Rape culture through diverse eyes
Roxane Gay-edited anthology of essays reveal how embedded assault is in our society
“I taught myself to be grateful I survived even if survival did not look like much,” Roxane Gay writes in the preface to the new book of essays on rape culture she has edited.
Not That Badis the title of the anthology, and it’s also what Gay told herself after she was gang-raped at 12 — that surely, there were others who had it worse. This logic is inflicted on survivors in many ways, and Gay writes that it was a way for her to cope, but that ultimately diminishing her experience “hurt far more than it helped.” Now — post-Harvey Weinstein, post-#MeToo — we’ve entered a new era of understanding of how bad it really is, opening a new space for conversations on how to move forward. And Gay is the perfect person to help us start.
An American writer, editor and professor at Purdue University, Gay is the author of bestselling non-fiction and fiction books, including Bad Feminist and, most recently, Hunger. Her latest project includes a refreshingly diverse range of writers, including Canadian writer Stacey May Fowles, actors Ally Sheedy and Gabrielle Union and them’s executive editor Meredith Talusan. And the contributions are just as diverse — from gut-wrenching stories of assault to sharp analysis of all the ways our culture chooses to ignore the actions of perpetrators in favour of victim-blaming.
Most striking for me were the essays that recognized an incident as rape long after it occurred — situations previously chalked up to “bad sex,” such as waking up after a drunken night to find yourself being penetrated by a near stranger.
Samhita Mukhopadhyay, executive editor of Teen Vogue, writes about when she started to recognize herself as a survivor, and the shock that came with it — that even as someone who edited a bestselling collection of feminist essays, she had difficulty recognizing the violence inflicted on her. And she also writes that there’s no tidy end to processing that: “The constant drumbeat of stories of sexual assault — from R. Kelly to our own goddamn president — keep me in a constant state of postrape PTSD.”
That drumbeat has gotten louder, es- pecially since the Weinstein story broke in October and the #MeToo movement has grown too large to ignore.
Through these essays, Gay and this allstar group of writers prove the point that rape culture is deeply embedded in the way we live, work, date and raise our kids — and it’s not just bad, it’s downright horrifying.