Roxane Gay Quote

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

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?

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About Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay (born October 15, 1974) is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017).
Gay was an assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University for four years before joining Purdue University as an associate professor of English. In 2018, she left Purdue to become a visiting professor at Yale University.
Gay is a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for The Rumpus, and the editor for Gay Mag, which was founded in partnership with Medium.