Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

A woman’s anger needs the whole house; go somewhere else. Anywhere else. Her anger is not going away.

You’ll be called brave over and over, which you will hate. No one means for it to sound reductive, but it does. You worry that they don’t mean superhero-brave, but cancer-brave, walk-the-plank-brave.

Even now, these lies taste familiar, comfortable, in a way that the words survivor and victim never have.

We are trapped in a legal system that has never favored women and has never believed survivors. And we are mired in a circuitous and damning dialogue, so powerful that it invalidates our experiences, our traumas, our truths—a dialogue so powerful that we begin to doubt whether our experience was ever there at all.

The subject is what I wanted to revisit in this essay. The flip side of treating “victims” or “survivors” as subjects of a narrative is that the process of intellectualizing the issue also requires neatly transmuting the subject into the object. And objectifying people who have lived through sexual violence is not a good

place to begin, or end, any story—not our own, and not theirs. I know I can never “restore the dignity” of victims I’ve never really known, I don’t seek to “give voice” to (or ventriloquize on behalf of) people rendered silent by politics and projections of our collective social anxieties. When exploring the experience of sexual violation at the border, I do bring my own experiences with gender oppression to my lens, but I don’t dare claim the telling of their stories as an exclusive right, when, in many cases, the stories are all they’re able to carry with them. I’m just trying to explore the territories that are supposed to be fixed, hard, official—and to peer beyond the wall. Maybe then as storytellers we can reveal real people behind those “enemy lines,” reveal our families in the gaze of the “alien,” and witness the wars being waged within, as nations trade bodies for political power and rob people of the right to own themselves.

Don’t walk alone at night. I read that statement and I thought, This is the wrong message. This is a misdirected, victim-blaming message.