Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

I heard their painful stories and started to think, What I went through was bad, but it wasn’t that bad. Most of my scars have faded. I have learned to live with my trauma. Those boys killed the girl I was, but they didn’t kill all of me. They didn’t hold a gun to my head or a blade to my throat and threaten my life. I survived. 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.

having a hand shoved down my pants or being told I should be grateful for romantic attention because I wasn’t good enough and on and on. Everything was terrible but none of it was that bad. 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 don’t know when this changed, when I began realizing that all the encounters people have with sexual violence are, indeed, that bad. I didn’t have a grand epiphany. I finally reconciled my own past enough to realize that what I had endured was that bad, that what anyone has suffered is that bad. I finally met enough people, mostly women, who also believed that the terrible things they endured weren’t that bad when clearly those experiences were indeed that bad. I s...

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

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 STORIES AREN’T WORTH TELLING. THERE’S NO ARC TO them, no dramatic climax. There’s nothing at stake, not really. You imagine your listener, leaning in, “And then what happened?” And you have to say, “Nothing. That’s the whole story.” “Oh,” she says, her mouth a firm line. 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. That’s how you know they’re important somehow.

YOU RECOGNIZE THE TENSION BETWEEN “I AM A BODY” AND “I have a body,” but you are unable to resolve it. “Have” implies that this body is just a possession, that it can be lost or thrown away. That you can do without it. It implies, perhaps, that someone else could have your body and that your body would be not your own. That it would belong to another. That doesn’t feel quite right. But “am” doesn’t seem right either. To “be” a body suggests that you are only a body. You are meat and some blood. You are hard bones and flexing

SOMETIMES PEOPLE TELL YOU THAT YOU’RE LUCKY THAT YOU have sons so they won’t have to deal with all this crap. 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. Sometimes you think about what you’ll tell them and come up surprisingly blank. It’s the words that fail you, not the ideas. The ideas are there. Though you aren’t sure exactly what you’ll say, these are the things you want them to know: It’s not okay to hit the girl you like. And it’s not okay to hit the girl you love.

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.

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 little drunk. Here’s my number. Let’s get together another time.”

I didn’t get mad back. I felt terrible and guilty, cowering in my room

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.

I can’t name it then, but I feel the words at least eroding my voice. I sense that “at least” marks an end to the story I’m supposed to tell, that I am supposed to say something gracious in response—“thank goodness”—or else nothing more at all. “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.

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.

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

“A good therapist knows you have to live in the house while you remodel.”

“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 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.

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, relatively unviolated. Shouldn’t that be enough? Lucky Lucky Lucky

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 prove it was. It really was bad. It was terrible. It was so awful there was no way I could survive.

IF YOU SURVIVE, YOU HAVE TO PROVE IT WAS THAT BAD; OR else, they think you are.

Perhaps the most horrifying thing about nonconsensual sex is that, in an instant, it erases you. Your own desires, your safety and well-being, your ownership of the body that may very well have been the only thing you ever felt sure you owned—all of it becomes irrelevant, even nonexistent. You don’t need to be a helpless, innocent child to be changed by that.

Anger is the privilege of the truly broken, and yet, I’ve never met a woman who was broken enough that she allowed herself to be angry.

For years, that night was my fault. I knew what rape was. I knew what consent was. I knew about first- and second-wave feminism. I knew queer theory. But I swallowed the blame like that bottle of red wine and repeated to myself the lies that would run on loop for years to come. You have only yourself to blame. It was not that bad. You’re okay. You’re alive. At least you don’t remember it all. The bruises are gone. You can forget about it. No one ever has to know. Even now, these lies taste familiar, comfortable, in a way that the words survivor and victim never have.

work. I help women tell their stories, I thought. My story isn’t as serious, it isn’t as important. I am dealing with it. I am okay.

Rape interferes with how my partners and I can experience joy and connection even within incredibly loving, supportive, and nonnormative relationships. Rape culture means that even as someone who realized just how nonconsensual that high school relationship was just a few months after it ended, I still struggle with the repercussions of that experience and the many that followed it. Even though I had the strength to confront that boyfriend over AOL Instant Messenger to tell him just how I felt about our relationship (in the form of a badly written and very emo poem, of course), I kept doing sexual things that I didn’t really want to do for years after.

Frequently, the person I just told would need me to be supportive while they went through a range of emotions and feelings, sometimes very intensely, and then they would usually tell me nothing would change in how they felt about me. And then things would change.

People you tell will make comparisons. They will compare you to everyone else they have heard of who has experienced something similar, and they will rate how you are doing according to that metric.

Even many people who are mostly on your side will think that you must have done something. That it would not happen to them, or to the people they love, because their lives are organized better, they don’t take chances, they don’t know anyone who would do anything like that.

Sometimes I see ghosts. The worst ghosts for me are not usually the flashbacks, although those can be pretty bad, but the ones who show me what I might have been if it never happened. It’s like suddenly feeling what it would be like to run on a leg that had never been broken, just for a second, and then it’s gone and the old bone-deep pain is with me again.

I see phantoms in relationships sometimes; certain ways people are with each other that I can’t be.

I don’t know that I truly remember exactly how many times I said no, especially given the circumstances—the passage of time blots out any kind of vivid, detailed memory, and the world fills you with doubt over the legitimacy of your own story.

THERE IS THIS IMPOSSIBLE PARADOX WHEN YOU ARE VICTIMIZED by sexual assault. You want to—you have to—convince yourself that it wasn’t “that bad” in order to have any hope of healing. If it really is as bad as you feel like it is, how will you ever get out from under it? How will you ever get “better”? On the other hand, you need to convince others it was “bad enough” to get the help and support you need to do that healing. To get out from under it. To get an appointment at the clinic. To get friends to come over with Styrofoam food containers when you can’t feed yourself. You tell yourself how bad it is and then you numb yourself to how bad it is. You repeat as needed, for so many years.

This is rape’s legacy, the countless deaths women die just trying to keep existing in the world as it is.

Because I was indoctrinated to the point that I demonized my own resistance for getting in between what he needed and how he wanted it. Because anyone who gets in between is, by default, wrong, withholding, and un-fun. Because what was important to him became the only important thing.

but a gasp is a gasp is a gasp, and maybe he thinks it’s kosher to then choke her, so he pulls or chokes and she gasps, in an attempt to experience sexuality and to fulfill the expectation, regardless of if she’s enjoying herself as long as she’s performing enjoyability. Because

Because I wanted him to want to stop without me having to ask, to know without being told, to take crying as a sign, to be a hero and come to my rescue. Because I settled for him to keep going, to show his love for me like this.

Because I’d remind myself that he was My Boyfriend, my Boyfriend, My boyfriend. Because I questioned myself and my sanity and what I was doing wrong in this situation. Because of course I feared that I might be overreacting, overemotional, oversensitive, weak, playing victim, crying wolf, blowing things out of proportion, making things up. Because generations of women have heard that they’re irrational, melodramatic, neurotic, hysterical, hormonal, psycho, fragile, and bossy.

Because slightly more than half of the population is regularly told that what happens doesn’t or that it isn’t the big deal we’re making it into.

Because stifling trauma is just good manners.

Because when I said I didn’t want to have sex, he didn’t talk to me for the rest of the night. Because when I would plead, he would plead (my panic, his smile). Because I preferred not to fight or appear culpable. Because I’d lie: “It’s fine,” I’d say, desperate, like I could discover another sensation, dispel the anxiety through a sleight of psyche, and keep on loving him. Because lying is just performing, and perform is what we’re encouraged to do. Because besides, even if I’d said, No, Stop, there are those who’d think I’d meant Yes, Please, anyway.

Because I remember leaving Student Health Services and passing black-and-white posters of a group of resolved faces underneath a statistic in large bold red font—“one in four college women experiences sexual violence”—and thinking What a god-awful statistic that has nothing at all to do with me, a woman in love.

Because I didn’t inquire, What power structures are operating here?, and opted to believe that consent is an individual, uncomplicated yes/no articulation and action. Because even after I’d read preeminent scholar-activist-feminists, if my boyfriend said he loved me while hurting me, then I’d consent to be hurt. Because beggars can’t be choosers.

Because though it takes a while to nail those sex tips worth trying, it takes longer to figure out what’s not okay. Because who fantasizes about ethical sex, about moral principles that govern a group’s behavior? Because instead, at times, I wished he’d hit me so I’d have an ironclad justification to find a curb and kick him to it, to say it. Because there are some things I have to say only to know I don’t mean them. Because I could still get weak-kneed around him. Because I was more afraid to go untouched. Because “Girls are cruelest to themselves,” writes Anne Carson in “The Glass Essay.”

Because he didn’t want to hear it. Because

Because his now-wife would say he’s a Good Guy, with a human heart, who doesn’t even watch rom-coms or read about libertarianism.