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 aro...
We were sexual targets, marked as eternal sluts for exploring the desires only acceptable in men.
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, ...
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.
My life views on sex, men, dating, and self-worth were sculpted with the unfiltered ramblings of a drunken misogynist.
It wasn’t really a loud-mouthed, hyperactive little pig-tailed blonde that made Carl cringe. It was what I represented. While his upbringing was battered humiliation, I was spoiled, doted on, and spoon-fed by the world. I don’t think he was even ...
Incarceration is when nobody writes a happy ending for a woman without a man.
Incarceration is the way a woman is expected to date like a soccer goalie, shuffling back and forth to block the balls constantly flying in her direction and shamed the moment she lets one slip in her net.
Southerners have mastered picking, choosing, and rationalizing religious texts to fit their social agenda better than their own mother’s fried chicken recipe.
I fell in love with a sniper - a man whose basic training instills psychopathic tendencies. I loved a professional dehumanizer. I loved a man who lived in a world where empathy was suicide. I loved a man who had to be ready to put a bullet through a ...
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 o...
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 collaps...
Suddenly, the brave warriors parading to combat with bugles and bayonets were replaced by the push of a button.
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...
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 ...
I grew up missing my mom while she was right in front of me.
Carl’s abuse isn’t obvious. It’s not something one can even notice while it’s happening. Carl doesn’t do you the favor of punching you in the face and sending you to school with a black eye so that you have a fighting chance of being rescue...
Your true passion in life is what you’d be doing if somebody handed you 100 million dollars.
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...
