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Book: Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture
Quotes of Book: Not That Bad: Dispatches from
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  1. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    It's not that I don't want to love unharmed people; I just don't understand them.
    book-quote

  2. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    In the self-defense class, our teacher taught us that if we couldn't imagine doing something- cracking an assailant in the head with a stapler, opening up a can of pepper spray on an attacker, digging our keys into the eyes of a would-be rapist- we wouldn't be able to act in a real crisis. Wielding the stapler, the pepper spray, and the keys, our teacher taught us the power of visualization, and I learned to imagine in advance what I might be called upon to do in an emergency... I have my keys in my hand and I am holding them like a claw. Let's turn this motherfucking system around.
    book-quote

  3. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    If you survive, you have to prove it was that bad; or else, they think you are. Surviving is some kind of sin, like floating up off the dunking stool like a witch. You have to be permanently écorchée, heart-on-sleeve, offering up organs and body parts like a medieval female saint.
    book-quoterape-culturesurvivorsurvivors-of-abuse

  4. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    Anger is the privilege of the truly broken, and yet, I've never met a woman who was broken enough that she allowed herself to be angry.
    book-quote

  5. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    Unmoored and in flight, the refugee is vulnerable to every king of harm- from homelessness to fraud- but sexual violence is the most intimate and most public act of brutalization, and it erupts wherever laws and social norms are unraveled. As transit bodies drift in search of sanctuary, gendered violence can buttress a social taxonomy of dominance and oppression, demarcating the tapeable and those with the power to rape, siphoning spheres of male and female, captors and prisoners.
    book-quoterefugeesrape-culture

  6. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    I still carry the weight of being a rape survivor, and of the demand that I forgive and forget to uphold the myth of the perfect black family. I carry the weight handed to me by the Black moral majority, who ignored my father's crimes and who knows how many other men's, who tried to buy off a terrified thirteen year old with a one-day trip to an amusement park. They were so desperate to project the image of the respectable, righteous, picture-perfect Black family to the world that they were willing to let women and girls in the picture suffer.
    book-quotesurvivalrape-culturerape-survivor

  7. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    Because I questioned myself and my sanity and what I was doing wrong in this situation. Because of course I feared that I might be overreacting, overemotional, oversensitive, weak, playing victim, crying wolf, blowing things out of proportion, making things up. Because generations of women have heard that they're irrational, melodramatic, neurotic, hysterical, hormonal, psycho, fragile, and bossy. Because girls are coached out of he womb to be non-confrontational, agreeable, solicitous, deferential, demure, nurturing, to be tuned in to others, and to shrink and shut up.
    book-quoterape-cultureharassmentrape-survivor

  8. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    The idea of a secret that will be revealed always results in one of two scenarios: death and destruction, or self-discovery and recovery beyond our wildest dreams of unification. And in the greatest of sagas, both at the same time.
    book-quote

  9. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    O my friend searching for an absurdity necessary to train the self to be tolerant . . . do not reconcile with anything except for this obscure reason. Do not regret a war that ripened you just as August ripens pomegranates on the slopes of stolen mountains." -MAHMOUD DARWISH
    book-quote

  10. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    A good therapist knows you have to live in the house while you remodel.
    book-quote

  11. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    We need to end the system where it is only white men who decide when a woman--in any position, "privileged" or not--is deserving of power and agency.
    book-quote

  12. Roxane Gay _ Not That Bad: Dispatches from

    People will always respond differently to the story of a sexually abused third grader than they will that of a young woman who is violated by a friend at a booze-soaked house party. There is a kind of fairness in that, since they are very different stories. Yet, in many ways, they are so intimately intertwined: they both rely on the belief in ownership of the vulnerable body, whether female or child or both. The idea that one violation is vastly worse than the other is probably not so different a rationalization than what goes through a date rapist's mind. Those who are disgusted at the idea of touching a child may be the exact same that would grope an adult woman in an alleyway or on a crowded subway train-or worse.
    book-quote
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