Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

sweet girl, I know it’s not your fault. None of this was ever your fault. Do you hear me? Not. Your. Fault.

“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?’”