Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

THE WAYS WE ARE TAUGHT TO BE A GIRL ARE MANY. THESE were my biggest lessons. The smaller ones aren’t worth writing about but they add up;

What. He. Wants. My score is low compared to some and high compared to others. The harder the lesson, the higher the points. Some girls would kill for my score. This is why I don’t talk about my score. I got off easy.

I legitimately think, “I got off easy.” I didn’t get raped, my dad didn’t finger me, my cousin didn’t make me suck his dick, nobody ass-fucked me while I was passed out at a frat party. I got fondled, at best. Not that bad, right? Lucky, right? Right. Exactly. This is what I’m saying. I got off easy. Why even write this essay?

Until I became a seasoned adult, I thought this was a normal part of growing up as a girl. Weird shit with boys/men happens to you. Look at all the times it happened to me so, obviously, it’s just how it is in life, like flat tires, running out of gas, getting a traffic ticket, spraining an a...

But as I matured and met other women, looked back on my life, I realized it’s not normal. It’s the exception. It’s not “what you get” for being a girl. It’s what you get for not having vigilant parents. It’s what you get for not knowing how to defend yourself. It’s what you get for being young, innocent, and scared. It’s what you get when you are unsupervised and stupid. Most of all, it’s what you get when men decide to take it from you, regardless of what you want. If all these boys, these men, had chosen to treat me as more than “thing,” my scor...

We are supposed to die prettily and vacantly so our rage doesn’t tear down all their certificates and awards and case files, trash their analysis and ram their face in the privilege that allows them to side with our abusers in silencing and killing us.

“He has sometimes likened his style of writing to that of a medic performing a post-mortem on a raped child—whose job is to analyse the injuries, not to give vent to the rage that is felt.” —SUSIE MACKENZIE ON J. G. BALLARD, GUARDIAN, SEPT. 6TH, 2003 If Ballard’s is the model for the experimental, political novel, how is the (un)dead raped child supposed to write, even if she survives? Perform a postmortem on herself. Give vent to the rage that is felt. They are incompossible, apparently. It’s one or the other, science or howling. It’s easier to play dead.

IT’S A CONUNDRUM: IF YOU SURVIVE, THEN IT—THAT, THE trauma—can’t have been that bad. Being dead is the only way to...

It was terrible. It was so awful there was no way I could survive. What did this child die of? Shame, ma...

AND THERE ARE PARTS IT’S HARDER TO TALK ABOUT, OR harder to see. A litany. Because no medic did see, when I presented at the emergency room and the family doctor’s office with repeated broken toes and fingers, with rashes and smashed teeth; with anorexia at age six; with what were called growing pains in my legs (although I never got any taller) so bad I couldn’t walk upstairs to my bedroom; with a third-degree burn I didn’t even feel myself sustaining on the iron. That wasn’t true; I did feel it. It felt good. It felt ice-cool on a summer day. It felt like being able to feel.

I am amazed at how much violence we can contain—internalize, suppress, hold on to, narrate. How much we can swallow and still survive.

My body was not my body but a postpubertal amorphous mass of Silly Putty whose shape, position in space, and vector I couldn’t control.

Sometimes it’s more subtle and frustrating: the links of causality drop out, as if a vivid memory were a dream I was trying to describe a day later. I get flashes, but not the ligatures that bind the flashes into coherent, narratable memories.

But sitting on the cold ledge of the doctor’s table, my school trousers scissored to bits, I was retching incoherent with tears. Call it shock, call it displacement, call it adolescent hysteria. It was fear.

SOMETIMES I WONDER IF I DID SURVIVE ANY/ALL OF IT, IF I float through a life stolen from ending before it started.

Do you survive if you don’t know how you’ve survived? I remember an elaborate plan to sneak into the kitchen and steal a knife to . . . One of those half-dreamed, half-conscious unraveling thoughts in the dark before dawn. I remember dreaming repeatedly that the walls of the house were made of paper and would crumple. I remember having to pee in a jar because of the anorexia. I remember running and running my fingers over the smooth place on my shin when I’m working, a nervous habit I feel like I’ve had since I was born.

IN HER MEMOIR MY FATHER’S HOUSE, SYLVIA FRASER TALKS about having a photographic memory for details of her childhood, a memory she used to write her early novels. She describes the shock of discovering that the photographic accuracy was a front, a disguise for the sexual abuse she had forgotten until—violently—her body reminded her.

I spent a semester in grad school writing about Fraser’s work, and Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, and Camilla Gibb’s Mouthing the Words. I’d moved three thousand miles from my past, from London, UK, to Toronto, Canada, and I was in love with Canadian feminist literature. For months, I studied and framed these, and more—accounts by daughters of sexual abuse by their father...

I SURVIVED BY READING. My father taught me to read during the same period of time that he was raping me. He taught me to swim—to breathe without drowning—during the years when he was holding my mouth closed at night. I write, I thi...

MY FATHER’S FAVORITE COMEBACK IN AN ARGUMENT: “DON’T be facetious.” Nothing I said had meaning. It was always simplistic, flippant, juvenile, unsubstantiable, silly, girlish. The synonyms pile up, evacuating whatever claim I’d made, whatever feeling or fact stood behind the claim, turning my mouth into a black hole.

Now, educated by Rebecca Solnit and Sarah Seltzer, I’d knowingly call what he was doing gaslighting, sealioning, lollipopping. Actually, I’d go one better: I’d call it Cordelia-ing: “Nothing comes from nothing. Speak again.” The rendering of a daughter as puppet, scripted, voice too sweet and low to carry meaning. No. I’d call it floccinaucinihilipilification. All the mansplaining tactics summed up: the action and habit of estimating something as worthless. It worked. MY FATHER’S FAVORITE THREAT: “I WILL ANNIHILATE YOU.” annihilate—to render as nothing, to erase; generally, through violence.

“The creative adult is the child who has survived.” —MISATTRIBUTED BY THE INTERNET TO URSULA K. LE GUIN IN A BLOG POST RESPONDING TO THE MEME ATTRIBUTED TO her, Ursula K. Le Guin spoke of her: aversion to what the sentence says to me: that only the child is alive and creative—so that to grow up is to die. To respect and cherish the freshness of perception and the vast, polymorphous potentialities of childhood is one thing. But to say that we experience true being only in childhood and that creativity is an infantile function—that’s something else. Le Guin’s post “The Inner Child and the Nude Politician” frees me from the anxiety generated by the meme: that only those who remember their childhoods—to the extent of preferring childhood to adulthood—can be creative adults. To extend creative adulthood to only those who had halcyon days in which the “vast, polymorphous potentialities of childhood” were realized and can be remembered speaks of white middle-class cisgendered privilege. Acknowledging Le Guin’s critique, I can reread the misattributed meme with the emphasis on “survived,” rather than “child.” I am an adult (and alive) because—however she could—the child I was survived the terrors of childhood. The child I was is dead, over and over again. It’s true. That child is under Ballard’s knife, that child is the object of this essay, opened diagrammatically for your consideration. I am the child who survived—to become the adult who can speak back. Teach me the word for my ...

about internalized hatred and intergenerational inheritances of abusive violence. About how the tenderness of lovers could wound. About the ways in which even the secret hearts and soft parts of bodies were and are colonized.

From them, I learned the blazing insight that rape was not an act between an individual and an individual, hidden in a dark room—that was what my rapist wanted me to think. Rape was and is a cultural and political act: it attempts to remove a person with agency, autonomy, and belonging from their community, to secrete them and separate them, to depoliticize their body by rendering it detachable, violable, nothing.

Any measure of comparison feels grotesque when presented as a simile: that rape is “like” colonization—although the metaphor of “rape” is often used to describe the conquest of land.

Flip it around and think of rape as colonization: not just a metonym, but a precise synecdoche, part for whole, an action by which genocidal violence, the removal of land rights, and the destruction of coherent culture proceeds.

RAPE AND COLONIALISM ARE NOT COMMENSURATE, BUT they are kin. When we talk about sexual violence as feminists, we are—we have to be—talking about its use to subjugate entire peoples and cultures, the annihilation that is its empty heart. Rape is that bad because it is an ideological weapon. Rape is that bad because it is a structure: not an excess, not monstrous, but the logical conclusi...

RAPE WAS WHERE MY REBELLION STARTED. HIS SMALL SENSE that—small as I was, an infant—I needed to be controlled was my hint that I had power that had to be curtailed. That I was alive enough to be annihilated. That my survival was a threat that needed to be contained. Ra...

Something other than the evacuated, erased nobody that my fath...

It’s what we have. It’s what we create from “to survive.” The walls of the suburban conservative religious worldview in which I was raised were paper-thin, the surface of a shadow-play of stick figures (Father, Rabbi, Policeman) performing the same old, same old drama of power. Rendering something worthless—tearing something down—is powerful. It’s a weapon of power. We know it in our bodies. It’s time to pull out the scalpel and turn it around. Slash vents in the paper walls of this master’s house of heteropatriarchal colonialist mass hallucination that claims to be our reality. Give vent to our rage. Be bad. Dare to survive.

Here’s a real memory: me in the kitchen of our Cairo apartment, garnishing a very large knife. Eight years old, fed up, and telling him that, if he ever came near me again, I’d stick it in his throat. He laughed. Still, I didn’t tell anyone what he’d done.

A couple counselors have called it PTSD. It feels more like running my fingers over the rupture between the life I lived then and the one I live now.

Sometimes I think it’s that feeling—unending weakness, total vulnerability—of which I’m most resentful.

Do not regret a war that ripened you just as August ripens pomegranates on the slopes of stolen mountains.”

The memories come back in bits and pieces; there is no consistent story line. I’ve learned that telling a story often creates sense where there is none, so I refuse to fill in the blanks. Those who ask for more details—parents, friends, idiots in a writing workshop—are like dogs nipping at my feet while I try to push the gates of hell closed. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.