Top positive review
4.0 out of 5 stars"MY NO DID NOT MATTER"-p. 51
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 24, 2022
Roxane Gay was raped when she was 12.
In reading Roxane's autobiography, I was reminded of another woman's rape words about how she disassociated and felt herself floating above, watching her own rape from the ceiling and these are her words: "I will spend the rest of my life trying to reattach the parts of me that watched from the ceiling that day".
"Coming back" from rape is a journey, and it is usually punctuated with a lot of self-destruction, and Roxane's story has a lot of that. She often runs towards self-destruction because maybe on the other side of that, there is some kind of familiarity, some kind of safety, some version, perhaps twisted, of love. She writes of "needing to be a victim of some kind over and over. That was something familiar, something I understood" (p.236 of my paperback copy).
After sexual assault, it seems less harmful for a girl to inflict damage upon herself rather than having others do it. Sexually abused women will almost always have issues revolving around control because they often feel some of their control was relinquished, stolen, or lost in the abuse. And since sexual abuse involves her body in such a direct way, it is natural that control will be often directed there, at her own body.
In Roxane's novel, An Untamed State, the main character is gang-raped, just like Roxane. Instead of binge-eating, however, she does NOT eat, saying she wants to feel "empty", because if there is nothing there, if she is nothing, then, naturally, there's NOTHING LEFT TO HURT.
Both these approaches--overeating and undereating--are flip sides of the same control coin. And it is a message to her potential perpetrators, and it is this: "I've ruined myself before giving anyone else the chance to EVER AGAIN".
Before he organized his gang rape of Roxane, "Christopher" was someone Roxane wanted love from. She writes on p. 49: "Christopher wanted to use me. I wanted him to love me. I wanted him to fill the loneliness, to ease the ache of being awkward". This is the TRAP girls fall into, desperately wanting love or validation from an incapable boy, and they are often PUSHED into this trap. They are pushed by the media, by fairy tales, and they are often unaware that these guys are playing games.
After the rape, Roxane writes that she became "hyperconscious of how I take up space" (p. 172). This can be a result of sexual assault, regardless of body size. Many sexually assaulted women become hyper-vigilant and PTSD-ing in public because they know how quickly aggression can happen.
Unexamined, sexual assault creates a low bar for future relationships. When Roxane gets older, she often does not wait to get to know someone before jumping into a relationship, which often happens when sexually abused young women start having relationships. She writes of a new relationship that she jumps into that "we did not yet know the worst things about each other" (p. 235).
There should be a WAIT before you really know someone. And usually before a couple has sufficiently waited, they have bonded in "love" or more likely lust, and now feel close. BUT YET they don't really know each other, and, most likely, just know the best versions of each other: the desirable sheen.
There's always something sacred to the sexually assaulted woman, but it usually isn't sex. Roxane writes about the meaning of hugs for her: "A hug means something to me; it is an act of profound intimacy" (p.258).
She also writes of her perceived "inability to overcome my past" (p. 260). For me, seeing how rape is related to blurrier sexually coercive situations, including medical coercion, actually helps, because then rape becomes not an isolated incident, but weaved into the sorry-state of today's sneak-driven society.
Sexual assault is hard to crawl back from and there are some harsh reviewers here, their dismissive attitudes can come abusively close to the perpetrator's energy. Treat Roxane, and all the "Roxanes" with thinner bodies, kindly, respectfully, because that's only the beginning of the way back from abuse for all of society. Because, until that day, and I am not optimistic that that day will come, I will feel as Roxane feels: "angry when I think about how my sexuality has been shaped" (p. 246) AND....
..."weary of all our sad stories--not hearing them, but that we have these stories to tell, and that there are so many" (p.247).
