That drumbeat has gotten louder, especially since Harvey Weinstein story broke in October and the #MeToo movement has grown too large to ignore. Kelly to our own goddamn president - keep me in a constant state of postrape PTSD.” And she also writes that there’s no tidy end to processing that: “The constant drumbeat of stories of sexual assault - from R. 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 best-selling collection of feminist essays, she had difficulty recognizing the violence inflicted on her. Most striking for me were the essays that recognized an incident as rape long after it occurred - a doctor asking about shredded cervix years providing evidence of that sex with a former partner wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was assault, or waking up after a drunken night to being penetrated and equating it to “bad sex.” 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.

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 Gay is the perfect person to help us start.Īn American writer, editor and professor at Purdue University, Gay is the author of best-selling non-fiction and fiction books, including Bad Feminist and most recently, Hunger. This logic is inflicted on survivors in many ways, and Gay writes it was a way for her to cope, but that ultimately diminishing her experience “hurt far more than it helped.” Now - post-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.

Not That Bad is 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.

“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’s edited.

Not That Bad by Roxane Gay