a b Girlhood Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 139-141 © The Author(s) doi: 10.3167/ghs.2021.140112 ISSN: 1938-8209 (print) 1938-8322 (online) Not That Grateful Survivor Resistance in Rape Culture Janet Wesselius BOOK REVIEW Gay, Roxane, ed. 2018. Not that Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture. New York: Harper. “I will not be grateful” says Claire Schwartz. Many of the 29 pieces in Rox- anne Gay’s anthology, Not Tat Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, make clear how women are expected to be grateful that their sexual assault was not worse than it was. And yet, many of them, like Schwartz, refuse to be grateful that something that should never have happened was not worse, was not more violent, more degrading, or actually fatal. Tis ubiquitous expectation to be grateful—unsurprisingly gendered feminine—is present in the title itself: we tell ourselves that our experiences of sexual assault are “not that bad” compared to the experiences of others. And as Gay points out, doing so “allowed [her] to break down [her] trauma into something more manageable, into something [she] could carry with [her] instead of allowing the magnitude of it to destroy [her]” (x). But at the same time, she says, [B]uying into the notion [it’s not that bad ] made me numb to bad experiences that weren’t as bad as the worst stories I heard. For years, I fostered wildly unreal- istic expectations of the kinds of experiences worthy of sufering until very little was worthy. Te surfaces of my empathy became calloused. (x) Tis anthology makes clear the toxic nexus between and among many fac- tors related to how girls are raised in this society: to be grateful; to minimise their discomfort or sufering; to put the needs of others ahead of their own; and to be accommodating and forgiving regardless of the cost to themselves and of how these patterns of socialization enable and perpetrate rape cul- ture. As xTx writes, “[T]he ways we are taught to be a girl start when you are very young” (115) and one of the lessons we learn is “if they want it, they can take it. What you want or don’t want is irrelevant” (119).