Girls Play Dead
Acts of Self-Preservation
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A lyrical and groundbreaking exploration of the misunderstood ways women survive and forever carry trauma from the award-winning New York Times Magazine writer Jen Percy.
“Percy’s subject is brutal, but her writing allays some of the impact by being almost impossibly beautiful: crisp, vulnerable, lyrical....Her stories, woven together, become something like a fabric, a totality....Girls Play Dead is a vital continuation of [the effort] 'to tell true stories of women’s lives,' in such breadth and definition that the justice system finally has to acknowledge what it’s been obscuring.” — Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“Girls Play Dead reads like a novel, exquisitely rendered, and a kind of geography, mapping out the complexities of women’s experiences going ‘down below’ and the specific ways that they come to understand their altered bodies and minds.”
—Rachel Aviv, New York Times bestselling author of Strangers to Ourselves
After a childhood spent learning survival strategies in the wilderness, Jen Percy thought she knew how she would respond in the face of danger. But a series of unsettling interactions with men left her feeling betrayed and confounded by her body's passivity. Forced to reckon the myths of her own empowerment, Percy set off a broader inquiry into the way fear shapes behavior in the context of sexual violence, including the strange behaviors of three generations of women in her family.
Drawing on original reporting, years of conversations with survivors, and her own life story, Percy explores the surprising ways in which responses to sexual violence are shaped by both evolutionary instinct and gendered scripts. She takes on taboo subjects—orgasms during assault, sexual promiscuity, female rage, freezing and passivity—illuminating how society misreads these acts as deviance or consent, rather than brilliant acts of self-preservation.
Like Joan Didion, Katherine Boo, and Janet Malcolm, Percy is a fearless cultural critic with a talent for wresting deep truths from lived experiences. Girls Play Dead meaningfully expands the language available to survivors and complicates our expectations of how a trauma story should sound—especially when belief, justice, and healing are contingent on how well a story “makes sense.” Percy examines how trauma corrupts storytelling itself, making survivors’ accounts seem fractured or surreal—and therefore less credible to institutions demanding coherence—resulting in an ambitious testament to the mind as a record of resilience.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With an eye for complexity and a deep sense of compassion, journalist Jen Percy takes an impressively broad look at what happens to women’s bodies and minds during traumatic events like sexual assault. Many of us have been taught that, when in extreme duress, humans enter fight or flight—a primal compulsion to either defend ourselves or run away. But as Percy discovers through a survey of survivors, this is often simply untrue. The immediate reaction for many is to go silent or become passive. Some find themselves completely physically immobilized until the threat has passed. Percy draws on human biology to show how natural these responses can be, but she also explores how women and girls are conditioned to please the men around them, especially men who are dangerous. And most frustratingly, she illustrates how these natural responses are completely at odds with the way police and the legal system investigate assaults. This is an eye-opening and important read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Percy (Demon Camp), a New York Times Magazine contributing writer, offers a groundbreaking exploration of women's often shamed and silenced responses to sexual assault. Confused by her own "accumulation" of passive reactions to sexual harassment, Percy wonders, "Why aren't we getting up and walking out?" Through extensive, empathetic interviews with sexual assault survivors, she examines a range of trauma responses, from freezing during a rape (known as tonic immobility) to post-assault symptoms like agoraphobia, dissociation, seizures in response to stimuli reminiscent of attacks, and increased sexual activity as a way of regaining agency. While these methods of self-preservation are deeply ingrained (Percy compares tonic immobility to prey animals playing dead), they also have "imprisoning powers," leading victims to suffer feelings of extreme guilt. Noting that "there is hardly any historical record" of these experiences from women's perspectives, she tracks down unconventional literary references and probes her own family's generational trauma. The latter helps reveal how she, like many women, learned passivity as a girl, taught to "accommodate the pain of others." Percy also emphasizes that the justice system's continued reliance on "believability" prevents victims who react to trauma in passive or "strange" ways from getting justice—but that fighting back, as women are exhorted to do, can lead to even worse outcomes (she relays the harrowing stories of three women imprisoned for killing their attackers). The result is a vital record of a little discussed aspect of women's lived reality.
