who reached out to women on Twitter the other night with : “Women: tweet me your first assaults. They aren’t just stats. I’ll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my ‘pussy’ and smiles at me, I’m 12.” Her Twitter handle is: @kellyoxford.
Twenty-seven million responded within the first two days. I am so moved by this, in part because I too was groped and fondled and assaulted by men (a doctor who groped my breasts when I was ten, a chiropractor who told me I had an inverted uterus and he should therefore try to set it right by putting his fingers inside my vagina, a dentist who fondled me when I was twelve, a man who pulled out his penis and started masturbating the moment he saw me walking up a set of steps in a park) as well as hearing the thousands and thousands of stories of women at workshops and retreats--the outrageous overt abuse from fathers and grandfathers and uncles, but also, the "everyday" abuse that has seemed, for a very long time, to be part of what being a woman involves.
When you speak up in an orchestra of 27 million other women to reclaim your body, to inhabit these arms and legs and heart and breasts and genitals, the best thing happens: you realize you are not alone and that you can come home to your body, yourself, your power.
Tweet Kelly Oxford if it moves you.
But most of all, keep coming home to that body of yours and know that it is your birthright, no matter what anyone else says. What you say, how you feel matters.
