Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

I will never know who I would have been had I not become the girl in the woods.

heard their painful stories and started to think, What I went through was bad, but it wasn’t that bad.

I taught myself to be grateful I survived even if survival didn’t look like much.

But, in the long run, diminishing my experience hurt me far more than it helped. I created an unrealistic measure for what was acceptable in how I was treated in relationships, in friendships, in random encounters with strangers. That is to say that if I even had a bar for how I deserved to be treated, that bar was so low it was buried far belowground.

The list of ways I allowed myself to be treated badly grew into something I could no longer carry, not at all. Buying into the notion of not that bad made me incredibly hard on myself for not “getting over it” fast enough as the years passed and I was still carrying so much hurt, so many memories. Buying into this notion made me numb to bad experiences that weren’t as bad as the worst stories I heard. For years, I fostered wildly unrealistic expectations of the kinds of experiences worthy of suffering until very little was worthy of suffering. The surfaces of my empathy became calloused.

I saw what calloused empathy looked like in people who had every right to wear their wounds openly and hated the sight of it.

I was interested in the discourse around rape culture because the phrase is used often, but rarely do people engage with what it actually means. What is it like to live in a culture where it often seems like it is a question of when, not if, a woman will encounter some kind of sexual violence? What is it like for men to navigate this culture whether they are indifferent to rape culture or working to end it or contributing to it in ways significant or small?

There were hundreds and hundreds of stories from people all along the gender spectrum, giving voice to how they have suffered, in one way or another, from sexual violence, or how they have been affected by intimate relationships with people who have experienced sexual violence. I realized that my original intentions for this anthology had to give way to what the book so clearly needed to be—a place for people to give voice to their experiences, a place for people to share how bad this all is, a place for people to identify the ways they have been marked by rape culture.

As of this writing, something in this deeply fractured culture is, I hope, changing. More people are beginning to realize just how bad things really are.

Women and men are saying, “This is how bad it actually is.” For once, perpetrators of sexual violence are facing consequences. Powerful men are losing their jobs and their access to circumstances where they can exploit the vulnerable. This is a moment that will, hopefully, become a movement. These essays will, hopefully, contribute to that movement in a meaningful way. The voices shared here are voices that matter and demand to be heard.

You swallow. Hard.

IF RAPE CULTURE HAD A FLAG, IT WOULD BE ONE OF THOSE BOOB INSPECTOR T-shirts. If rape culture had its own cuisine, it would be all this shit you have to swallow. If rape culture had a downtown, it would smell like Axe body spray and that perfume they put on tampons to make your vagina smell like laundry detergent. If rape culture had an official language, it would be locker-room jokes and an awkward laugh track. Rape culture speaks in every tongue. If rape culture had a national sport, it would be . . . well . . . something with balls, for sure.

These are little bits of things that happened, or things you think about. They’re light on tension, you know that. There’s no real peril. There’s no resolution. Still, they stick with you. You think about them even after they’re over, sometimes for a long time. Sometimes for a very long time.

How is it possible they haven’t seen this? How is it possible they are learning about consent from their teacher? The author of the essay is forbidden to speak by the rules of the workshop, but you study her as she takes notes in silence. Did she know? you wonder. Does she know now?

YOU RECOGNIZE THE TENSION BETWEEN “I AM A BODY” AND “I have a body,” but you are unable to resolve it.

It is a long list, but also, it is not so long. Looking at it now, you wonder, isn’t there more to you than that?

It’s true that your kids, by virtue of both being boys, will be in a privileged position, but the idea that they “won’t have to deal” with rape culture makes you shudder. You very much want them to “deal with” rape culture the way one “deals with” a cockroach problem.

It’s not okay to hit the girl you like. And it’s not okay to hit the girl you love. The world around you tells women that they should always nod politely no matter what they’re feeling inside. Don’t ever take a polite nod for an answer. Wait for her to yell it: “Yes!” Not everyone gets sex when they want it. Not everyone gets love when they want it. This is true for men and women. A relationship is not your reward for being a nice guy, no matter what the movies tell you.

Birth control is your job, too.

Don’t ever use an insult for a woman that you wouldn’t use for a man. Say “jerk” or “shithead” or “asshole.” Don’t say “bitch” or “whore” or “slut.” If you say “asshole,” you’re criticizing her parking ski...

Here are some phrases you will need to know. Practice them in the mirror until they come as easy as songs you know by heart: “Do you want to?” “That’s not funny, man.” “Does that feel good?” “I like you, but I think we’re both a lit...

THIS IS YOUR NEW THING: WHEN A MAN YELLS AT YOU ON THE street, you yell back. You are tired of pretending you can’t hear these men. You are tired of gluing your eyes to the sidewalk in shame. You are tired of taking it, of treating it like a tax you must pay for the privilege of being a woman in public spaces. You think, perhaps foolishly, that you can explain your feelings to these men and they will listen.

Why aren’t you shutting up? This isn’t what’s supposed to happen.

But now you know the truth—they know it makes you feel frightened. They like it. There’s still fear, yes, but now there’s anger, too. So much anger that it boxes out some of your fear. The next time you yell back to the man yelling at you, it’s easier. And the time after that is easier still.

Now the responses roll off your tongue like perfect round stones. You’ve worried them in your mind and in your mouth until they are smooth as glass: “Why would you say that to me?” “That is an offensive thing to say.” “It’s hurtful to talk to women like that.” “You should never say that again.”

Your prize for all this effort is a small thing, but you cherish it. It is the astonishment on your harasser’s face. Sometimes he even mutters a flimsy “Sorry” before he hurries away from you. He doesn’t want a conversation. He’s not shouting at you as a method of engagement; he’s just testing something out. He needs to fumble around for his power...

Next time, you tell yourself when it’s done, this man won’t shout so readily. Next time he will see the woman coming, open his mouth to speak, and for one second, ...

I have trouble soaking off the most dogged shame. I am scraping away the last of the sticky residue with my thumbnail.

We get to want something to come easy for a change. We get to make every choice on that daily life scale from forward-thinking to utter self-sabotage. And we still don’t deserve to be raped. Not ever. How did we ever get to a place where victim blaming was wedged so far into our brains? Turn this around, I think to myself, scraping with my thumbnail. Turn this around. What would Kurt have had to do for me to feel justified in raping him? There’s no answer to that question.

We’ll leave together, I’ll walk her back to the dorm, and we’ll have a talk. I’ll save her, somehow, from what’s going to happen to us next, even though, sweet girl, I know it’s not your fault. None of this was ever your fault. Do you hear me? Not. Your. Fault. But from here, back in the future, I can only watch.

Imagine the drinking and the drugs. Imagine the sleeplessness and the unfinished brains. Imagine the heat, the dehydration, and the food packed by the boy-men hosting this nightmare. Imagine that nobody on the whole boat had the sense to bring sunscreen. Imagine the depth of seething, unmet need—and then imagine the depth of the water.

What did I want to be? Part of the system my liberal artist parents had always rejected? Noticed? Accepted? Desired? I didn’t even like Kurt: he represented everything I’d been taught to distrust in the world, a privileged fuck from the burbs who thought anything could be his for the right price, including me.

I knew it was too late to get away, and, somehow, I knew what was coming.

They will wake you up to rape you.

Six hours before, he’d had a pillow stuffed in my mouth to muffle my screams, and now he had the nerve to give me first choice on a bag of fucking doughnuts.

I wondered then if I could have fought harder—I hadn’t bitten off his earlobe and spit it in his face, I hadn’t jammed my knee into his testicles with all the force of my starved eighteen-year-old body, I hadn’t leaped to my feet and rammed a well-placed heel into his kneecap. I pleaded, I cried, and finally I screamed for help, but I didn’t hurt him back because I didn’t want to die. I remember the pillow in my face and, when there wasn’t air enough left for screaming, thinking breathe, breathe, breathe.

Here’s what I didn’t say: “You fucker. You raped me. You think I’m going to go out with you?” Here’s what I did say: “I’m busy,” and “I can’t,” and “I have to work/write a paper/do some math.” I didn’t call what happened on the boat that weekend rape.

“Hey,” I said. “That’s mine.” “Yes,” Kurt said, touching a finger to the loop of white lace knotted around the base of the mirror. “Your belt. I wanted something to remember you by.”

In his own terrifying way, Kurt had named his own crime before I could, and yet I never filed a report. I never even said, “You raped me.” I did nothing. I got out of that fucking car at the airport and I never saw him again.

IN THE BUNK ON SHASTA LAKE, KURT HAD PUT A PILLOW over my face so no one would hear me scream, but now I wonder: Who would have heard me? And if someone had heard, on that boat anchored to an island I didn’t know until today was named for an actual meat market and slaughterhouse, who would have acted? Who would have helped me? From the distance of nearly thirty years, my heart made vulnerable by motherhood and my fierce desire to protect my children, I wonder, How many other women were raped that night on Slaughterhouse Island? I feel certain I was not the only one.

My unarticulated logic went like this: if I give my body away, over and over, I can prove to myself that sex is my choice—even though, and this seems significant now, I always let the men choose me. Until I was nineteen years old, it never occurred to me that I could do the choosing. Not you, not you, not you. Yes, okay. You.

Published in 1988, the very year I went to Shasta with Kurt, reporter Robin Warshaw’s book revealed the results of Mary Koss’s Ms./NIMH-funded survey. Theirs was the first nationwide study of campus sexual assault ever, and the statistics rattled us all: Twenty-five percent of women in college have been the victims of rape or attempted rape. Eighty-four percent of these victims were acquainted with their assailants. Only 27 percent of women raped identified themselves as rape victims.

Here, in the pages of I Never Called It Rape, I can have a conversation with my college self: she wrote—not a lot—in purple pen, scratching asterisks next to the things that mattered most to her. One in four female respondents had an experience that met the legal definition of rape or attempted rape and . . . the average age when a rape incident occurred (either as perpetrator or victim) was 181/2 years old and [Women] were embarrassed about the details of the rape (leaving a bar with a man, taking drugs, etc.) and felt they would be blamed for what occurred, or they simply felt the men involved had too much social status for their stories to be believed and In short, many men fail to perceive what has just happened as rape.

“The question,” our self-defense teacher said one afternoon when we were gathered around her cross-legged on mats in the gym, “is not ‘What will he think of me?’—if I don’t answer his question, if I’m not polite, if I don’t want to go—but ‘What do I think of him?’” This simple rearrangement of pronouns flipped something in my brain. Forever.

So you’re saying that if I go to a party in a really short skirt, and I’m flirting all over the place—if I get raped, it’s not my fault? Yes, I’d say. That’s exactly what I’m saying. Sometimes it seemed to me that the girls just didn’t want to hear that rape is never the victim’s fault. They wanted to have something to believe in, rules to follow, a formula, reasons other girls got raped and they didn’t: short skirt equals rape; too much beer equals rape; unlocked door equals rape. The part I wanted them to understand is that these equations can implode, constricting your whole life, until one day you’re sitting in a locked steel box breathing through an airhole with a straw and wondering, Now? Now am I safe?

In fact, I had been run over by a truck, but I couldn’t say that out loud. I couldn’t say how much it hurt. Embarrassed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong pants, I limped back to my dorm in the rain. Do you understand yet why we blame ourselves when we are hit, dragging the shame behind us like a twisted rim?

Nineteen percent. One in five women. Today. I am still scraping at my story. I can’t go back and get the young woman I was from the Italian restaurant before she climbs onto the boat. I can’t stop the truck or the rapist, but I can let the girl I was know that I see her. I hear her. I know she is telling the truth. If nothing changes—and in thirty years, not nearly enough has changed—next year, there will be one hundred thousand more assaults on our campuses. One is too many. One hundred thousand.

Wielding the stapler, the pepper spray, and the keys, our teacher taught us the power of visualization, and I learned to imagine in advance what I might be called upon to do in an emergency. One hundred thousand? This is an emergency. Together, let’s visualize what we need to change the rape culture. I have my keys in my hand and I am holding them like a claw. Let’s turn this motherfucking system around.

I too, having lost faith in language, have placed my faith in language. —TERRANCE HAYES

This is about how, all of a sudden, there was only one after. How the infinity of tiny afters—after school and after my most recent birthday and after A. and I ducked behind a couch hiding from nothing and she told me that she was falling in love with me and after my chest opened to a new kind of wanting and after I last had a fever and after the first time I threw a Frisbee without its careening into the ground—were all swept away into the only after that stretches out endlessly over the unfolding nows. This is about that.