Rough - Rachel Thompson

Genre: Non-Fiction

Release Date: Expected 26th August 2021

Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK - Square Peg

"For every women, every femme, every non-binary person who's ever experienced something they didn't have the words to define. For those who've experienced something they'd rather forget. Who felt that what happened to them didn't match up to what they consented to. Who felt their experienced was just a 'gray area' or 'just bad sex' or 'not rape, but...'. Who were harmed, and didn't believe they had the right to feel that way."

Rough is a collection of the stories of fifty different women and non-binary people at their experience with sexual violence. It read more like a collection of personal anectodes with some facts and statistics alongside, so was (writing-wise) very easy to read and absorb, despite the content being very hard to read in places. It had a very personal feel to it, as though the writer is talking directly to us through these stories and reaching a familiarly painful place in all of us.

"There is a very specific type of lonliness that comes with not being to speak about these things. I didn't know that the women in my life were silently dealing with the very same thing."

Dealing with a range of issues that we are taught not to talk about, from the use of language such as 'unconsensual sex' that waters down the violence and the violation that is rape, to more subtle acts of sexual violence such as 'stealthing', the way we excuse non-consentual kink if someone has previously engaged in BDSM or other kinks and how we often view forced sex in relationships as a totally normal thing. Also bringing an open conversation into the 'gray' areas of sex, like consentual sex that is not wanted or desired but done regardless - this book may not have told me many things I didn't already know, but gave me a further insight into people from different backgrounds who've lived through similar experiences. This book is a conversation starter.

This book is kink-positive, sex-positive and consent-postive - looking into the other issues that tie in with sexual violence like racism, ableism,transphobia, fatphobia and other driving forces, blatant and microaggressive behind violence that the world is now starting to pay attention to.

RATING: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thank you to Rachel Thompson, Random House UK and Netgalley for this ARC in return for an honest review.

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