Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I finished reading Chanel Miller's "Know My Name" yesterday.  Her writing is passionate and powerful, and the memoir heartbreaking.  I felt a sense of kinship with her and every other female on the planet.  But it especially brought me back to my days in college, when I had two encounters that almost ended in rape, but I was not drinking so I was able to think quickly and get away.  In other words, I was lucky.  Then I remembered all the near misses young women experience, and the ocean of women who are not so lucky, and I thought of my clients in the safehouses in which I worked, who somehow had been conditioned to blame themselves for the violence, and often whose parents blamed them as well.  They got lectures for being married to the wrong guy and not getting free of him because of lack of support, financial and emotional.  I blamed myself in college, and after the one party when a guy shoved me onto a bed in a room off the party room, I never went to another party as an undergraduate or graduate student.  Because it was my fault I put myself in that position, I figured, and up to me to stay away from drinking.  I still ended up abused by my first husband, and raped at knifepoint, but it wasn't rape in those days, it was a husband's right to own his wife's body, no matter how he treated her.  My parents never knew he'd done it, but I can still hear my father saying, when I asked them for help, "You made your bed".  I was lucky, he relented, probably because of my mother, and they did help me escape and carve out a new life with my toddlers.  This is the patriarchy, which pops up in surprising places, including the judge in Miller's case, who ignored the jurors' decision, and freed his fellow male in solidarity.  I hope this new uprising of women in our country and other places blossoms into a force for honoring women's bodies and safety in our world.  It's about time.