🤕#14: Not That Bad: Dispatches From Rape Culture by Roxane Gay - Book Summary & Key Takeaways

“If rape culture had a flag, it would be one of those boob inspector t-shirts.

If rape culture had its own cuisine, it would be all this shit you have to swallow.

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.” - Aubrey Hirsch, Loc 126

“When I was twelve years old, I was gang raped in the woods. […] What I went through was bad, but it wasn’t that bad.” - Roxane Gay, Loc 71

“Millie confirmed to me that my mother’s suffering was worse than mine. She’d been raped. Me? It wasn’t that bad.” - Vanessa Mártir, Loc 1175

“If you survive, then it—that, the trauma—can’t have been that bad. Being dead is the only way to prove it was.” - So Mayer, Loc 1435

“I got fondled, at best. Not that bad, right? Lucky, Right?” - xTx, Loc 1410

“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.” - Stacey May Fowles’ counsellor, Loc 3034

“I told myself it wasn’t rape because we were in a relationship. It wasn’t rape because I still loved him. It wasn’t rape because I didn’t fight him off. It wasn’t rape because I stayed with him after. It didn’t matter that I kept whispering no, no, no. It didn’t matter that I sobbed the entire time. At least I wasn’t raped like my Mom was, I told myself.” - Vanessa Mártir, Loc 1131

“What right do I have to be angry? At least I’m alive.” - Lyz Lenz, Loc 1803

“You’re okay. You’re alive. At least you don’t remember it all.” - Amy Jo Burns, Loc 1998

“That was “real” rape; anything less than that seemed like it was supposed to be tolerable. Anything “less” than that, well, at least you could say it wasn’t as bad as what happened to Sylvia.” - Elisabeth Fairfield Stokes, Loc 3109

“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.” - Claire Schwartz, Loc 479

“Are we supposed to feel sympathy for this character, even as he’s raping her?”

The student looks taken aback, surprised. “He’s not raping her. They’re having sex.”

You point out that all of the evidence that he is, in fact, raping her. She’s clearly very drunk. She can’t even walk by herself. She never takes any agency, just lies there while it’s happening.

The student cuts you off. “This is, like, based off me hooking up with my girlfriend for the first time.”

It hadn’t occurred to you that the student might not have realized he was writing a rape story.” - Aubrey Hirsch, Loc 165

“He (Jeff) flipped out. His room was just below mine, and all night, he played angry music and hung out his window screaming that I was a bitch, a whore, a fucking cunt. Other boys from the dorm joined Jeff in his righteous fury, smashing things against the floor, pounding on my door and hissing through the crack.

I didn’t get mad back. I felt terrible and guilty, cowering in my room while the whole male population of my dorm rose up with a clear message: I had belonged to them and I had strayed from the pack.” Jill Christman, Loc 326

“I was raped,” I whisper. I am devastated. I don’t want to be made the object in my retelling.

The victim must learn to make language tell her own truth:

“He raped me.”

- Claire Schwartz, Loc 527

“Sometimes people tell you that you have sons so they won’t have to deal with all this crap.

It’s true that your kids, by virtue of both being boys, will be in a privileged position, but the idea that they “won’t have to deal” with rape culture makes you shudder. You very much want them to “deal with” rape culture the way one “deals with” a cockroach problem.” - Aubrey Hirsch, Loc 190

“My daughters get fed a lot of phony girl power through books and television and clubs at school. And then they go into the schoolyard where they get their real messages, they catch ads in the subway, they overhear conversations at the diner, I take them to The LEGO Movie—much admired, roundly praised, critical darling— and they watch as the main female character is objectified throughout the entire thing.” - Lynn Melnick, Loc 695

“If the Harvey Weinstein disaster illustrates anything at all, it illustrates the entirety of the power structure. His behavior and his crimes are so … what? Undeniable? Shocking? Inexcusable? Any culpable man in the entertainment industry can pull up some feigned dignity and state publicly (or privately) “Well, I didn’t do THAT … exactly” as a kind of self-protective blanket of denial.” - Ally Sheedy, Loc 1271

“I told my parents when I got home. Not everything. 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.”

- xTx, Loc 1312

“The doctor continued to speak to my parents and I tried to tune him out but couldn’t entirely. Divorce is hard on any family, he explained, but it would be a real tragedy for a Black Family to divorce. A broken home is the absolute worst thing that can happen to a child. (Worse than getting raped by your father? I thought to myself.)

“In the letters,I wrote that my father had tried to rape me a second time and I had run away from home but couldn’t stay where I’d been. I asked for each person to send me money because my part-time job after school wasn’t enough to allow me to get a place on my own.”

“Having lived two drastically different stories of sexual assault, I’ve learned some interesting things about responses. When someone hears a story of child abuse, they usually respond in one of two ways: (1) a look of absolute horror and sympathy with what seems to be an almost overwhelming impulse to comfort you (regardless of your actual emotional state at the time) or (2) a look of absolute horror and with what seems to be an almost overwhelming impulse to flee from you.

On the other hand, when someone hears of an adult woman being raped at a house party, the reactions are much more varied. Were you drunk? Had you hooked up before? Could there have been some misunderstanding?”

“They are so intimately intertwined: they both rely on the belief in ownership of the vulnerable body, whether female or child or both.” 

- Nora Salem, Loc 1651

“Jesus is allowed table-flipping rage. We speak of men and their rage as if it is laudable. “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? What system? What faith? What institution has room? Has patience? Has understanding for an angry woman?

An angry man in cinema is Batman. An angry male musician is a member of Metallica. An angry male writer is Chekhov. An angry male politician is passionate, a revolutionary. He is a Donald Trump or a Bernie Sanders. 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.” - Lyz Lenz, Loc 1763

“How do we define force? What does it mean to “resist to the utmost”? How do we define consent? From an evidentiary perspective, can we ask what she was wearing? When can we ask about previous sexual partners, experiences, and proclivities?

In Evidence, we learned how to discredit a witness on the stand. We learned the exceptions that would allow you to introduce a witness’s sexual history to undermine the idea that she was raped.

How much did you have to drink that night? Would you say it was your usual custom to dress in this way when going out? And you gave him your phone number? Do you normally accept a drink from any man who buys you one? Did you have sexual relations with him in the past? How many, would you say? And all of those times were consensual? Did you ever say no? You didn’t scream? And you continued to be in a relationship with him? But it’s hard to remember now what happened on that day, isn’t it?” - V.L. Seek, Loc 2029

“Growing up, I was exposed almost exclusively to male narrators and protagonists and found myself inside the male mind, championing his desires, aligning with his frustrations. 

Because I’d think Give the man sex, my thoughts indistinguishable from his; He needs to have sex! I’d tell myself, merging obsessions, and assuming, as many do, that hot, hard-core, superlative sex was his God-given right.

Because I was indoctrinated to the point that I demonized my own resistance for getting in between what he needed and how he wanted it.” - Elissa Bassist, Loc 3475