Feminist Memoir Quotes

“Starvation was the first indication of my self-discipline. I was devoted to anorexia. I went the distance of memorizing the calorie content within every bite of food while calculating the exact amount of exercise I needed to burn double my consumption. I was luckily young enough to mask my excessive exercise with juvenile hyperactivity. Nobody thought twice about the fact that I was constantly rollerblading, biking, and running for hours in stifling summer humidity. I learned to cut my food into tiny bites and move it around my plate. I read that standing burned more calories than sitting, so I refused to watch television without doing crunches, leg lifts, or at least walking in place. When socially forced to soldier through a movie, I tapped my foot in desperation to knock out about seventy-five extra calories. From age eleven to twelve, I dropped forty pounds and halted the one period I’d had.”
― Maggie Young , Just Another Number

“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’s 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’d 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, “Oh, that’s too bad,” and drifted into the kitchen as if I’d 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.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“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.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“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.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“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.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“The phrase was so simple and for most women, so generic. Any other female would have laughed off such a question from a boy she had no interest in. But in my case, it was a landmark moment in my life. Number 23 had gone where no other man had gone before.
Until then, my history with men had been volatile. Instead of a boyfriend or even a drunken prom date, my virginity was forfeited to a very disturbed, grown man while I was unconscious on a bathroom floor. The remnants of what could be considered high school relationships were blurry and drug infused. Even the one long-lasting courtship I held with Number 3 went without traditional dating rituals like Valentine’s Day, birthdays, anniversary gifts, or even dinner.
Into young adulthood, I was never the girl who men asked on dates. I was asked on many fucks. I was a pair of tits to cum on, a mouth to force a cock down, and even a playmate to spice up a marriage.
At twenty-four, I had slept with twenty-two men, gotten lustfully heated with countless more, but had never once been given flowers. With less than a handful of dates in my past, romance was something I accepted as not being in the cards for me. My personality was too strong, my language too foul, and my opinions too outspoken. No, I was not the girl who got asked out on dates and though that made me sad at times, I buried myself too deeply in productivity to dwell on it.
But, that day, Number 23 sparked a fuse. That question showed a glimmer of a simplistic sweetness that men never gave me. Suddenly he went from being some Army kid to the boyfriend I never had.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“I voted for every woman who has to leave a baby too soon, who has to downgrade her career, or who is made to feel invisible in her role as a mother.”
― Erin Passons, The Nasty Women Project: Voices from the Resistance

“In just two years, CSAS ignited the flame Grandmother lit years before. Carl would never succeed in his attempts to extinguish it. But his parental authority was able to keep it dormant and unthreatening for several years. At Ooltewah High School, I was like a lion forced into captivity after a liberating romp in the jungle. Nothing challenged me. Nothing motivated me. Nothing moved me. My claustrophobia itched to the point where clawing at my own skin seemed to be my only method of relief. With no social outlets and no intellectual nourishment, I caved into self-destruction. My bulimia amplified from throwing up obligatory family dinners to driving to grocery stores, Dollar Generals, and gas stations, shoving junk food into my purse in between security camera reach, devouring the calories in the corners of desolate parking lots, and scurrying into remote public restrooms in the outskirts of town. My knees would rest on the cold, sticky tile floors as I wrapped my arms around bleach-scented toilets as if embracing an old friend.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“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 “keep” a man in her life at all times.
It was the man’s goal to catch the woman and the woman’s goal to keep the man.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“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.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“A Jewish woman in exile in the 1930s is an antihero.”
― Núria Añó

“Carl discreetly turned his head to the left and then the right to make sure Mom wasn’t within hearing range.
“I tried to stick it in er ass once and she didn’t speak to me for a week,” he nearly whispered before belting out a slur of loose chuckles. “And gettin’ ‘er to do ya on top? Forget about it!”
In ways, I morphed into Carl’s description of the ideal woman. Like Mom, physical beauty was my ultimate priority. I spent hours on end stripped naked, posing in front of my full length bedroom mirror at every angle so that each wrinkle, roll, and pinch of fat could receive sharp scrutiny before I strived for complete self annihilation. I made it a habit of studying every Teen magazine model and the skinniest cheerleaders in my middle school yearbook. I observed their arms, legs, and hips. I held their images against mine with a goal for my bones to protrude further and calves spread further apart when standing straight. However, I saw the way Carl bent his head down and lowered his voice when he spoke about Mom, as if it was our job to keep a feisty, barking puppy believing that it was our guard dog.
“Ure mom can’t help she got half ure I-Q,” Carl would chuckle.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“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.”
― Maggie Young

“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.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“Months after my first real breakup, I was experiencing the ego thrash that comes with watching an old boyfriend move on. I was lucky she wasn’t a beauty queen. Dissecting her physical flaws was the aspirin that would not heal my wounds, but temporarily eased my pain. For the first time in my life, I managed to behave like a true southern belle. I lifted my lips into a bright smile and warmly greeted my enemy as if she were my new best friend.
With all the phony verbal sugar I could muster I said, “Hi! We haven’t met before. My name’s Maggie.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“I’m pretty sure Number 1 wasn’t even aware that he was using a man’s deadliest weapon against women. He exposed his vulnerability. Over the years, I would repeat a pattern of chronically caving to that same behavior. It didn’t matter whether or not I liked or respected him. Every time he dared to let his guard down and unveil some of his ugliest, grittiest faces, I whole-heartedly believed I was the only person on earth being let in on a secret. It was a mirage of a connection. Despite his faults and my prior resistance, I felt an obligation to uphold that bond. No matter what kind of person he was or how toxic he could have been, I saw beauty in that fleeting defenselessness as if he were an infant, innocent and untainted by the evils of the world. I always fell in love with that face in every man. I clutched that memory tightly, despite the fact that its weight wore my arms and drug my pace. I was so focused on remembering their moment of weakness that I was blind to who they normally were.”
― Maggie Young, Just Another Number

“The biggest takeaway from my long-distance relationship with Floyd Byars was that I optioned an original screenplay he had co-written with his writing partner, Laurie.
Another takeaway was a case of crabs picked up on our only vacation together in Zihuatanejo, Mexico.
I noticed a crab in my eyelashes when I was in the airplane bathroom on my way back to JFK. I feared these little critters might be other places as well, so I spent the next four hours squirming in my seat, itchy and miserable. On the taxi ride home, I made the driver stop at an all-night pharmacy so I could buy a bottle of Kwell.
But despite the footsies and the crabs, I liked the premise of his (their) Making Mr. Right script.”
― Susan Seidelman, Desperately Seeking Something: A Memoir About Movies, Mothers, and Material Girls