Bad Feminist: Essays

by Roxane Gay

  As a critic, I recognize the significant flaws, I do, but The Hunger Games is not a movie I am able to watch as a critic. The story means too much to me.

  The Hunger Games books are not perfect. While the writing is engaging and well paced, the quality of the prose weakens with each successive book. Many of the secondary characters aren’t well developed, and at times the plot strains credulity. The third book is rather rushed, and some of Collins’s choices feel almost gratuitous, particularly with regard to the characters she chose to kill off. The complete erasure of sexuality is problematic. Intimacy is conveyed through a great deal of kissing to the point that it becomes laughable. It is disturbing that within the world of the Hunger Games, it is perfectly acceptable for teenagers to kill one another and die or otherwise suffer in really violent ways, but it is not at all acceptable for them to explore their sexuality.

  I was struck, consistently, by the sheer brutality, and yet the undeniable heart of the story, of the characters, of my dearest Peeta and his devotion for Katniss, and how toward the end, even when it seemed hopeless, they found their way to each other. The books’ imperfections are easily forgiven because the best parts of the books are the truest—that sometimes, the one you love best is the one who has always been right by your side, even when you didn’t notice.

  I am fascinated by strength in women.

  People tend to think I’m strong. I’m not. And yet. I identify with Katniss because throughout the trilogy, the people around Katniss expect her to be strong and she does her best to meet those expectations, even when it costs her a great deal.

  I come from a loving, tight-knit, imperfect but great family. My parents have always been involved in my life even when I pushed them away. I have wanted for little. One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I have always been lonely. I’ve struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I’m weird, because I live in my head. When I was young, we moved around a lot, so there was rarely any time to get to know a new place, let alone new people. Loneliness was the one familiar thing, making me this bottomless pit of need, open and gaping and desperate for anything to fill me up.

  I should not be this way but I am.

  When I was in middle school, when I was young—old enough to like a boy but young enough to have no clue what that meant—there was a boy who I thought was my boyfriend and who said he was my boyfriend but who also completely ignored me at school. It’s a sad, silly story lots of girls know. It was fine because when we were together, he made me feel like he could fill my gaping void. He was terrible, but he was also charming and persuasive. I was nerdy and friendless, all lanky limbs and crazy hair, and he was beautiful and popular. I accepted the state of affairs between us.

  When we were together, he’d tell me what he wanted to do to me. He wasn’t asking permission. I was not an unwilling participant. I was not a willing participant. I felt nothing one way or the other. I wanted him to love me. I wanted to make him happy. If doing things to my body made him happy, I would let him do anything to my body. My body was nothing to me. It was just meat and bones around that void he filled by touching me. Technically, we didn’t have sex, but we did everything else. The more I gave, the more he took. At school, he continued looking right through me. I was dying but I was happy. I was happy because he was happy, because if I gave enough, he might love me. As an adult, I don’t understand how I allowed him to treat me like that. I don’t understand how he could be so terrible. I don’t understand how desperately I sacrificed myself. I was young.

  I was always a good girl. I was a straight-A student, top of my class. I did as I was told. I was polite to my elders. I was good to my siblings. I went to church. It was very easy to hide how very bad I was becoming from my family, from everyone. Being good is the best way to be bad.

  It never crossed my mind to say no or that I should say no, that I could say no. He started pressuring me to have sex. I didn’t say no but I didn’t say yes and I did not want to say yes. I wanted to say no but could not because I would lose him. I would be nothing again.

  One day we were riding our bikes in the woods. About a mile deep, there was an abandoned hunting cabin often used by teenagers to do the things teenagers do when they’re hiding out in the woods. It was disgusting—small, a dirt floor littered with empty beer cans and used condom wrappers and discarded cigarette packs. There was a small bench. The glass in the windows was broken, brown with age. Several of his friends from school were there. I didn’t know them well, had mostly seen them in the halls. They were all popular, handsome. They would never have reason to know a girl like me, quiet, shy, awkward.

  I did not understand, not at first. I was very naïve despite what I thought I knew. Once I realized what was going on, I assumed this boy wanted me to give his friends blow jobs. I did not want to do that, to share what I thought was private between this boy and me, but I would have. I could have, if only to make him happy. I told him I wanted us to leave, to continue on our bike ride. I did that. I did try to save myself. I did understand I was not safe. They were all so much bigger and I finally felt something. I felt fear but I didn’t know how to say no. I tried to leave, to run out of that cabin, but they grabbed me just past the threshold. I screamed. I opened my mouth and I screamed and my voice echoed through the woods and no one came for me. Not one person heard me. We were too far deep.

  The boy I thought was my boyfriend pushed me to the ground. He took my clothes off, and I lay there with no body to speak of, just a flat board of skin and girl bones. I tried to cover myself with my arms but I couldn’t, not really. The boys stared at me while they drank beer and laughed and said things I didn’t understand because I knew things but I knew nothing about what a group of boys could do to kill a girl.

  I was a good girl who went to church. I had faith. I believed in God back then, so I prayed. I prayed for God to save me because I could not save me. I whispered Our Father because it was the only prayer I knew by heart. I begged God to change those boys’ minds. He didn’t. And then I did say no, I found my voice, and it didn’t matter and I wasted my first love, my first everything, on a boy who thought so very little of me.

  They kept me there for hours. It was as bad as you might expect. The repercussions linger. I walked home alone, pushing my stupid bike, hating myself for thinking this boy loved me. I was a good girl, so that’s what my parents saw when I came home a completely different person and went to my room and tried to pull myself together well enough to be the girl everyone knew. I had to hide what happened because I didn’t want to get in trouble, because my parents were strict, because you’re not allowed to have sex before marriage, because I was a good girl, so that’s what I did. I swallowed the truth, which only made that gaping void of need inside me yawn wider.

  Just because you survive something does not mean you are strong.

  The worst of it was going to school the next day. I didn’t want to but I had no choice. I was a good girl. I went to French class and sat in the second-to-last row. It was uncomfortable in every way. Just as class was about to begin, the boy behind me grabbed my shoulder and I felt a surge of adrenaline, then terror. He stood and leaned into me. He said, “You’re a slut,” and everyone heard and they snickered. Everyone started calling me a slut. When the teacher came in and stood at the front of the room, she looked at me differently. If she could have, she would have called me a slut too. I was mortified and trapped. I sat perfectly still and tried to concentrate, but all I could hear was the hiss of the word “slut.” That shame was one of the worst things I have ever known. “Slut” was my name for the rest of the school year because those boys went and told a very different story about what happened in the woods.

  In June 2011, Meghan Cox Gurdon wrote, in the Wall Street Journal, about how Young Adult fiction has taken too dark a turn, has unnecessarily exposed young readers to complex, difficult situations before they are mature enough to make sense of those situations. She wrote
,

  If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.

  She is correct in noting that there is darkness in some Young Adult fiction, but she largely ignores the diversity of the genre and the countless titles that aren’t grounded in damage, brutality, or loss. More troubling, though, is the suggestion that somehow reality should be sanitized for teen readers.

  The critical response to Gurdon’s article was swift and passionate from writers and readers alike. Sherman Alexie wrote, “There are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books—especially the dark and dangerous ones—will save them.”

  I learned a long time ago that life introduces young people to situations they are in no way prepared for, even good girls, lucky girls who want for nothing. Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you. Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.

  Perhaps I loved the Hunger Games trilogy because the books were, in their own way, a fairy tale and I am always, always in search of a fairy tale.

  As I read the Hunger Games series, I thought of Gurdon’s article because I was struck, more than once, by the intensity of the traumas the characters were put through, the relentlessness of that trauma, and the visible effects. At times, I thought, This is too much, but I know something of the world now, and there are rarely limits to suffering. In this trilogy, suffering has few limits, and suffering has consequences that, all too often, we forget when narratives neatly imply that everything turns out okay, when narratives imply that it gets better without demonstrating what it takes to get to better. In the Hunger Games, it takes everything.

  My love for these books, at its purest, is not really about Peeta or anything silly and girly. I love that a young woman character is fierce and strong but human in ways I find believable, relatable. Katniss is clearly a heroine, but a heroine with issues. She intrigues me because she never seems to know her own strength. She isn’t blandly insecure the way girls are often forced to be in fiction. She is brave but flawed. She is a heroine, but she is also a girl who loves two boys and can’t choose which boy she loves more. She is not sure she is up to the task of leading a revolution, but she does her best, even as she doubts herself.

  Katniss endures the unendurable. She is damaged and it shows. At times, it might seem like her suffering is gratuitous, but life often presents unendurable circumstances people manage to survive. Only the details differ. The Hunger Games trilogy is dark and brutal, but in the end, the books also offer hope—for a better world and a better people and, for one woman, a better life, a life she can share with a man who understands her strength and doesn’t expect her to compromise that strength, a man who can hold her weak places and love her through the darkest of her memories, the worst of her damage. Of course I love the Hunger Games. The trilogy offers the tempered hope that everyone who survives something unendurable hungers for.

  The Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion

  When I see men who look like him or his friends. When I smell beer on a man’s breath. When I smell Polo cologne. When I hear a harsh laugh. When I walk by a group of men, clustered together, and there’s no one around. When I see a woman being attacked in a movie or on television. When I am in the woods or driving through a heavily wooded area. When I read about experiences that are all too familiar. When I go through security at the airport and am pulled aside for extra screening, which seems to happen every single time I travel. When I’m having sex and my wrists are unexpectedly pinned over my head. When I see a young girl of a certain age.

  When it happens, a sharp pang runs right through the center of my body. Or I feel sick to my stomach. Or I vomit. Or I break into a cold sweat. Or I feel myself shutting down, and I go into a quiet place. Or I close my fingers into tight fists until my knuckles ache. My reaction is visceral and I have to take a deep breath or two or three or more. I have to remind myself of the time and distance between then and now. I have to remind myself that I am not the girl in the woods anymore. I have to convince myself I never will be again. It has gotten better over the years.

  It gets better until it doesn’t.

  The first congressional hearing on television violence was held in 1954, and in the ensuing years, the debate about television and violence has been ongoing. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 dictated that televisions needed to include a chip to monitor program ratings. The current television parental guidelines went into effect on January 1, 1997. These guidelines were designed to help parents monitor what their children were watching and get some sense of the appropriateness of a given television program.

  The guidelines rated television content by age appropriateness from G (all audiences) to MA (mature audiences only). There are also a second set of guidelines designed to protect children from violence, coarse language, and sexual themes. These guidelines, of course, only work if someone is monitoring what children are watching and is able to enforce a set of standards about what children can watch. Cable boxes and most televisions now allow parents to lock certain channels or shows with ratings they consider inappropriate for their children, but there is only so much a parent can control.

  How effective, then, are these ratings and guidelines? In “Ratings and Advisories: Implications for the New Ratings System for Television,” Joanne Cantor et al. note how research shows that “parental discretion warnings and the more restrictive MPAA ratings stimulate some children’s interest in viewing programs,” and “the increased interest in restricted programs is more strongly linked to children’s desire to reject control over their viewing than to their seeking out violent content.” Even children want a taste of forbidden fruit. Or at the very least, children don’t want to be told they cannot taste that fruit.

  Television ratings are like airport security—an act of theater, an illusion designed to reassure us, to make us feel like we control the influences we allow into our lives.

  We want our children to be safe. We want to be safe. We want and need to pretend this is possible.

  When I see the phrase “trigger warning,” I am far more inclined to read whatever follows. I myself enjoy the taste of forbidden fruit.

  I also know trigger warnings cannot save me from myself.

  Trigger warnings are, essentially, ratings or protective guidelines for the largely unmoderated Internet. Trigger warnings provide order to the chaos of the interwebs; they are a signal that the content following the warning may be upsetting, may trigger bad memories or reminders of traumatic or sensitive experiences. Trigger warnings allow readers a choice: steel yourself and continue reading, or protect yourself and look away.

  Many feminist communities use trigger warnings, particularly in online forums when discussing rape, sexual abuse, and violence. By using these warnings, these communities are saying, “This is a safe space. We will protect you from unexpected reminders of your history.” Members of these communities are given the illusion they can be protected.

  There are a great many potential trigger warnings. Over the years, I have seen trigger warnings for eating disorders, poverty, self-injury, bullying, heteronormativity, suicide, sizeism, genocide, slavery, mental illness, explicit fiction, explicit discussions of sexuality, homose
xuality, homophobia, addiction, alcoholism, racism, the Holocaust, ableism, and Dan Savage.

  Life, apparently, requires a trigger warning.

  This is the uncomfortable truth: everything is a trigger for someone. There are things you cannot tell just by looking at someone.

  We all have history. You can think you’re over your history. You can think the past is the past. And then something happens, often innocuous, that shows you how far you are from over it. The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.

  I used to think I didn’t have triggers because I told myself I was tough. I was steel. I was broken beneath the surface, but my skin was forged, impenetrable. Then I realized I had all kinds of triggers. I simply had buried them deep until there was no more room inside me. When the dam burst, I had to learn how to stare those triggers down. I had a lot of help, years and years of help.

  I have writing.

  Every so often debates about trigger warnings flare hotly and both sides are resolute. Trigger warnings are either ineffective and impractical or vital for creating safe online spaces.

  It has been suggested, more than once, that if you don’t believe in trigger warnings, you aren’t respecting the experiences of rape and abuse survivors. It has been suggested, more than once, that trigger warnings are unnecessary coddling.

  It is an impossible debate. There is too much history lurking beneath the skin of too many people. Few are willing to consider the possibility that trigger warnings might be ineffective, impractical, and necessary for creating safe spaces all at once.

  The illusion of safety is as frustrating as it is powerful.

  There are things that rip my skin open and reveal what lies beneath, but I don’t believe in trigger warnings. I don’t believe people can be protected from their histories. I don’t believe it is at all possible to anticipate the histories of others.