Maggie Young Quotes

The crew did not fit the stereotype of the Navy sailors that I expected. The media always presented Navy men as being GI Joe's in white. But a good sum of them were in their thirties and forties. Very few sported less than two chins, let alone the six-pack of a warrior. While standing at attention, I saw a slew of potbellies jiggling atop Navy belt buckles. I saw bald spots, acne, retro porn mustaches, and wrinkles, but to my utter disappointment, no eye candy.

It seems quite bizarre how much I loved one big bundle of all of my demons, but that may have been his core appeal. If he could embrace me, there was a chance I could become tolerable, even passable in those worlds that considered me a plague.

Abusive relationships exist because they provide enough rations of warmth, laughter, and affection to clutch onto like a security blanket in the heap of degradation. The good times are the initial euphoria that keeps addicts draining their wallets for toxic substances to inject into their veins. Scraps of love are food for an abusive relationship.

Affairs began, drama spread, and traditional, good-old-boy camaraderie was tainted by the temptresses who represented the inconvenience of feminism.

We were sexual targets, marked as eternal sluts for exploring the desires only acceptable in men.

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.

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'd spot me exiting my bathroom, hair tied back, knowing what I'd 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.

High school doesn't end after high school.

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

My self-respect is my biggest cock block.

Just Another Number was meant to be unresolved because resolving it would destroy its authenticity. It's a memoir. I am unresolved as a human being. And it also leaves room for a sequel.

Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.

My shipmates and I only grasped our roles on the very superficial level we were taught. We were fighting the bad guys. They were the bad guys because we were told that they were the bad guys. We had to control, infiltrate, and shove our authority around the world because we were its greatest nation. We had the shiniest ships, the biggest guns, the deadliest weapons, and the cockiest egos. And if we thought otherwise, we were vicious traitors. The military condemns rebels, thinkers, and doubt. The military loves obedience, loyalty, and oblivion. Its core values are, after all, "Honor, Courage, and Commitment.

My wakeup call wasn't some light switch of empowerment. From as early as preschool I feared that if I didn't 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't 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.

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

It is not your job to convince men to like you.

I envied the men. I envied the irresponsibility their surroundings and genitals allowed. I envied the artificial affection they bought. But most of all, I envied that flicker of euphoria they got to feel, like a quick sip of whiskey that warmed their chest and eased their pain.

From my first stab at second base, I became obsessively concerned for my vaginal upkeep. I began shaving the day after I felt my first tongue down my throat. The first buzz was a disaster, causing horrifically itchy dull razor breakout that made me look like I made love to a poison ivy bush. Whenever I thought there was a chance of unveiling my privates, I smothered every breakout with the same foundation I used for the occasional teenage acne face breakouts.

Adolescence is never graceful or beautiful. Our first steps are wobbly, full of stumbles and spills. Our first words are mispronounced and barely comprehendible. Our first kisses are sloppy and wet. The process of breaking sexual thresholds is far from sexy. It will be a long time until being a penetrator outgrows the feel of a grade school science experiment where I fill my paper mache volcano with vinegar and baking soda, giggling and high-fiving my lab partner once it explodes.

Seasoned digital daters are like lions who have had their prey killed, butchered, and served to them on a tray in their artificial habitat for so long that they've forgotten how to hunt.

I grew up missing my mom while she was right in front of me.

But what has happened is that emotional evolution has not caught up with our economics. We are still haunted by the outdated myth that women need men.

The idea of giving a man a rim job provoked the squeamishness I felt at thirteen when I accidentally stumbled upon my first porn, Women Who Love Big White Cocks. I was repulsed that a woman would put her mouth on a man's penis. After all, that's where he pees. I got older. I discovered my sexuality and on countless occasions, put my mouth where a boy peed. He put his mouth where I peed, put his fingers where I pooped, put where he peed where I pooped, and we swapped saliva the entire time. Men forgot that the female breasts that ignited their hard-ons fed them as infants. We didn't realize that although the meaning changed, our "dirty places" remained the same.

Even beyond my craving for sex was my longing for intimacy. Matty advertised intimacy. He dangled it in front of my face and jerked it away the second my arm shifted to reach for it. The moment my interest weaned, he'd dangle it again. The scraps of attention Matty tossed me was merely a flickering candle on the other end of a cold dungeon. I couldn't escape incarceration, but I was certain that its flames would thaw my frostbite.

In the privacy of my room, armed with a mirror, shaving cream, razor, and bowl of water, I sat on my floor with a towel propped under my bare ass. Leaning back against my bed with my legs wide open as if I were about to give birth, I shaved everything off. My lady parts looked like a barren desert after a massive forest fire. I saw parts of myself that had long vanished beneath pubescent growth.
Suddenly, I felt sexy. There was something about going bare that made me feel sensual and touchable. But that was short lived. I was ill prepared for my skin's reaction to the change. I completely broke out. My pussy flushed as razor bumps shot across my flesh as if I'd had an allergic reaction to my underwear. It took weeks of applying antibiotic ointment to calm my skin.

Southerners have mastered picking, choosing, and rationalizing religious texts to fit their social agenda better than their own mother's fried chicken recipe.

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

Patriarchy is women structuring lifelong decisions around men they haven't met.

He practically floated. He spoke, smiled, nodded, and laughed with so much flawless grace. I suddenly felt an urge to push him over. I wanted him to fall on his ass just so he could seem human. I wanted him to laugh, open-mouthed and uncontrolled.

An eerie aspect of social media is the way the dead's account lingers in digital space as a floating memorial. Friends post emotional farewells as if the departed will read them. But we all know that those words are for the rest of the world as if to flaunt their bond with the deceased like a new car or engagement ring. Just like any material possession that ceases production, a person's value amplifies when they are dead. They have no future. They have no present. Their past becomes a limited resource that everyone is desperate to snag a piece of.

I lived in a picture perfect subdivision with color coordinated houses and mailboxes, yellow labs prancing within the borders of invisible electric fences, and balding dads on riding lawn mowers. It was the type of community where housewives spent their summers tanning by the pool, half-heartedly watching their Ritalin pumped brat beat another brat with a foam noodle while rehashing Sunday's Bible study between whispers of Susie's weight gain and Dan's canoodling with the babysitter.

His unfiltered conversation topics reminded me of my female sailor status: More than a hooker, less than a woman. I was a brick wall he could chuck rocks at all day and not feel a thing. But they hurt. God, they hurt.

My parents' attempts to stop my habit were through guilt and force. They grounded me several times. Carl made cracks when he felt that I was eating too much and snide comments on my weight yo-yoing. They sent me to psychiatrists who tried to quick fix me by Paxil, Zoloft, and Effexor prescriptions. All were antidepressants with weight gain for side effects, which might as well have been rat poison for a bulimic.

We all want love. We all want affection and admiration. But there will inevitably be people determined to hate you no matter what you do. And chances are, their approval isn't worth your struggle to get it.

I never dealt with excessive body fur. But having barely made love to a tampon, my privates were truly untainted.

As a child of the millennial generation, I was raised in a society in which we were under the misconception that women and men had reached equality. With the exception of very few matriarchal societies, women were more liberated than they had ever been in history. In America's middle class, basic education was practically handed to us. We have the ability to obtain a higher education and career without men. So it took me nearly a decade after becoming sexually active to realize that, as a woman, I was socially oppressed. I grew up in a world where a woman's abstinence until marriage was highly praised and if she must participate in premarital sex, to limit that activity to as few partners as possible. It was considered tacky to openly discuss my sexual encounters. I was also taught that, as a woman, I was hormonally programmed to be more emotional than men. If I had sex with a man, I was supposed to feel some sort of intimate attachment. If I didn't, I was a cruel-hearted slut.

My friends were thin, pretty, naturally bronzed and accessorized with bug-eyed sunglasses. They slurped vodka straight from the bottle while they drove. They roamed the streets in bikinis by day and by night, skimpy dresses short enough to bare their ass cheeks when they bent over. They pushed up their breasts and snorted coke in the bathrooms of clubs before grinding their crotches into strangers until last call. And when the night came to an end, they romped through the filthy, gum-stained streets barefoot because they were too hammered to feel the glass shards beneath their soles. The PB girls were wild, edgy, and dangerously carefree.

Your true passion in life is what you'd be doing if somebody handed you 100 million dollars.

I, along with most of the Navy girls I've known, didn't like Navy wives. They were usually rude. They ignored us when they brought their husbands dinner on duty. They gave us smug, fake smiles if they were forced to interact with us. The Navy women and the Navy wives could sense each other's resentment. They hated us because they knew their husbands would probably end up fucking us.

Thailand has been dubbed a lustful playground where it is overlooked when a straight male foggily awakes with new tattoos, missing limbs, and a torn anus from a belligerent romp with a transsexual ladyboy. As my shipmates perpetually claimed in defending their infidelities, "Hookers don't count. They're not real people.

My best-kept secret is that I didn't reject normality. Normality rejected me.

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

I was a meek child who bloomed into something untamed and out of place. Just as I never mastered the skill of walking on my own two feet, I never acquired southern social etiquette. Whenever I was at a family gathering, tension surrounded me. Everyone always wondered, "What the hell is Maggie going to say next?" My mother cleverly masked her true feelings with her pretty, young face and consistent, bright smile. I, as her daughter, was a representation of her. And she was carrying a time bomb in a nursery. In a world where it was impolite to air one's dirty laundry, I wore my most ragged, period-stained panties as a trendy accessory.

You only have to be cruel to one person to qualify as a cruel person.

I was used to surrounding myself with drug addicts. They were usually slightly older than me. Most of them looked like they'd been gnawed at by a household pet and tossed in the corner of the garage for a few years. But Number 3 introduced me to a whole new level of bad crowds. As a house painter, he associated with men in construction. Many of them were middle-aged, poverty-stricken rednecks with snuff leaking out of their toothless traps. Marijuana and painkillers were their crackers and juice boxes.

I learned early on that love was treacherous, leaving my heart like an open wound for others to infect.

The females showed their vulnerability by caving into the comforting arms of their shipmates. The males put us in our place through a cat and mouse game of wooing and slut shaming.

In boot camp, I was warned about the double standards in the Navy. Petty Officer Hunter told us that Navy men were horny animals eager to stick their dicks in something warm and wet. That was socially acceptable. However, females were held at a higher standard. Females serving sea duty was a new concept, only a decade or two old when I enlisted. I was one of the first women allowed on destroyers. Therefore to show our gratitude for being granted one inch towards male equality, we had to work a hundred times harder for a worthy image.
Hunter informed us that we had to work hard to establish a decent reputation at our command. If we acted like a slut, we would be treated like a slut. One slip would permanently brand us.

If you didn't grow up in a home that built your confidence and self esteem, make your own.

Carl constantly told horror stories of cursing and beatings from his father and the twenty-four-hour blackout screaming of his alcoholic, pill-popping mother. He used his trauma like a caution sign for what he could do if I didn't silence my backtalk.

Number 23 had plenty of redeeming qualities that made falling for him a justifiable accident. But our connection had nothing to do with our similarities, our differences, our aesthetic attractions, or our emotional and physical needs. When we spoke, he was truly with me. Our egos, our personas, expected social cues, the facades that everyone builds around them that are supposed to sculpt the way the world sees us, were stripped with Number 23 and I. He was immediately my best friend, familiar and safe - an epiphany that I had been spending my life alone in crowded rooms.
Our souls were naked. We initially curled into the warmth of that connection. But once we knew how real it was, we felt exposed, vulnerable, and raw. While his defense was his fearful recoil, mine was dictation.

As a woman, I've had to choose between ignoring the full effect of my carnal instincts and exploring them with a man who will abandon me. Both result in emotional isolation. It wasn't until tapping into the forbidden grounds of the male anatomy that I realized that men are locked in their own prison. Their vulnerability frightens them as much as my confidence.

Western tourists transform Thailand into its own little planet of indulgence. Time has no relevance and debauchery, no consequence.

There is an air of grace and tradition The South takes pride in upholding. When all hell is breaking loose, southerners face the world with a smile. All anger, resentment, and feelings of hierarchy only flutter in bits of passive aggressive, light-hearted gossip. In southern culture, it is a cardinal sin to utter a single word without a sweet layer of sugarcoating.

Be yourself. And if you're remotely interesting, you're bound to face a lot of rejection.

We can deeply love our poison. We can love the taste of it, the scent of it, the comforting weight of it in our belly and find ourselves woken in the night with stabbing cramps, arms around porcelain toilet bowls, hurling every last bit until collapsing on bathroom tile, limp from dehydration. Sometimes parting with love is essential for survival. I've found the most tragic aspect of losing loved ones wasn't the big boom of the fallout, but realizing later how much healthier I was without them.

I had the girlish, round face that would have passed for a German World War II poster of an Aryan Hitler youth had I worn braided pigtails.

Males were expected to be ready to fuck any hole they could slip their dicks into. Boys weren't considered men unless they were influenced by their carnal instincts to spread their seed.

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 Navy's use for deck was no different than an aging socialite getting weekly Botox injections, plastering wrinkles with foundation, and ducking into the ladies room to powder her nose and retouch her lipstick every ten minutes. We incessantly slaved away to make our ship pretty. We fluffed the feathers of America's peacock.

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

I can't remember the words she spoke when they finally opened the garage door and yanked me inside, but I was petrified. It wasn't sound Mom's screams or the jolt of her grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me like a rag doll that plagues my memory, but the look of her eyes- wide, wild, and unrecognizable.