Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

Don’t ever use an insult for a woman that you wouldn’t use for a man. Say “jerk” or “shithead” or “asshole.” Don’t say “bitch” or “whore” or “slut.” If you say “asshole,” you’re criticizing her parking skills. If you say “bitch,” you’re criticizing her gender.

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.”

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 daughters get fed a lot of phony girl power through books and television and clubs at school. And then they go into the schoolyard where they get their real messages, they catch ads in the subway, they overhear conversations at the diner, I take them to The LEGO Movie—much admired, roundly praised, critical darling—and they watch as the main female character is objectified throughout the entire thing. We need a break from all this empowerment.

You made me an object. I was not a person to you, in that moment. I was at best a challenge, an unresponsive organ, a stubborn body.

Yes, I slept beside you afterward. Another entry in the case for the defense. Like the fact that I asked you, to start with, made a fool of myself saying how attracted I was to you, how much I liked you, how much it would mean for you to be my first.

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 scorecard would be empty right now.

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.

When I recounted the story to a friend, she shook her head. “You shouldn’t have encouraged him,” she said. “You really only have yourself to blame.” I was angry at the time but, in retrospect, I see that my friend believed in the woman who was untouchable, the woman who could do the right things, the woman who could just “be careful” and thereby escape the horrors that await so many of us.

If I peruse my list of partners, there are probably only one or two people about whom I could say confidently that our relationship never involved any sex that I performed out of obligation, rather than actual desire.

I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to have sex with him, but the boundaries I put up were weak at best, and he dutifully approached them over and over until I conceded.

I have had people who are otherwise loving and kindhearted tell me that they just don’t understand how people who go through this can get up in the morning. I have had people tell me that they would rather be dead than be what I am.

The world in which we lived reinforced the sense that I had no say in the matter of how men treated my body. Boys could laugh at our breasts in gym class and not get in trouble for it. Every day in high school our bras were snapped, our skirts flipped up, our butts lightly spanked as we walked to class. If our nipples showed through our shirts, some asshole would inevitably say, “Cuttin’ any diamonds lately?” On the rare occasion that any one of us girls complained to a school official about the catcalling and unwanted touching, it was met with, “it just means they like you,” and of course, “boys will be boys.”

Because growing up, beyond Rand and Cosmo, I was exposed almost exclusively to male narrators and protagonists and found myself inside the male mind, championing his desires, aligning with his frustrations.

Because of the trap that one is inevitably in: a man pulls a woman’s hair—likely he once saw an actor pull an actress’s hair and the actress gasped in pleasure—so he pulls and she gasps; maybe she gasps in pleasure, or in pain, or because she’s seen something, too, or has had a legacy shoved down her throat before she could learn what she desires, or because she wants to be “normal”; 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 maybe, eventually, she pulls her own hair, to please him.

Because my behavior and word choice were a convergence of marketed clichés of how women are supposed to act and sound in sexual scenarios. Because I knew how to say “Yes! Harder!” in a thousand languages, how to moan in eight octaves, how to bend over backward, how to ask for it, how to beg God for it, but not how to say, “No. Stop.”

Because all I could do was hold on, stare at him, and focus on the bond between me and some guy no longer aware of me.

Because I didn’t want to ruin his experience of me.

Because girls are coached out of the womb to be nonconfrontational, solicitous, deferential, demure, nurturing, to be tuned in to others, and to shrink and shut up.

run and rerun everything by yourself before verbalizing it—put it in perspective, interrogate it: Do you sound nuts? Does this make you look bad? Are you holding his interest? Are you being considerate? Fair? Sweet?

Because when others serially talk down to you, assume authority over you, try to talk you out of your own feelings and tell you who you are; when you’re not taken seriously or listened to in countless daily interactions—then you may learn to accept it, to expect it, to agree with the critics and the haters and the beloveds, and to sign off on it with total silence. Because they’re coming from a good place.

Because to mention certain things, like “patriarchy,” is to be dubbed a “feminazi,” which discourages its mention, and whatever goes unmentioned gets a pass, a pass that condones what it isn’t nice to mention, lest we come off as reactionary or shrill.

Because sidelining women’s stories/voices/visages, and also glorifying—thus neutralizing—their suffering, are not only prerequisites to sexual violence against women, but also ensure that sexual violence isn’t seen as sexual violence but as totally normal, sanctioned behavior.