Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

At forty-two (still got it!) (MILF tits!), the harassment has certainly, thankfully slowed, but it doesn’t seem to want to go away altogether. And, even though it happens much less frequently than it used to, I flinch and brace myself every time I leave my apartment. I wonder if, when it finally stops for good, if it will be too late to relax, if the muscle memory of the harassment will keep me tense on the sidewalk forever.

I try to understand when people tell me they enjoy it, when women my age say they miss being called names or when they get a kick out of being called to so explicitly: I wanna fuck your asshole. (I was wearing a down coat.) I’d like to put my cock between those titties. Ugly cunt, I’m talking to you! I know what it’s like to feel invisible as a child and I imagine it feels the same as an adult. But it’s a ...

Once or twice in my life, I swear to you, I’ve done things other than be a body available for men to enjoy or reject. But I know I have no right to complain. I am lucky. I’ve been allowed one more day as a woman on this earth, rela...

He is not the only man who raped me, but he is the only one who raped me and refused to leave because he was stitched into my life like an ugly scar from a wound healed wrong.

I imagine that there are ways in which our bodies never really stop being our mothers’ bodies. In the bath, I trace my fingers along the lines of myself like a person following a river to its source. When I laugh like her or when I’m mean like her or when I go cold and distant like her, I can feel her lingering, ready to claim what is hers and has always been hers. If her body could betray her, my body could certainly betray me.

After all, when she saw me and I saw her, we wouldn’t be able to hide from the fact that the whole thing was ending. There is a kind of magic to distance. As long as I stayed away, she could go on thinking that things weren’t as bad as they were, and I could go on thinking that I was doing something good for her by doing nothing, by not talking about it or seeing it.

When I was little, all I ever wanted was to be down there dancing with them, laughing and talking to them as equals, and now that I had permission, which is to say that I had grown past the age of needing to ask permission, all I wanted to do was sit in the house and not have to fan bugs from my mother’s hair.

I didn’t want to be a part of their mourning. I didn’t want to be involved in someone else’s grief when I knew so little about how to deal with my own.

I do not know what to do with such mourning or such grief. The world in which my brother is not only moved to emotion but to open tears at the grave of our mother is a world that I don’t know how I came to inhabit. Watching the video, I felt as if I had slipped out of my life and into some gray replica tucked behind the real thing, a life glimpsed at the corner of the eye, where anything is possible.

CANCER IS A DISEASE OF PROLIFERATION, A DISEASE OF ABUNDANCE. The body consumes itself to make cancer cells, so in one sense, it is a disease of success run wild, turning to ruin.

It was a never-ending stream of names, some old, some not, but all mostly too young to have died. Second cousins, third cousins, neighbors, friends of my parents, each passing out of this world and into whatever hangs behind this world like a second eyelid.

SOMETIMES I WONDER IF MY COUSIN KNOWS THAT I AM HANGING around her Facebook like a ghost, like a fiend. Technology lets us believe we are living parallel lives, both in and out of the world, both here and there. I can skim the facts of other people’s lives from their posts like foam from boiled milk. How many people, when my mother died, came to my page to wish me love and light? How many returned time and again looking for some clue of my pain or anguish or grief? Isn’t that what we do? We scent a tragedy in the air and we try to trace it—not to its source, but to those most affected. We try to make sense of it by watching them grapple with it. In this way, we aren’t living parallel lives at all. We’re leeches, proliferating in a still pool of light. Spectating isn’t living, after all; it’s consumption. Grist for the mill.

My brother once called me a hard person. I think he meant that I am a person who does not forgive. This is true. I find it difficult to forgive people who have done harm to me. I am this way out of necessity, because if I do not remember the harm done to me, then no one will, and the boy that I was will have no one to look out for him. If I do not remember and do not hold people accountable for that boy’s pain, then no one will remember it, and no one will remember that it was not acceptable for him to be treated that way. If I forgive all of the things done to me, done to the boy that I was, then I will betray everything I promised that boy when we endured those things. The only way through all of it was to promise that I would remember it and that at some point, I would make it known what happened there.

I am a hard person because hardness is what comes from a life lived underground. The hard part of me would like nothing more than to keep refreshing, waiting for the moment when my cousin’s grief is obvious and clear, because that will mean that I no longer have to live my life like a clenched fist. At the same time, the fact that my freedom can come only with my cousin’s suffering is something nearly unbearable to me. Spectating isn’t free. No one gets something for nothing.

MY CHILDHOOD HAD BEEN FED TO ME LIKE RANCID MEAT. I was forced to swallow it down, gagging until I vomited. But I was not raped.

By that point, I had been hurt when men touched me. But this hurt, too, when he turned me down. The truth is I should have been glad—it would have been wrong for him to touch me.

I quickly downed four or five shots of vodka and thought Okay, let’s cut to the chase, let’s not let this be a group activity.

What does it say about me that I wish I could go back? Not to before it happened, though of course I wish for that. But I have gotten used to compromise, to settling for less. I would settle for going back to the way I felt sixty-four days ago. I feel weak for saying this, but I would.

“Survivor” is the “special needs” of victimhood. If I say I have survived, I’m fooling nobody. I didn’t. My friends—those who have seen me change over the past five years, seen my body alter from the effects of hormones, and seen me get better at doing my makeup and appearing more confident in how I walk through the world—call me fierce, and I hate the word, partly because it’s such a stupid, drag queen cliché, but also because I know just how much it is a lie.

There was nothing fierce about the way I screamed in that room, thirteen years ago, when you refused to listen to me telling you I didn’t want your lips around the part of me that I hate to name. There was nothing fierce in my unresponsiveness or in the way I held on to the fact that you did finally stop when I screamed as proof that you hadn’t assaulted me. There was nothing fierce in the way I broke down for the first time sixty-three days ago.

I closed my eyes against the memory, and when I came to, three-quarters of an hour had passed and, although I had not slept and had not dreamed and had not meditated, I could not tell you what my thoughts had been in all that time besides the one: You made me an object. I was not a person to you, in that moment. I was at best a challenge, an unresponsive organ, a stubborn body.

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 ...

And my hands, my hands. I wrapped them around my shins and pulled in tight and cried and thought about how when you’re hurt, way before you say it, you have to feel it. How wounded animals in the woods look for a quiet place. How they stay without moving for days.

I told myself it wasn’t rape because we were in a relationship. It wasn’t rape because I still loved him. It wasn’t rape because I didn’t fight him off. It wasn’t rape because I stayed with him after. It didn’t matter that I kept whispering no, no, no. It didn’t matter that I sobbed the entire time. At least I wasn’t raped like Mom was, I told myself.

I lay in the tub and let the hot water run until it singed my skin. I wished Mom had saved me the need to learn the why for myself. I wished she’d told me about what some men do. I wished I’d listened. I knew that I was dirty and disobedient and deserved to be punished. I started scratching my inner thigh and inched up slowly. I clawed until I bled. Then I cried quietly into my bloody hands. Each time I peed, the sting reminded me of my crime.

I mutilated myself for months after, even after Valentín moved back to Puerto Rico. I never got close enough for him to touch me again.

“Yeah.” I looked over at my daughter, who had moved on to the swings, and that’s when it hit me: I’d been blaming myself for thirty years for what happened to me when I was just six.

WHEN MILLIE WAS ON HER DEATHBED, I TOLD HER WHAT VAL had done to me. I was thirty, then, and my daughter was just a few months old. Millie looked at me with a solemn expression and said, “You can never tell your mother that.” That was also the day Millie confirmed to me that my mother’s suffering was worse than mine. She’d been raped. Me? It wasn’t that bad.

“I MUTILATED,” I BLURTED OUT TO MY FRIEND IN THE PARK. “I scratched myself until I bled.” I immediately regretted it; a long silence followed. Then she whispered, “I ...

I won’t lie and say I’ve completely convinced myself that what Val did to me and what my ex did to me and what that man on the street did to me were as bad as what happened to my mother; and maybe I never will. This I do know: It was bad enough.

These are gifted adolescent women who don’t get to be judged on their impressive talent: their bodies are already paramount to the work they want to do and it’s only going to get worse. At sixteen these students are being judged on their sexual attractiveness. Their talent is a gift, but it is not enough.

What’s so disheartening is knowing Harvey Weinstein’s sick actions will be addressed (finally) and yet the entire culture and context for his sick shit will remain in place. I hope I’m wrong. I hope it changes. I’m not holding my breath.

You imagine other girls have their own ways of keeping score; in diaries, in shiny-smooth scars, in how they raise their daughters, in the ways they are lost. It’s an odd tallying; the girls who have the most points are not the winners and the girls who have the lowest points do not win either. Nobody wins. Ever. I am a girl with low points.

“Just do it!” These weren’t the words. These were the words. I was a child. I was scared. She said them too. Three against one. I didn’t do it. They did it. I did nothing except endure my first lesson on how to be a girl.

I told my parents when I got home. Not everything. We learn not to tell everything. We know telling everything will make them see the bad in us. How it is our fault. How we contributed. We fear repercussions, albeit lighter than the ones we will administer to ourselves; slut, bad, ugly, weak, whore, trash, shame, hate. We tell just enough, if we tell at all.

After the things are done, you will feel like a bad person. These feelings will never go away. They enter the wet plaster of you and harden into the mold of you. The way you are taught to be a girl will become how you are as a woman—a woman who is, at her core, not good enough, without worth, tarnished.

I cement my legs closed. I press so hard and plead so hard with the thighs I will learn to hate for the rest of my life simply because of their roundness. Why is he doing this? Why can’t anyone see? Why am I not moving saying yelling screaming? Why me?

If they want it, they can take it. What you want or don’t want is irrelevant.

Slut child. I was watching cartoons. In a room. By myself. He lay down on the bed, his pose mirroring mine. He begins stroking the mountain-range length of me; head, hair, cheek, shoulder, arm, waist, hip, thigh, calf. An endless petting. I watch cartoons. His sour breath, garbled words. His hand. Slow and stroking. Feeling him inch closer, narrowing the valley between us. I want for bedsheets, a night-light, a way to hide, shrink away. Monsters aren’t always in closets, under beds. I watched cartoons, unsure. Uncle ****. He’s nice, right? My dad’s friend. This is okay, right? Then why does it feel wrong? Why can’t I move? Get up? Run? My body betraying me once more. Once more, a car without brakes. The door opens and another father’s friend rages, rips him off the bed. What the fuck do you think you’re doing? he asks. And that’s when I know, for sure, that was a wrong thing. I am left alone with the bed, the cartoons, feeling a partner in the wrong thing. If I was a good girl, I would’ve left. I didn’t do anything. I let him. I let him. I let him. I. Let. Him. My fault.

If you do nothing, it’s your fault. Even if you are a child. Even if you are scared. Even if the man is your dad’s good friend who you’ve known since growing up. Pay attention. Take notes. This is how you are shamed shaped into a woman.

He was a god and he knew it. I was only prey.

I obviously had forgotten my previous lessons. Bad student. Bad girl.

After a while he woke up. Checked how I was doing. Praised me with that smile. Told me I’d done a fine job. Called me a good girl. He lay back down. But he reached up and started caressing my face. He took his thumb and pressed it all over my lips, then into my mouth. Again, I froze. I did not know what this was. What was this? In and out of my mouth and I sucked on it. Automatically. I sucked his thumb. I didn’t know what to do but I felt that was what was wanted FROM ONE OF MY COUNSELORS so I sucked on it. Like a sleepy baby. Even though it all felt wrong. I was in the middle of a lake, alone. Not alone. I saw the brakeless car then. It was headed toward the crest of a hill. My stomach.

If a boy treats you like you’re special, it’s probably because he wants to come and not because you are a treasure he discovered. You are not a treasure. You are a thing a boy can use to make him ejaculate. This makes sense because you already believe this at your core. You have been taught.

I kept shooting the alien insects. The hard pressing into my ass continued. My shooting continued. And then he put his arm up onto the top of the machine and suddenly his entire body was curved against mine and I instantly knew what was not pressing into me. It was not a poster. It was not wrapping paper. I looked to my right, tried to turn to look at him but his arm had me locked in. He was too close for me to see his face. What I saw instead was an Asian boy standing about ten feet away, staring at us. I thought to myself, What must this look like?

Where are my brothers? Why is nobody seeing I need help?

I played the game. While he rubbed against me. Level after level. While he rubbed against me. I was having the best game of my life. While he rubbed against me. I couldn’t die. While he rubbed against me. I got extra lives. While he rubbed against me. My score went up, up, up. While he rubbed against me. All I wanted was the insect aliens to kill me. While he rubbed against me. All I wanted was for my brothers to see me and know and help. While he rubbed agai...

You could’ve left but you stayed. You wanted it and he knew. The ways we turn the gun to our own temple.

All I know is I will never forget that mustache. This time, Mike and my friend left him and me in the car to go do whatever they were going to do. We were in the backseat and . . .

Men are strong. Also, see lesson summaries; 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.