Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

“I hate New York,” I usually say, when the subject comes up, meaning, maybe: How could any city that flaunts its beauty like that let this happen to me? Though I know all cities eat their own. And this is not about the city.

You’re so lucky you weren’t killed. The words feel slender and sharp as the blade that was pressed against my neck that night—stroking a border so fine you can touch it and touch me at once with each of its cool metal faces. You . . . killed.

At least you weren’t killed. At least you have access to medical care. At least you have insurance. At least you have wonderful friends.

I don’t have breath to say: No, I will not be grateful for my rights. I will stand with two feet on this earth and I will always say thank you when someone does something kind and sorry when I’ve done something wrong and never outside of that. And, yes, I am furious that I am pulled between poles of gratitude and apology—both of which are violent erasures. Thank goodness I wasn’t killed. I’m sorry I’m so inarticulate. I can’t name it then, but I feel the words at least eroding my voice.

“At least” curbs my telling too much truth. It’s a blunt instrument wielded to club a reckless retelling into submission. The story ends here. But the truth is, I have no story—nothing I can corral into a coherent narrative.

One wants a teller in a time like this.

You know that moment when you trip and you are poised with equal possibility to fall flat on your face and to take the next step, and your heart shoots up into your throat? Every second feels split—normality and catastrophe equally plausible. The assumptions I once cobbled into a day no longer hold. There is not a man hiding behind that tree. No one will break into my apartment and kill me while I sleep. I will be able to sleep until the morning. I will be here in the morning. The stones that composed the ground on which I’ve always walked have come loose, swirling unpredictably around my head. (And here, I feel myself saying it: “At least I have ground.”)

A friend is assaulted by an adjunct professor. The deans tell her to keep it quiet. A sophomore is pressing charges against a student who raped her at a party. The school takes no measures to keep him away from her. Her friends take turns sleeping in her room. Their grades drop. Their relationships become strained. These are the stories we tell each other, quietly.

Sometimes people tell me that something bad happened to me, but I am brave and strong. I don’t want to be told that I am brave or strong. I am not right just because he was wrong. I don’t want to be made noble. I want someone willing to watch me thrash and crumple because that, too, is the truth, and it needs a witness. “He broke me,” I say to a friend. “You’re not broken,” she whispers back. I turn my palms up, wishing I could show her the pieces.

How, I want to know, do they give form to what is happening in their bodies, their minds, as they are dying? How do they make their way in the same language used to write them out of history books? Is it the same language?

We must, she says, make language accountable to the truths of our experience. She advises us to turn away from the commonplace, “I was raped.”

The activist and poet, who wrote: “I am black and I am female and I am a mother and I am bisexual and I am a nationalist and I am an antinationalist. And I mean to be fully and freely all that I am!” Jordan, who refused to see contradictions as conflicting. Who insisted that the difficult truth is also the site of her girding question: “Where is the love?”

I take a deep breath and settle back into my chair, poised to receive the new language I know she will give me to speak my experience. “The victim must learn to make language tell her own truth: He raped me.”

I am devastated. I don’t want to be made the object in my retelling. “I ...

I hate how, in the after, my quiet has become silence. The room in my chest that was sky-lit has become a sealed and padded cell.

B., Somewhere in this essay is a love letter to you. Your love brought me back to my quiet. I needed a new language. I needed a new story—one where I don’t have to remember the beginning and don’t know the end. This is a love letter to our love, which was never the kind of durable love that built itself around errands and taxes. It was all our bodies and your brilliance, your language and where our language trailed off together into something dark and shimmering—like the sea, like the mud, like the shape of my imagination when I clutched a book for its world and its heft, like the Nashville summer nights when lightning bugs gifted their tiny glow, unjarred. All halo, all fleeting.

Judith Butler says that we suffer from our condition of addressability. My body feels like my condition, and everything feels like an address.

I look for them everywhere, women like me. And they find me, too.

My beautiful friend in graduate school says to me, “I sit down, and I just lose time.” “I know,” I say.

In my notebook, I write, Create: there are parts of you even you can’t give away.

Go to court. Don’t go to court. Get a rape kit. Don’t get a rape kit. Don’t take a class with that teacher. (He’s handsy.) Don’t take a class with her. (She’s unsympathetic.) Don’t watch violent movies. Don’t watch movies that might be violent. Don’t be angry. If you’re angry, explain why calmly. If I were you, I wouldn’t wear that. I’d rather be dead than be raped. (I’d rather be dead than be you?) Don’t talk about rape. Do you have proof? Don’t get defensive. Avoid your triggers. Don’t eat at restaurants with steak knives. Are you eating? You look thin. You look fat. No one’s going to want to go home with you. Don’t let people you don’t know into your home. Who do you really know anyway? Don’t walk alone at night. Don’t not walk alone at night. This is your life. This is your life. This is your life.

“Have you experienced trauma?” I say, “I was beaten and raped when I was sixteen,” as though agreeing, “Yes. Wash, rinse, repeat.” “Oh.” She pauses, looking up at me. “At least you weren’t killed,” she says, writing something down in her notebook.

The next day, I call my friend Anisha and tell her I will never go to therapy again. After a sleepless night fighting to keep the past from consuming my present, I am furious that everything I’ve worked so hard to rebuild seems to have crumbled. “It feels like I’m right back there, in the week after it happened. The stakes are too high,” I say. “I had it all under control. I can deal with this myself.” Anisha tells me, “A good therapist knows you have to live in the house while you remodel.”

I lay awake all night thinking about how I am completely exhausted, staving off sleep and trying to stop thinking about what might happen if I allow myself to close my eyes. I watch the sun rise, which tells me it’s time to start again.

At the end of the session, I am amazed at myself for sitting in a room alone with a man for forty-five minutes. I tell H. so, and he nods.

I don’t want to thank H. Instead, I say, “I’ve never really said all of it out loud.” H. does not say, “What are you talking about?” He does not say, “Really, eight years later?” Or, “At least you weren’t killed.” H. says, “I’m here to listen if you want to tell me.” And then, “If you don’t want to speak, I am still here.” “Will it help?” I ask. I want a definitive answer, even as I suspect that men with definitive answers about my body have something to do with why I’m there in the first place. “It might,” H. says. “Some people find it helpful. Others don’t.” I say nothing.

I stare at a photograph of a huge and knotted tree on H.’s desk but, out of the corner of my eye, I can see him there nodding like my quiet and not knowing is something to affirm. His kindness threatens to loose everything I have wrapped so tightly.

Everything changed that night. I repeat it to myself like a mantra shoving down the question that keeps bubbling up: How can it be that not everything changed? The same dumb sun. The same impossible horizon. Beauty hurts. It enters me even as I have fortified myself to keep everything out.

I realize that I read Jordan wrong. I took her language rather than joining her project. I saw: He raped me. She first said, “The victim must learn to make language tell her own truth.” I made something from it, but I am not better for it.

I am not sorry. And I am not grateful.

I can do only two things . . . — describe this flight and not add a last line.2

I’ve been a D-cup since seventh grade, so my breasts have been up for public conversation almost as long as I can remember—along with the rest of me, especially my ass, the way I walk, and how viable a fuck I am to passersby.

Do I want to smoke a joint in your car? No thanks. Why aren’t I smiling? I’ve been having night terrors again, thanks for asking. You’d like to rub your dick all over my ass? Thanks for letting me know.

Come, listen to me talk about why it doesn’t matter what I’m wearing, why it’s hot out and I shouldn’t have to cover up, why it’s not on me, it’s on them. I talk a good game, I know the language and the reasoning. I’m tough, I’m badass, I’m right. And I blame myself. The dress could have shown less cleavage. “C’mere MILF tits!” calls a man out a car window. “I wanna fuck you sideways!” I look down and away. I have a fearful history. I flinch at loud garbage truck brakes. I’ve literally been startled by my own kid’s shadow. Silly mom. So silly.

I’m embarrassed. I’m embarrassed for the objectification and I’m embarrassed by my fear. I’ve been dealing with this for thirty years and it doesn’t change. Wasn’t it supposed to have gone away by now? It didn’t go away during my pregnancy or when I walked with a baby nestled in a wrap against my chest. It didn’t magically evaporate on my fortieth birthday. Shouldn’t that be one of the benefits of age? Or am I buying into an ageist way of thinking, that I might one day be seen by strangers as something beyond my sex appeal?

I turn around and make eye contact with a cop standing outside the library. I gesture to him, like what the hell? and he gestures back, like what can you do? I don’t know, you’re just a cop and someone made me feel unsafe on the street. Never mind. I was wearing a sundress. I’m a D-cup.

It’s not like he touched you. It’s not like he hurt you. It’s not like he raped you. I’m supposed to be grateful because I wasn’t raped. I’m supposed to be grateful because, even though I walk through the world with MILF tits and a sundress, I wasn’t raped. And I’ve been raped, and this is much better. So, thank you. Today I stand outside the library, the luckiest MILF in Brooklyn.

I’ve been catcalled for decades but I felt unequal to the task of having to switch gears from being in defense mode on the street to smiling at teachers and children. I wanted to know I’m not alone, because I felt humiliated and alone. My online friends were very nice. Lots of solidarity, lots of “worddd” and “I’m sorry.” Some women wondered why they didn’t get street harassed, and they felt ambivalent about that. One man wrote “You still got it!”

Important lesson, listen: I should be honored to be objectified now that I’m forty-two, I should be grateful. I should have slowed down because I’m not that fine, I’m forty-two! I should be glad anyone finds me sexually viable.

I am short, round, wear glasses, didn’t get my chipped front teeth fixed until a couple of years ago because I didn’t know how to let go of what my life had been, didn’t know that I deserved that. I couldn’t look in the mirror for years. I have a C-section scar and a few other scars. The skin around my lower midsection is slack from two full-term pregnancies. I can hardly remember to shave in summer and when I do it feels like a statement of some sort. I smoked for two decades and there are lines around my lips. I rarely wear makeup. I’m sure I’m softer than ever, if I could remember what my body was like before. I spent too long defined by how others perceived me, how it felt to others when they touched me. Now I feel so good to myself, but important lesson, listen: my face is falling, it’s all falling, isn’t it? I’m forty-two.

But wait!! I still got it!! I am not a waste of a body moving through space! I can still bring the titillation wherever I go. If I would just be more amenable, more grateful, you’re not hurting me you’re complimenting me, smile and say thank you, stop, you’re talking to me, you see me and I’m forty-two years old, you want t...

A couple of times he followed just behind me on the sidewalk making grunting noises. I couldn’t get the courage to say: please stop. I know what it feels like to be held down and I know what it feels like to be hit in the face. I know that saying please stop made it no more likely that these things would stop.

So there I was, in my neighborhood, altering my behavior to try to avoid being harassed.

Here’s a partial list, just off the top of my head right now, of all the places I’ve dreaded, feared, or even stopped going to, because I felt exposed, harassed, creeped on: the bakery, the pizza place, the deli across from work, the deli in my office building, the closer entrance to the subway, the playground with the baby swings, the playground with the frog statue, my daughter’s ballet school waiting room, a poetry reading I’d just given, a poetry reading as I was giving it, walking my kids to school, picking my kids up from school, the construction site to the left of my building, the construction site to the right of my building, the airport, the train station, the zoo.

A couple of years ago, I was part of a question-and-answer session involving poetry and photography when an older man in the audience thought a good question to ask was (I’m paraphrasing) why, when I look so nice and respectable and pretty and kinda hot, well, why do you write all these nasty poems with sex and violence in them? Are these about you really? Which parts are true?

This panel was a major deal for me, career-wise. I was being taken seriously in a room of serious artists and I was trying like heck to take myself seriously. And there I was being objectified in front of the entire audience. I blamed myself.

If you wrote poems about the weather. If you hadn’t belted your dress so tight. If you could talk more intelligently. So what if I thanked my objectifier? So what if so much of my day involves de-escalation? I’ll take my lumps to avoid worse. I should be grateful that I can. I should be grateful that this is what I’m complaining about. I should be grateful that I don’t currently fear for my life. Grateful Grateful Grateful

By eighth grade I depended on the alcohol and by ninth grade, when I was kicked out of school for drugs, I had no doubt that the only thing I had to offer the world was my body, and the world pretty much confirmed that for a long time. Hey, sexy, why you walking away? Come sit on my lap and tell me why you look so sad. Looking fine, mama! (I was walking home from a day at the emergency room.)

Eventually—and not long from now, as my oldest is ten—my daughters will be publicly harassed on the street and I will be powerless to stop it. It is very likely that we could be harassed on the same day, that we will find ourselves back in our safe, charmingly untidy apartment, still tender from the words hurled by strangers. I am incompetent, a failure. For the first time since my oldest was a newborn, I feel unequal to the task of parenting.

I’m standing on the corner of Twenty-Second and Sixth in Manhattan. “Miss, Miss!” a man’s voice calls to me and I think it can’t be me, I’m no Miss and I think what if it’s me please leave me alone and he taps me on the shoulder, I flinch because I flinch, and he says, “I just wanted to say I like your dress!” Holy crap, he just wants to say he likes my dress! It’s a whole new world.