Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

I know this, too, won’t solve anything. If writing about you was going to make everything right, then I’d be right by now. In the past sixty-four days I’ve barely written about anything other than you. I’ve written blogs and poems, half of a one-woman show, tweets at three in the morning that I deleted when I woke up at seven. You have become my cottage industry and, although I hate the thought of that, I sat at my desk with my mobile phone propped against my aging, webcamless laptop and told you, wherever you are, that: Sometimes I call you my rapist, and that feels wrong somehow, but I cannot keep saying “the woman who raped me” every time I mention you, and cannot say your name because I only know your first name anyway, and in saying even that I turn accuser and am too aware how easily my case could be undone, an accuser who’d been drinking when it happened; an accuser who’d consented, at the start; an accuser who, at the time, was presenting as male: an accuser who’d be bound to fail, in court. So I, out of need for variation, name you mine: My rapist. It feels wrong. Too intimate somehow, suggests collusion, a joint enterprise between us. “It takes two,” they say. “Two, babe: me. You.” It smacks of going steady and those creepy ’50s love songs: Every night, I hope and pray this fear will go away, but I cannot say your name, and the woman who raped me sounds clunky and anyway is legally someone who can’t exist: English law defines rape as an act committed only by the ...