Review of Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation

Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation by Jen Percy revises dominant narratives around sexual assault by telling real-life stories of sexual assault.The book's title means many things all at once: infantilizing women by referring to them as girls, making all of us take seriously what happens to the bodies of women and girls, figuring the actions of women as frivolous or fatal, and blurring the lines between all of these things.Women's own experiences told in their own voices are at the heart of the book.And Percy interlaces those accounts with the standard account or accounts of intimate partner sexual violence and the new ones that she narrates.Percy writes against versions of sexual trauma that understand women's seeming passivity-silence, not explicitly saying no, body language and even sexual responses that may seem to welcome instead of reject the escalating violence, and remembering some details of the assault with excruciating accuracy while blotting out others in the face of it-as consent or something very like consent.Instead, she foregrounds understandings of sexual trauma that underscore the various origins of that seeming passivity, how it gets expressed during sexual violence, and its ongoing effects in real women's real lives.Not all unwanted sex is sexual assault.If having sex is reduced to binary terms, our resources are limited for both describing and understanding sex that doesn't feel right to at least one partner.Percy's book is expansive in its discussion around the hugely various forms of unwelcome sex.She situates her book within the context of wider conversations about unwanted sex, including consensual sex (or sex that is, as one woman she interviews puts it, "consensualish").1 Unwanted sex doesn't have to involve physical force or the fear of force.Women report feeling forced into sex "by the situation and not the person."2 The very act of sex becomes a way to