Feminist Roxane Gay brings together dispatches from the front lines of rape culture. 

This anthology of personal essays asks one of the harder questions about rape: ‘What is it like to live in a culture where it often seems it is a question of when, not if, a woman will encounter some kind of sexual violence?’ A survivor of a gang rape who spent most of her life telling herself the experience wasn’t that bad – she survived, didn’t she? – Roxane Gay knows all about the self-harm women do when they minimise their experiences of the sexual violence that permeates our culture, society and law. Beginning as an inquiry into the frequently used phrase ‘rape culture’, a phrase that is little understood, Gay hopes that Not That Bad will inspire a movement, because naming and shaming powerful perpetrators like Harvey Weinstein is not in itself enough to ensure lasting change.

The first thing NTB does is dispel a number of commonly held assumptions. Aubrey Hirsch’s essay describes how she only has fragments of memories left from a disturbing and intensely destabilising event that looks suspiciously like a date rape while she was passed out at a college party. She intuitively knows the memory fragments are important and is informed enough to realise trauma can often result in gaps in memory. But it’s when she juxtaposes this with her experiences as a creative writing teacher, encountering students who fail to recognise the date rapes that occur in their own and each other’s writing, that one recognition leads to another and her worst suspicions are confirmed.

Jill Christman’s essay ‘Slaughterhouse Island’ is a powerful refutation of the oft-cited women-who-wear-short-skirts-are-asking-to-be-raped maxim and links this with a contestation of the way the victims of sexual violence are deeply shamed today by a combination of internal and external power structures that support the patriarchy and keep women oppressed, victimised and blaming themselves for crimes that are not their fault. Claire Schwartz, a lesbian who was beaten and raped at 16, argues that language is inadequate to describe the experience; the trauma and memory of it are beyond language. And Ally Sheedy, an actress, writes about her experience of rape culture in Hollywood in a piece women from all walks of life will understand given the ubiquity of sexual harassment and gender inequality in the workplace.

There is a chapter about paedophilia and another about the transgendered and rape, but one of the most important chapters is VL Seek’s, which addresses the sticky subject of rape and the law. This is where the really hard work needs to be done if there is to be an end to rape culture and the hideous acts it spawns.

One quibble: in some chapters there is the sense that contributors are still being too hard on themselves for not reporting rape, or for taking a long time to actually accept that they have been raped and to come out of denial. I think women should be gentle with themselves for finding it difficult to report rape and other sexual assaults; until the law changes, doing so will remain a nightmare. Learning to accept and live with the trauma rape causes is a long-term, often lifetime process.

While I did need to pause midway to catch my breath, NTB is not all completely solemn, and learning the meaning of the longest word in the dictionary, floccinaucinihilipilifiation — the action of estimating something as worthless — is one of the lighter but no less pertinent moments in the collection.

My favourite piece, though, is the last. Elissa Bassist’s writing manages to be both funny and angry and is more powerful for it. Her use of ‘because’ as a motif to hack away at the systems of thought that are intrinsic to patriarchy is punchy and bold:

 Because slightly more than half of the population is regularly told that what happens doesn’t or that it isn’t the big deal we’re making it into.

Bassist convincingly and effortlessly links complex and emotionally charged ideas: women as second-class citizens is connected with the way women are programmed to be unable to say no to male sexual violence.

Because when a woman challenges a man, then the facts are automatically in dispute, as is the speaker, and the speaker’s license to speak …

Because even after I’d read preeminent scholar-activist-feminists, if my boyfriend said he loved me while hurting me, then I’d consent to be hurt.

Reading these testimonies is confronting. It won’t, though it should, be everyone’s cup of tea. NTB may remind you of your own history of date rape, partner rape, violent rape, your own experiences of coercion or of sociopathic narcissistic sex. It will make you ask yourself difficult questions like why haven’t I reported the rapes/sexual assaults/sexual harassment? It may also remind you of child molestation by teachers, child exposure to masturbators,  being sexually preyed on by older boys (always those friends of the family, or your brother) and will make you wonder why you have never complained or let yourself realise just how bad those experiences made you feel before now.

In short NTB might make you feel angry, hurt, traumatised, powerless and terrified. But it needs to. Whether change happens at a societal level or not, this anthology is, at the very least, a reminder that each reader has the power to change their own lives, even if it’s only to stop denying their experiences. At best, reading this anthology might help you see that it’s actually time to do something about such widespread institutionalised misogyny.

In Sarah Wainwright’s prize-winning TV series Happy Valley, one of the few times we see protagonist Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) smile is the final scene of Episode 6, Series 1. She’s standing beside her daughter Becky’s grave (Becky committed suicide after falling pregnant to the local psychopath when he raped her) and looking out over Calder Valley, West Yorkshire, and the town where she’s a police sergeant. Letting the rare sun warm her face, she’s smiling in satisfaction: she’s smiling because she got him, Tommy Lee Royce, the man who raped her daughter. Royce is going to prison for a long time having raped again while on parole, not to mention trafficking drugs and killing three people, one a female police officer. Catherine (who I like to think of as a modern-day Cathy of Wuthering Heights fame – it is Yorkshire, after all) smiles despite the flashbacks she involuntarily experiences to the hideous violence inflicted by Royce while she was trying to arrest him, violence that nearly killed her. When the flashbacks move forward in time to the scene of Royce’s arrest, Catherine relives spraying him with a fire extinguisher (thereby preventing him from suiciding and escaping a long prison term) and then kicks him in his already wounded guts. We are with her for each kick and we share her sense of satisfaction at the end.

Reading NTB I can’t help wondering why this sort of revenge doesn’t happen all the time in real life, especially given the statistics for violence against women and the lack of any improvement in them: the one in three women who are physically assaulted by men, the one in four who are sexually assaulted by men.

NTB expands the #MeToo campaign into a reflective and insightful exploration of society’s misogynistic combination of not-that-bad brainwashing and emotional numbing. Reading it, for once I felt glad I didn’t have a daughter and wondered if we removed all the TV/films/books which depict sexual violence towards women, what would be left. NTB is a disturbing but essential read. It’s not that bad, it’s actually much much worse.

Roxane Gay (Editor) Not That Bad: Dispatches from rape culture Allen & Unwin 2018 PB 368pp $26.99

Justine Ettler has a PhD in American fiction and is the author of three novels, including the controversial bestseller The River Ophelia (a new edition was released in 2017) and Bohemia Beach (published by Transit Lounge in 2018). She has worked as an academic and a freelance journalist, and her work is available at bookshops, online and from her website.

You can buy Not That Bad from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here.

To see if it is available from Newtown Library, click here.



Tags: Ally | Sheedy, Aubrey | Hirsch, Claire | Schwartz, Elissa | Bassist, Happy Valley, Jill | Christman, Roxane | Gay, Sarah | Wainwright, VL | Seek


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