Article content

Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

Edited by Roxane Gay

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Roxane Gay-edited anthology Not That Bad is a candid look at rape culture Back to video

Harper Perennial | 368 pages

$21

Cultural critic, essayist and novelist Roxane Gay’s anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture is a candid look at rape culture viewed through the eyes of 30 authors, giving a platform to a small group of diverse voices that are often disregarded or silenced in the face of personal tragedy and trauma.

Not That Bad is edited by Gay (she writes the introduction) and consists of new essays, some previously published. You’ll recognize a few of the writers, while some are being published for the first time. The title comes from what Gay says is the often self-defeating belief one’s own assault is not as bad as others’ experiences, acting as a coping mechanism to deal with the pain. She reflects on her own trauma, concluding that the reality of rape is, in fact, that bad.

Rape culture, according to feminist scholars Emilie Buchwald, Martha Roth and Pamela Fletcher in their treatise Transforming a Rape Culture, is “a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself.” The authors conclude that rape culture acts to normalize “physical and emotional” threats against women. Men are also victims of this toxic culture as evidenced in Not That Bad.