Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

I will never know who I would have been had I not become the girl in the woods.

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.

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.

bad. I saw what calloused empathy looked like in people who had every right to wear their wounds openly and hated the sight of it.

“Still, you shouldn’t let everyone see. You don’t want some guy to see you taking those and think he can take advantage of you and there will be no consequences.”

You are absolutely disgusting if that is your first thought seeing someone take birth control

IF RAPE CULTURE HAD A FLAG, IT WOULD BE ONE OF THOSE BOOB INSPECTOR T-shirts.

If rape culture had an official language, it would be locker-room jokes and an awkward laugh track.

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.

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 cartilage. You are tangled veins and skin.

Don’t ever take a polite nod for an answer. Wait for her to yell it: “Yes!”

He doesn’t want a conversation. He’s not shouting at you as a method of engagement; he’s just testing something out. He needs to fumble around for his power in the dark, like a totem he carries in his pocket. He wants to make sure it’s still there.

And we still don’t deserve to be raped. Not ever.

pounding on my door, and hissing through the crack. I didn’t get mad back. I felt terrible and guilty, cowering in my room while the whole male population of my dorm rose up with a clear message: I had belonged to them and I had strayed from the pack, hooking up with a rogue male and threatening the sanctity of the whole goddamned dormitory gene pool.

My unarticulated logic went like this: if I give my body away, over and over, I can prove to myself that sex is my choice—even though, and this seems significant now, I always let the men choose me.

“The question,” our self-defense teacher said one afternoon when we were gathered around her cross-legged on mats in the gym, “is not ‘What will he think of me?’—if I don’t answer his question, if I’m not polite, if I don’t want to go—but ‘What do I think of him?’”

They wanted to have something to believe in, rules to follow, a formula, reasons other girls got raped and they didn’t:

I can’t stop the truck or the rapist, but I can let the girl I was know that I see her. I hear her. I know she is telling the truth.

And, yes, I am furious that I am pulled between poles of gratitude and apology—both of which are violent erasures.

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.

The stones that composed the ground on which I’ve always walked have come loose, swirling unpredictably around my head.

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.

my quiet has become silence.

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.

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

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.

“Survivor” is the “special needs” of victimhood. If I say I have survived, I’m fooling nobody. I didn’t.

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.

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 thought I was the only one who did that . . .”

This I do know: It was bad enough.

But this is the way women are set up in the media. There has been some movement, I suppose, but not much. It’s a frustrating and demoralizing struggle with some moments of triumph in spite of itself.

This is how it IS. If the Harvey Weinstein disaster illustrates anything at all, it illustrates the entirety of the power structure. The lurid details of his rapes are disgusting and yet a shield, in a way, for the greater toxicity of that power structure.

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.

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.

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.

What did this child die of? Shame, mainly. And narrative necessity.

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 own abjection and erasure and you teach me to survive.

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.

WHAT HAPPENS BETWEEN AN INDIVIDUAL AND AN INDIVIDUAL can be labeled “not that bad.” It can be called a “crime of passion.” It can be called a misunderstanding, a Freudian slip, a one-time deal, just between you and me, an act meaningless among the vast, insensible crises of genocide. 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...

feels more like running my fingers over the rupture between the life I lived then and the one I live now.

The idea that one violation is vastly worse than the other is probably not so different a rationalization than what goes through a date rapist’s mind.

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.

I’m writing this so it can be a part of the compendium of other sad and bad stories like these, because maybe the compendium will say something in totality that we cannot say alone.

Our society has a place for actual abusers: jail. There are systems and processes in place to handle them and rehabilitate them. The faith I grew up with demands forgiveness for abusers, but angry women? They must be silent.

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.

ANGRY WOMEN ARE ALWAYS THE VILLAINS.

Forgive the abuser. The only solution for female anger is for her to stop being angry.

But the anger of women? That has no place in government, so it has to flood the streets.