Not That Bad Quotes

“It's not that I don't want to love unharmed people; I just don't understand them.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I am a real survivor because I survived, even if some days it feels like I didn't survive at all.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Angry women are always the villains.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“YOU RECOGNIZE THE TENSION BETWEEN “I AM A BODY” AND “I have a body,” but you are unable to resolve it. “Have” implies that this body is just a possession, that it can be lost or thrown away. That you can do without it. It implies, perhaps, that someone else could have your body and that your body would be not your own. That it would belong to another. That doesn’t feel quite right. But “am” doesn’t seem right either. To “be” a body suggests that you are only a body. You are meat and some blood. You are hard bones and flexing cartilage. You are tangled veins and skin. Is that all, though?”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Rape and colonialism are not commensurate, but they are kin. When we talk about sexual violence as feminists, we are–we have to be–talking about its use to subjugate entire peoples and cultures, the annihilation that is its empty heart. Rape is that bad because it is an ideological weapon. Rape is that bad because it is a structure: not an excess, not monstrous, but the logical conclusion of hetero-patriarchal capitalism. It is what that ugly polysyllabic euphemism for state power does.”
― So Mayer, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“In the self-defense class, our teacher taught us that if we couldn't imagine doing something- cracking an assailant in the head with a stapler, opening up a can of pepper spray on an attacker, digging our keys into the eyes of a would-be rapist- we wouldn't be able to act in a real crisis. Wielding the stapler, the pepper spray, and the keys, our teacher taught us the power of visualization, and I learned to imagine in advance what I might be called upon to do in an emergency... I have my keys in my hand and I am holding them like a claw. Let's turn this motherfucking system around.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“These are gifted adolescent women who don’t get to be judged on their impressive talent: their bodies are already paramount to the work they want to do and it’s only going to get worse. At sixteen these students are being judged on their sexual attractiveness. Their talent is a gift, but it is not enough.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“If rape culture had a downtown, it would smell like Axe body spray and that perfume they put on tampons to make your vagina smell like laundry detergent.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“The ways we are taught to be a girl start when you are very young. When you are being taught, you don't know about the points. When you are being taught to be a girl, the lessons are simply accepted-the price you pay for your curves, your holes. It's only later, when you are older, after you've been taught, that you find out about the score sheet.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“People will always respond differently to the story of a sexually abused third grader than they will that of a young woman who is violated by a friend at a booze-soaked house party. There is a kind of fairness in that, since they are very different stories. Yet, in many ways, they are so intimately intertwined: they both rely on the belief in ownership of the vulnerable body, whether female or child or both. The idea that one violation is vastly worse than the other is probably not so different a rationalization than what goes through a date rapist’s mind. Those who are disgusted at the idea of touching a child may be the exact same that would grope an adult woman in an alleyway or on a crowded subway train—or worse.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“words in the Oxford English Dictionary? antidisestablishmentarianism—in short, conservatism; getting in the way of change. floccinaucinihilipilification—the action or habit of estimating something as worthless. 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.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“floccinaucinihilipilification—the action or habit of estimating something as worthless.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“We have spent countless hours focused on manners, education, the perils of drugs. We teach them about stranger-danger and making good choices. But recently I’ve become aware that we must speak to our children about boundaries between the sexes. And what it means to not be a danger to someone else. To that end, we are making an effort to teach our sons about affirmative consent. We explain that the onus is on them to explicitly ask if their partner consents. And we tell them that a shrug or a smile or a sigh won’t suffice. They have to hear yes.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“An angry woman must answer for herself. The reasons for her anger must be picked over, examined, and debated. My anger must stand the scrutiny of the court of law, of evidentiary procedures. I must prove it comes from somewhere justified and not just because one time some man touched my sister. Or because at one time some man touched some woman and he will continue on and on. Or because my pay is unequal and the pay of women of color is less equal than mine. Or because I had to have my husband tell my parents to stop forcing me to meet my sister’s abuser for a reconciliation meeting, because they wouldn’t listen to me, because my angry vagina rendered me mute.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Sexual assault must simultaneously be terrible and be something you're able to accept--which is an impossibly hard thing to negotiate.”
― Stacey May Fowles, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Those who ask for more details-parents, friends, idiots in a writing workshop-are like dogs nipping at my feet while I try to push the gates of hell closed.”
― Nora Salem, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Anger is always reserved for someone else. And yet, I've been in a room who escaped a war, who lost her father in ethnic cleansing, whose mother burned her hair, whose cousin raped her. 'What right do I have to be angry, when I am alive?' she said.
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.
An angry woman must answer for herself. The reasons for her anger must be picked over, examined, and debated.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Intellect can miss the gospel of intuition.”
― Elissa Bassist, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“We need 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.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“was interested in the discourse around rape culture because the phrase is used often, but rarely do people engage with what it actually means. What is it like to live in a culture where it often seems like it is a question of when, not if, a woman will encounter some kind of sexual violence? What is it like for men to navigate this culture whether they are indifferent to rape culture or working to end it or contributing to it in ways significant or small?”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“It seems that, if something makes you feel better, it is a healthy option. Want to sleep all day? That’s okay. Drink too much? That can be a valid coping choice. Isolating yourself via a fear of the outside world? Self-preservation is important.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“It took you twelve years to see that being “good” had gotten your piano teacher everywhere and you nowhere at all. So you decide, for the first time in your life, that you aren’t going to be one of the good girls anymore. You decide that “good” is not an adjective that ought to be applied to a person, as it only rendered you inanimate and inhuman, like a piece of cheese or a watercolor painting.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“The survivor who was raped at knifepoint feels guilty she has taken up the space of a survivor who was raped at gunpoint.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“That's because we can never let it go. Because where would we put it? What system? What faith? What institution has room? Has patience? Has understanding for an angry woman?”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“We don't exist without other people; therefore, our pain isn't real until somebody else looks at it and goes: "Damn, that looks like it hurt.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Frequently, the person I just told would need me to be supportive while they went through a range of emotions and feelings, sometimes very intensely, and then they would usually tell me nothing would change in how they felt about me. And then things would change.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture