents the economic choice of staying home to raise their 
children. We don't talk about the women who are proficient in 
permaculture, homeopathy and botany, or the women who work their 
asses off to run scenes of their own so they can send their kids to college.

No, we talk about potstitutes, grow hos and trim bitches.

Bitches. Really, bitches?

Bitches are not humans: They're holes. Bitches are interchangeable. 
Bitches do not deserve consideration. Bitches can be bought and sold.

And that is the crux of our actual woman problem.

The majority of women in this underground industry are the mothers, 
grandmothers, farmers and college students mentioned above.

And a smaller but not inconsiderable number are being pimped, 
exploited, enslaved and raped. Reducing the role of women in weed to 
a slur - trim bitches - is really an elaborate system of victim 
blaming that benefits no one except predators and pathetic stand-up 
comedians who can't write a set without one hand in their pants.

Because these issues often go unreported and unaddressed, it is 
impossible to get accurate numbers, but the exploitation of women in 
weed is so endemic that District Attorney Maggie Fleming made it a 
cornerstone of her election campaign.

Resources appear to be in even shorter supply than sympathy.

That, combined with the insular nature of grow culture and the 
remoteness of many scenes, makes helping victims a challenge.

"We're not going to be able to go out and pick somebody up," says 
Maryann Hayes Mariani, client services coordinator for the Humboldt 
Rape Crisis Center. "It wouldn't be safe for them or for us. So when 
they call we often problem solve with them, and coach them on what to 
do if they can get to a more populated area."

Seasonal workers are also uniquely vulnerable to financial 
exploitation. It's not uncommon to hear stories of a summer's worth 
of work gone unpaid, with no legal recourse for the victim.

If our instinct upon hearing these stories is to scoff and say that 
it was a risk they knew they were taking, do we hold the same 
standards for victims of sexual exploitation? Mariani says many of 
her clients feel as though they have nowhere to turn - and no social support.

While some victims are seasonal workers who ended up in a bad scene, 
others are children of grow culture, who were indoctrinated into its 
code of silence from a young age. It's all well and good to say that 
a victim of rape, incest or assault should turn his or her assailant 
in to law enforcement, but what about when the assailant is a family 
or community member upon whom the victim might be financially 
reliant, in a culture that functions due to the unspoken agreement 
that nobody narcs, ever? What then?

"Even after they get them to safety, the terror stays with them for 
quite a while," Mariani says, adding that victims often live in 
anticipation of being found and brought back to the scene they 
escaped. "They might go back because they can't deal with the waiting 
and the fear. We don't judge.

We have to respect their choice."

Human nature dictates that we devote our attention to the visible and 
convenient, the small handful of anecdotes that reinforce what we 
already believe about the world.

Young men in big trucks, young women in tight jeans.

It's a story as old as commerce itself.

Victims are often invisible and definitely inconvenient. More often 
than not, we mistake their silence for consent.

But the hour is growing too late to do that. Legalization is just 
around the corner.

What that really means for our economy and for our culture is a 
matter of great debate, but one thing is for certain: When the money 
and the silence and the fear are finally drained from grow culture, a 
lot of ugly things are going to get dragged out into the sunshine.

In time they'll be sanitized and repackaged and sold as quaint 
reminders of a wilder time. And make no mistake: This wild time, this 
time of bootstrap entrepreneurs, modern-day homesteaders, young women 
in big trucks, young men staying home to raise their children, this 
time of heady economic optimism, is an extraordinary time to 
experience. We should be grateful we get to live through it. But none 
of that matters if we're allowing the mothers, grandmothers, 
daughters, sisters and workers that comprise our beloved community to 
be reduced to a slur. None of that matters if we're complicit in the 
exploitation of the powerless.

We say trim bitches, history will say women. We say trimmigrants, 
history will say migrant workers.

We say nothing, and history will say we picked the wrong side.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom