Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

Until I became a seasoned adult, I thought this was a normal part of growing up as a girl. Weird shit with boys/men happens to you. Look at all the times it happened to me so, obviously, it’s just how it is in life, like flat tires, running out of gas, getting a traffic ticket, spraining an ankle, etc. It’s fucked up, but it happens and you just deal with it. Move on.

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.