Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

trauma-and-survival

• If you survive, then it can't have been that bad. Being dead is the only way to prove it was.

  NTB-009

• If being gang-raped wasn't that bad, then it wasn't at all that bad being shoved… Everything was terrible but none of it was that bad.

  NTB-015

shame

• Even thirty years later I have trouble soaking off the most dogged shame… we still don't deserve to be raped. Not ever.

  NTB-005

• I was faithful and believed in God. And then I didn't. I will never know who I would have been had I not become the girl in the woods.

  NTB-002

embodiment

• The ways we are taught to be a girl are many — the slow frisk between your legs, the 'fuck you dumb bitch' when you say no.

  NTB-008

• Now you know the truth — they know it makes you afraid, and they want you to be afraid.

  NTB-012