Maggie Georgiana Young

You can't exploit a woman who has based her entire career on exploiting herself.

I am done looking for love where it doesn__ exist. I am done coughing up dust in attempts to drink from dry wells.

We long for an intimate connection, but that longing makes us feel vulnerable. Therefore, we guard our hearts for self-preservation, which barricades that intimacy we are longing for. Casual sex is a very sad cat and mouse game. The man is entrapped in his role as the sex-driven predator constantly on the hunt for new conquests, while the woman is the prey that must find her perfect combination of sexual allure and virtue, with the sexual allure being what attracts him and virtue what keeps him.

I only knew to treat the male asshole as if it had a grenade buried inside of it that could ignite a deadly explosion of anger, trauma, and sexual confusion.

The prostate might as well have been a mythological creature like a unicorn or Leprechaun only acknowledged through whispery giggles among women brunching with their gay friends.

I milked my typical persona as a gritty, intellectual sex-positive feminist that men loved to conquer, toss aside, and shove into their conquest collection in the dusty backs of their closets.

But penetration was a big deal. They protected their anuses the way girls protected their hymen in high school, believing that allowing anything beyond their holy gates would permanently corrupt them.

But time and time again, I saw the change in their eyes once they__ conquered me. Dehumanization always follows penetration.

Anal sex was my least favorite bedroom activity. Even through half a bottle of lube, the whole charade felt like pooping backwards. It was a negotiation token- something I begrudgingly did in exchange for backrubs and switching the television from football to Sex in the City. Anal sex was something I tolerated in order to be a cool girlfriend, because it was and still is common knowledge that that men love shoving their dicks in buttholes. Male buttholes, however, had their own rules and regulations. Everyone knew that men who allowed rectal access were gay. I didn__ question it. I didn__ analyze it. I only knew to treat the male asshole as if it had a grenade buried inside of it that could ignite a deadly explosion of anger, trauma, and sexual confusion.

My life views on sex, men, dating, and self-worth were sculpted with the unfiltered ramblings of a drunken misogynist.

Incarceration is when nobody writes a happy ending for a woman without a man.

My wakeup call wasn__ some light switch of empowerment. From as early as preschool I feared that if I didn__ grow up to be the pretty princess men fawned over, I was a failure. That mentality was my disease. It got me raped. It made me feel dirty and devalued because my cherry wasn__ popped on a bed of rose petals. It fueled an adolescence juggling starvation and vomiting until my throat bled out and my stomach acid burned through the plumbing. It made me snort coke, smoke meth, and routinely gulp down narcotic petri dishes in hopes of obtaining hallucinogenic intimacy with junkie boyfriends. But most of all, it made me waste my youth chasing, obsessing over, fighting for, worshipping, clinging to, and crying over one after another loser. At some point, I just quit giving a fuck.

I would take them a few times, feel my emotions and sense of reality fuzz, and look at my mother who had been doped up on them since we moved to Chattanooga. I would see her blank, hazel eyes, and her bright, but empty, smile with chronic, artificial, exaggerated cheer, and become scared. I often wondered if she was buried under layers upon layers of southern sugar. I would make bitchy, inappropriate statements and look for her. I would say something, anything to shake her and look into her eyes for something real. I saw it when she was upset or afraid. I saw it when she__ spot me exiting my bathroom, hair tied back, knowing what I__ done. I saw it when she found out I was raped. I saw it when I told her about the drugs I used. I saw flickers of a real person, but she quickly disappeared within herself once she gathered composure. I decided not to be like her. Even if it meant embracing my demons, I wanted to be real. After a couple doses, I would toss the meds in the garbage.

The deeper into this chapter in my life I get, the fainter the hum of crucifixion becomes.

The gentlemanly Number 23 would have never made such a crude statement to a lady. But I was not a lady. Sure, I was intelligent and strong, but I dared to be wide open. I was Maggie Young, chaser of boys, writer of scandal, dropper of f-bombs, tits on a stick.

While men had the right to obey their biological urges, women had to suppress theirs until the perfect moment. From television, movies, books, magazines, my peers, and even some of my relatives, I was taught that if a woman allowed a man to penetrate her too soon, she was too easy of a conquest for him. He would move on to pursue greater challenges after he was finished using her body to relieve his sexual urges. If the woman waited too long to let the man enter her body, she was a prude and the man would eventually give up on her. Women needed to time this process perfectly so that she could __eep_ a man in her life at all times.It was the man__ goal to catch the woman and the woman__ goal to keep the man.

I always imagined rape as this violent scene of a woman walking alone down a dark alley and getting mugged and beaten by some masked criminal. Rape was an angry man forcing himself inside a damsel in distress. I would not carry the trauma of a cliché rape victim. I would not shriek in the midst of my slumber with night terrors. I would not tremble at the sight of every dark haired man or the mention of Number 1__ name. I would not even harbor ill will towards him. My damage was like a cigarette addiction- subtle, seemingly innocent, but everlasting and inevitably detrimental. Number 1 never opened his screen door to furious crowds waving torches and baseball bats. Nobody punched him out in my honor. The Nightfall crowd never socially ostracized him. Even the ex-boyfriend who__ second handedly fused the entire fiasco continued to mingle with him in drug circles. Everybody continued with business as usual. And when I told my parents I lost my virginity against my will, unconscious on a bathroom floor, Carl did not erupt in fury and demand I give him all I knew about his whereabouts so he could greet him with a rifle. Mom blankly shrugged and mumbled, __h, that__ too bad,_ and drifted into the kitchen as if I__ received a stubbed toe rather than a shredded hymen. Everyone in my life took my rape as lightly as a brief thunderstorm that might have been frightening when it happened, but was easy to forget about. I adopted that mentality as the foundation of my sex life. I would, time and time again, treat sex as flimsily as it started. I would give it away as if it was cheap, second hand junk, rather than a prize that deserved to be earned.

Suddenly, the brave warriors parading to combat with bugles and bayonets were replaced by the push of a button.