Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

had endured all manner of violence, harassment, sexual assault, and rape. 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.

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.

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. 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. The morning I wrote

I imagine that there are ways in which our bodies never really stop being our mothers’ bodies. In

We have to end the system where it is only white men who decide when a woman—in any position, “privileged” or not—is deserving of power and agency.

None of this was supposed to happen. Didn’t have to happen. I wasn’t supposed to have a score. None of us were.

IF YOU SURVIVE, YOU HAVE TO PROVE IT WAS THAT BAD; OR else, they think you are. Surviving is some kind of sin, like floating up off the dunking stool like a witch. You have to be permanently écorchée, heart-on-sleeve, offering up organs and body parts like a medieval female saint.

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.

I’ve tried many things to make the memories and their terrible vividness go away: alcohol, drugs, sex, lots of Benadryl-doused sleep to avoid nightmares. And, when that didn’t work, a razor to my thigh, a lit cigarette pressed into a palm. All of it made me feel silly and fragile. Sometimes I think it’s that feeling—unending weakness, total vulnerability—of which I’m most resentful.

“It was not a story to pass on. This is not a story to pass on.”

I was angry beyond belief, but I had nowhere to put that anger. The shelves of my heart were full.

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.

The shame and doubt that I struggled with about my sexuality was easily transferred to my trauma. I am not surprised by the statistics that show an increased rate of violence against queer people. Nor am I surprised that 46 percent of bisexual women face such violence, as compared with 14 percent and 13 percent of straight and lesbian women respectively.

morning. “I just want to smoke a blunt and

But that doesn’t mean you have to give your whole story to anyone who asks. Not telling my story doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

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.

Does saying no sixteen times make me worthy of pity? Does it make me worthy of help?

I need someone to listen. I need someone to believe me.

The twisted view of the two things women are supposedly for—either marriage or sex but not both—still makes me shudder.