Rape Culture Quotes

“Is this what growing into an adult woman is—having to predict and accordingly arrange for the avoidance of sexual harassment?”
― Candice Carty-Williams, Queenie

“I would never put the words ‘rape ’ and ‘play ’ in the same sentence. I there's rape, there's no play, " he says.”
― Mya Robarts, The V Girl: A Coming of Age Story

“The shame should have been all his but I chose to carry it around this whole time.”
― S.K. Ali, Saints and Misfits

“How is it that two eyes, a nose and a mouth can be positioned in such varying ways that it makes one person beautiful, and another person not?”
― Louise O'Neill, Asking For It

“I thought: And I do what countless women before me have been forced to do. I spread my legs for the man who killed my husband and my brother.”
― Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls

“Now, whenever she thinks of it, she is confused about what she did and didn't cause. She is confused about desire, and her own desirability. She is confused about her own sexuality. It should be hers to wield as she wishes, she knows this, but why—even if she isn't wielding it, exactly, even if she's just being herself—is there the sense of a shameful invitation, or even an invitation at all? She knows she should be able to invite if she wants to invite, to say no if she wants to say no, yes if she wants to say yes, to allure or not allure, to just simply feel good about what her body is and does and how it looks. She is supposed to be sure and confident about those things, but how can she possibly be sure and confident about those things? There are so many colliding messages—confidence and shame, power and powerlessness, what she owes others and what is hers—that she can't hear what's true.”
― Deb Caletti, A Heart in a Body in the World

“I am a real survivor because I survived, even if some days it feels like I didn't survive at all.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“The ways we are taught to be a girl start when you are very young. When you are being taught, you don't know about the points. When you are being taught to be a girl, the lessons are simply accepted-the price you pay for your curves, your holes. It's only later, when you are older, after you've been taught, that you find out about the score sheet.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“I just meant this stuff with me is different. And I definitely wouldn't call it regular bullying."
"So what would you call it, then?"
I opened my mouth to answer.
But I didn't have any words.
Because all the words I could think of—bullying, teasing, flirting—seemed too simple, too small, to hold all the hurt I was feeling.”
― Barbara Dee, Maybe He Just Likes You

“Whore," he spat at her.

"If I am a whore for resisting you," she said through her teeth, "what would I have been for giving in?"

"Whore," he said again.”
― G. Willow Wilson, The Bird King

“Anger is always reserved for someone else. And yet, I've been in a room who escaped a war, who lost her father in ethnic cleansing, whose mother burned her hair, whose cousin raped her. 'What right do I have to be angry, when I am alive?' she said.
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.
An angry woman must answer for herself. The reasons for her anger must be picked over, examined, and debated.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“When we’re talking about race or religion or politics, it is often said we need to speak carefully. These are difficult topics where we need to be vigilant not only in what we say but also in how we express ourselves. That same care must extend to how we write about violence and sexual violence in particular.”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“I survived.

Raped children are supposed to die. What would the culture of the individual white cisgender male straight genius do without us? We are the predicate of their sentences, material for their dispassionate dissections.

We are supposed to die prettily and vacantly so our rage doesn’t tear down all their certificates and awards and case files, trash their analysis and ram their face in the privilege that allows them to side with our abusers in silencing and killing us.

“He has sometimes likened his style of writing to that of a medic performing a post-mortem on a raped child-whose job is to analyze the injuries, not to give vent to the rage that is felt.”
- Susie Mackenzie on J.G. Ballard,
Guardian, Sept. 6th, 2003

If Ballard’s is the model for the experimental, political novel, how is the (un)dead raped child supposed to write, even if she survives?”
― So Mayer, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Now, whenever she thinks of it, she is confused about what she did and didn't cause. She is confused about desire, and her own desirability. She is confused about her own sexuality. It should be hers to wield as she wishes, she knows this, but why—even if she isn't wielding it, exactly, even if she's just being herself—is there the sense of a shameful invitation, or even an invitation at all? She knows she should be able to invite if she wants to invite, to say no if she wants to say no, yes if she wants to say yes, to allure or not allure, to just simply feel good about what her body is and does and how it looks.”
― Deb Caletti, A Heart in a Body in the World

“His comments are not compliments, or even propositions.
They are declarations of ownership. They are threats.
They are the intrusive thumb of male privilege and patriarchal violence, reminding me of my place as I move around within public space.

They are the put-down, the screw-you, the worthless-slur, the great derision that is a constant, omnipresent reminder that society allows male sexual violence to function commonly as a social norm.

It is the constant reminder that I should always be scared.

That I am never safe.

That someone always wants to hurt me, and that society will always, always turn its face the other way, as seen by the normalcy with which men can publicly deride me with confidence and gusto in their threats.”
― Alice Minium

“People who live through sexual assault are a crash on the side of the road, and the American media is nothing more than cars slowing down just long enough to take a peek.”
― Amber Tamblyn, Any Man

“In the twenty-first century, the vagina has come to eclipse the female face.”
― Antonella Gambotto-Burke

“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.”
― Roxane Gay, Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture

“Blaming her meant that she was at fault, that she must have done something for this to happen to her. And so it could never happen to their innocent, sweet, obedient daughters.”
― Mina Rehman, Women Who Slay Women

“Despite this inundation of rape imagery, where we are immersed in a rape culture—one that is overly permissive toward all manner of sexual violence—not enough victims of gang rape speak out about the toll the experience exacts. The right stories are not being told, or we’re not writing enough about the topic of rape in the right ways. Perhaps we too casually use the term “rape culture” to address the very specific problems that rise from a culture mired in sexual violence. Should we, instead, focus on “rapist culture” because decades of addressing “rape culture” has accomplished so little?”
― Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

“You hear that, boys? No one is responsible for your actions but you. Do you want to be someone’s morning-after regret? Because if so, you’re a terrible person, and you deserve to go to jail. If not, spare some thought to the consequences before you decide to pick up that drunk chick at the bar.”
― K.B. Rainwater, Bite Me

“The self-evident danger of this view is that it encourages the reader to think of female consent as a foregone conclusion once the pickup artist becomes sufficiently skilled.”
― Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age

“The Red Pill solution to the false allegation problem is to create a society in which female consent is virtually meaningless, so that when a woman asserts that she has not consented, few will care.”
― Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age

“Red Pill writers...have appropriated the texts and history of ancient Greece and Rome to bolster their most abhorrent ideas: that all women are deceitful and degenerate; that white men are by nature more rational than (and therefore superior to) everyone else; that women's sexual boundaries exist to be manipulated and crossed; and, finally, that society as a whole would benefit if men were given the responsibility for making all decisions for women, particularly over their sexual and reproductive choices.”
― Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age

“Deconstructed, I find its bits and pieces everywhere around me in the architecture of my social world.

I find components of its violence in the sexism of your comments.

I find it in the way you touch me without asking.

I find it in the way you call that girl a whore.

I find its bits and pieces of violence, the building blocks of sexual assault, in the psyches and vocabularies of my boyfriend, my professors, and my friends.”
― Alice Minium

“Deconstructed, I find its bits and pieces everywhere around me in the architecture of my social world.

I find components of its violence in the sexism of your comments. I find it in the way you touch me without asking. I find it in the way you call that girl a whore.

I find its bits and pieces of violence, the building blocks of sexual assault, in the psyches and vocabularies of my boyfriend, my professors, and my friends.”
― Alice Minium

“For it is the silent men, far more than the loud mouthy men on Warwick Boulevard, who make this possible. It is the silent men at 711, the silent men at the YMCA, the silent men next to us in cars, the silent men lying next to us in our bedrooms, the silent men we call our best friends, our boyfriends, and our fathers.

It is the silent men, not the loud ones- who permit foulmouthed men to chew me up and spit me out as I walk down the street.

It is the silent men who could have stopped this, but who didn’t care to, because they were busy.

It is the silent men who said 'Yes' to violence, and who, in their complicit silence, insisted that my world would be impenetrably loud.”
― Alice Minium

“Every man erupting against the willing of a woman is a rapist”
― Sir P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar