Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

Not everyone gets sex when they want it. Not everyone gets love when they want it. This is true for men and women. A relationship is not your reward for being a nice guy, no matter what the movies tell you.

Birth control is your job, too.

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 ski...

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 lit...

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.

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.

The faith I grew up with demands forgiveness for abusers, but angry women? They must be silent.

“Men just get mad and punch each other and it’s over,” we say. “Women are just bitches; they never let it go.” That’s because we never can let it go. Because where would we put it?

“Whatever you are mad at,” the emailer explained, “someone else has it worse. Why are you so mad? You don’t get to be mad.” Anger is always reserved for someone else.

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.

The anger of men is a powerful enough tide to swing an election. But the anger of women? That has no place in government, so it has to flood the streets.

There is no path lonelier than the one a good girl forges for herself.