Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

by Roxane Gay

They didn’t hold a gun to my head or a blade to my throat and threaten my life. I survived. I taught myself to be grateful I survived even if survival didn’t look like much.

But, in the long run, diminishing my experience hurt me far more than it helped.

Everything was terrible but none of it was that bad.

Still, they stick with you. You think about them even after they’re over, sometimes for a long time. Sometimes for a very long time. That’s how you know they’re important somehow.

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.

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.

JORDANA HAS INVENTED A NEW KIND OF RAPE-PREVENTION underwear.

A WHAT NOW?

When she changes her body type from “average” to “thin,” her message requests increase by 42 percent. When she lists “feminism” as an interest, her message requests decrease by 86 percent and the number of rape threats she receives triples.

THIS IS YOUR NEW THING: WHEN A MAN YELLS AT YOU ON THE street, you yell back. You are tired of pretending you can’t hear these men. You are tired of gluing your eyes to the sidewalk in shame. You are tired of taking it, of treating it like a tax you must pay for the privilege of being a woman in public spaces.

they know it makes you feel frightened. They like it. There’s still fear, yes, but now there’s anger, too. So much anger that it boxes out some of your fear.

He needs to fumble around for his power in the dark, like a totem he carries in his pocket. He wants to make sure it’s still there.

Turn this around. What would Kurt have had to do for me to feel justified in raping him? There’s no answer to that question.

Twenty-five percent of women in college have been the victims of rape or attempted rape. Eighty-four percent of these victims were acquainted with their assailants. Only 27 percent of women raped identified themselves as rape victims.

I can have a conversation with my college self: she wrote—not a lot—in purple pen, scratching asterisks next to the things that mattered most to her.

You don’t have to be polite. You don’t even have to be nice. Keep walking.

They wanted to have something to believe in, rules to follow, a formula, reasons other girls got raped and they didn’t: short skirt equals rape; too much beer equals rape; unlocked door equals rape. The part I wanted them to understand is that these equations can implode, constricting your whole life, until one day you’re sitting in a locked steel box breathing through an airhole with a straw and wondering, Now? Now am I safe?

Do you understand yet why we blame ourselves when we are hit, dragging the shame behind us like a twisted rim?

At least you weren’t killed. At least you have access to medical care. At least you have insurance. At least you have wonderful friends. Because the ones who tell me this are my friends and my teachers and the social worker and the doctor, I hold their words and outstretched hands even though my anger is mounting and I want not to be touched.

🫂

These days, I speak few words, and I certainly don’t have the vocabulary to dismantle what’s been forced on me by people called safe. I don’t have breath to say: No, I will not be grateful for my rights. I will stand with two feet on this earth and I will always say thank you when someone does something kind and sorry when I’ve done something wrong and never outside of that. And, yes, I am furious that I am pulled between poles of gratitude and apology—both of which are violent erasures. Thank goodness I wasn’t killed. I’m sorry I’m so inarticulate. I can’t name it then, but I feel the words at least eroding my voice. I sense that “at least” marks an end to the story I’m supposed to tell, that I am supposed to say something gracious in response—“thank goodness”—or else nothing more at all. “At least” curbs my telling too much truth. It’s a blunt instrument wielded to club a reckless retelling into submission. The story ends here.

🫂

(And here, I feel myself saying it: “At least I have ground.”)

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.

🫂

I am devastated. I don’t want to be made the object in my retelling.

When I was little, I used to curl up in the black-and-white-striped armchair in our living room with a thick book. Sometimes I would read but, often, I just held the book in my lap as a signal to passersby to let me be while my imagination roved. I treasured these moments of quiet. I grew into them, stretching out my girl mind into the implausible and absurd. I love my quiet. I hate how, in the after, my quiet has become silence.

🫂

I look for them everywhere, women like me. And they find me, too.

Create: there are parts of you even you can’t give away.

Don’t watch violent movies. Don’t watch movies that might be violent. Don’t be angry. If you’re angry, explain why calmly. If I were you, I wouldn’t wear that. I’d rather be dead than be raped. (I’d rather be dead than be you?) Don’t talk about rape. Do you have proof? Don’t get defensive. Avoid your triggers. Don’t eat at restaurants with steak knives. Are you eating? You look thin. You look fat. No one’s going to want to go home with you. Don’t let people you don’t know into your home. Who do you really know anyway? Don’t walk alone at night. Don’t not walk alone at night. This is your life. This is your life. This is your life.

“A good therapist knows you have to live in the house while you remodel.”

“I’m here to listen if you want to tell me.” And then, “If you don’t want to speak, I am still here.”

It’s not like he touched you. It’s not like he hurt you. It’s not like he raped you.

Now I feel so good to myself,

I know that saying please stop made it no more likely that these things would stop.

So there I was, in my neighborhood, altering my behavior to try to avoid being harassed.

I was invisible for years. I was quiet, shell-shocked; I didn’t want the attention but maybe would have liked it.

I think he meant that I am a person who does not forgive. This is true. I find it difficult to forgive people who have done harm to me. I am this way out of necessity, because if I do not remember the harm done to me, then no one will, and the boy that I was will have no one to look out for him.

🫂

At least I made it to that point. Many people never get properly diagnosed. And people with my illness living just a few decades before me were routinely lobotomized.)

Thank goodness I wouldn’t need to take medication forever, so said my doctor and the pamphlet he had gifted me.

We learn not to tell everything. We know telling everything will make them see the bad in us. How it is our fault. How we contributed. We fear repercussions, albeit lighter than the ones we will administer to ourselves; slut, bad, ugly, weak, whore, trash, shame, hate. We tell just enough, if we tell at all.

The way you are taught to be a girl will become how you are as a woman—a woman who is, at her core, not good enough, without worth, tarnished.

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.

“The idea of a secret that will be revealed always results in one of two scenarios: death and destruction, or self-discovery and recovery beyond our wildest dreams of unification. And in the greatest of sagas, both at the same time.” —MARY RUEFLE

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 survivor who was raped at knifepoint feels guilty she has taken up the space of a survivor who was raped at gunpoint. Everyone believes there is suffering worse than her own, that they should be strong enough to cope without me.”