Not That Bad - Roxanne Gay review

[amado1]

Well, I finished "Not That Bad", a selection of essays on rape edited by Roxanne Gay ... and despite my optimism, I'd have to give it 2/5 stars, max.

I did like Roxanne Gay when I first read her, but over time, she's become synonymous with a certain brand of feminism that rubs me the wrong way, and seems to be embraced by a specific flavor of person: cis, straight, white, wealthy, "woke", and mean as hell. The sort of privileged person who uses wokeness as a bludgeon to bully anyone they deem as lesser -- and who they deem "lesser" has some startling similarities to who racists and homophobes deem "lesser". This is not to say Roxanne Gay is herself privileged or that any of those descriptors apply to her; just that her writing seems to speak to a group of people I want nothing to do with, even though they claim to hold the same values as me.

Because this book is just edited by Gay, not written by her, I was eager to give it a chance. The subject material especially drew me in. Here's the review I wrote up for Goodreads:

 

First and foremost, I felt like I was reading a book written by aliens, for aliens. Maybe it’s a mindset disconnect. I related heavily to the essays by queer, trans, or male writers; everything else felt like it was written for a different species, people who react in ways that are mystifying to me, and whose focus seems overwhelmingly narrow, centered on cishet women as the ultimate victim. Maybe, as someone who’s been victimized by cishet women, or as someone who falls into multiple spectra of oppression, this was a poor choice in reading material; the essayists in this collection largely come across as privileged, and their stories frequently made me wince. There’s an almost tone-deaf focus on minor events that don’t even register on the radar of people like me, and there’s a framing of the world as Male vs. Female, Violent vs. Victim that seems disingenuous at best, and whitefem/radfem at worst. 

Writing quality: Most of the essays in this book are written in the dreamy, faux-poetic purple prose that’s so popular in literary fiction right now. The result is that they blend together, and come across as insincere, like the authors are playing dress-up and telling you their story in a carefully modulated Southern Belle accent. 

The exception, and standout, is “Only the Lonely” by Lisa Mecham. Short, to the point, and written in a clear, frank voice, this essay is immediately engaging. It sidesteps the overwrought tone of the other essayists and instead strikes a more subtle emotional point. Genuine talent here. Her superior writing skill eclipses the fact that her essay really covers much of the same ground as other, less skilled writers in this collection: the only way in which her "character" distinguishes itself is setting, and perhaps age. Mecham's POV comes across as middle-aged or older, and her essay is set in a small judgmental town rather than a party college.

Although not quite as good, other highlights came in the form of “non-traditional” victims: trans women, cis men. Although you’d think the pool of submissions was larger for cis women, the cis female essays were almost universally terrible, while the minority-gender essays really stood out … in terms of writing skill and sincerity. I noted my biases above, so keep that in mind: if you yourself are a cis straight woman, then maybe you’ll find the queer narratives unrelatable and hollow, as I found the majority of the book to be.

Ally Sheedy’s is another good essay, and it surprised me, because by that point, I’d forgotten these were supposed to be essays. All of them had read more like literary memoir, which is fine, but an actual essay was certainly a breath of fresh air. “Bodies Against Borders” by Michelle Chen fell in the same vein as a refreshing piece of academia among a slough of sameness in the form of literary memoir. This essay is also the only one to address the racism that men of color face when they are painted as rapists. 

Several of the stories make references to repressed memories, recovered in adulthood, which was … chagrining, to say the least. After all the years of debunking and scientific research, and all the overturned convictions of falsely-accused “pedophiles” after the Satanic Panic, it was more than a little dismaying to see these stories included here, especially when cishet women have played such a large role in weaponizing Satanic Panic accusations at anyone who strikes them as weird or “queer”. That history should be at least somewhat familiar to Roxanne Gay, and I would expect her to be more mindful of it when compiling a collection of essays.

There is of course little to no mention in this book of institutional rape (i.e. psychiatric wards, prisons, or military rape), the role of the church, or rape faced by immigrants and refugees. Largely the narrative centers around wealthy college students and their awkward, sometimes violent encounters with fellow students. This, combined with the purple prose, contributed to a sense of “sameness” throughout the book that made it a chore to finish. The portrait of a rape victim, as painted in this book, is of a white straight female college student, someone with a lot of money to her name, an interest in feminist literature (of sometimes questionable renown) and a penchant for hard partying and puppy-dog love with studly alpha males. 

If this doesn’t sound like you, or if like me, you’ve seen this perspective a thousand times and are sure you’ll be forced to listen to it again … maybe do yourself a favor. Just skip this one.

 

(I guarantee you’ll hear the same perspective anyway, speaking over you and every other queer, nonwhite, poor, immigrant, uneducated peon at your next rape victim support group)

 

Comments

[amado1]

There's some much-better-written negative reviews on there already, I just checked! That's a relief to me XD The first one I read (also a two-star rating) focused on the lack of actual editing done by Roxanne Gay on this, and on any of her other works. That struck me as well. The foreword in "Not That Bad" was written by Gay, and I was startled by how repetitive it was. I got the sense that she hadn't even given it a cursory glance over before going to print ... even if she chose not to change a single word, she could have helped matters by highlighting or italicising some words for emphasis, to give it more of a spoken-word feel...