I Would Have Definitely Been a Victim of Manson’s, Given the Opportunity
I was a teenage “rebel;” now I play Animal Crossing.
I play a deliciously stupid game in which I design custom houses for neon-colored animals.
Last week, I was approached by a pink faun who said:
“I want a place that reminds me of when I was a rebel.”
The home required a jukebox, a billiard table, and a folding floor lamp.
I recreated the extremely run-down underground billiards room where my high school friends hung out & smoked.
The place was shitty, and most of my friends were shitty, and I was shitty.
I listened to a lot of Marilyn Manson at the time.
My depression was profoundly under-medicated. Nobody seemed to be acknowledging how weird, hypocritical, and empty the world felt. In middle school, everyone seemed preoccupied with sports, clothes, or (oddly, still) Rugrats. In high school, it was more of the same (less the Rugrats).
I mostly wanted to read and draw.
I was a “loser,” a “faggot,” a “nerd,” and “fat.”
Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, KoRn, etc tapped into the Lonely Kids Killing Time At The Mall market. They were unhappy, and they were making art about it.
I read Long Hard Road Out of Hell. I knew Manson was shitty, and I didn’t care.
This book outlined an avalanche of abuse against his own fans.
“That’s on them for going backstage at a concert,” I mentally sneered. “Everyone knows what happens backstage at concerts.”
Like I mentioned earlier, I was shitty.*
*(It was the 90s. This was way before the #MeToo movement. However, “it was the 90s” is a poor excuse. Victim-blaming is shitty.)
I’ve never met Manson, but I met people like him. I fell into the same trap of “edginess.”
My friends smoked, drank, did drugs, and had sex. I didn’t smoke cigarettes, drink, or take hard drugs.
But I did lose my virginity before I was really ready.
I wasn’t coerced. It was just a thing that everyone was doing. My boyfriend at the time went to a different school but had the same basic friend group. Edgy, outcast types. They regularly went to a free clinic to got tested for STDs. They made an outing of it.
My boyfriend and I used condoms. We were straight-A students. Neither of us really fit in with out respective friends, no matter how hard we tried. We were the outcasts of the outcasts.
One day, I found myself in a trailer with an adult man who showed me a cigarette-width piercing through the head of his penis.
It was a wake-up call.
The guy was friends with my friends. He was living in a trailer on the property of his ex-girlfriend and her current boyfriend. Most importantly to my friends, he had weed.
Why was this guy friends with teenagers? Wasn’t it illegal to show underage girls your genitalia? Surely it was, right?
I was the one who drove us there, but I couldn’t just leave. I had to wait until my friends were done. I was the only sober one. We were in the middle of nowhere. There was no way for anyone to get home without having to explain to their parents how they got there, why they were there, who this adult man was.
Nothing happened-happened, but would you want to be in that situation? Would you want your kids in that situation?
The point here is that regular people get into situations that gradually escalate, until they’re somewhere they don’t recognize.
I was a nerd. I had loving, liberal, supportive parents. I didn’t take in substances or have unprotected sex. I never had after-school detention or a single encounter with a police officer.
And there I was, in this frigging trailer, with a stranger exposing himself.
When you’re an outcast, you’re drawn to other outcasts. Sometimes it’s hard, when you’re lonely, to overlook those red flags.
I was desperate to fit in. If someone famous had paid any attention to me, I would have been locked in the Bad Girls Room, too. I might have taken it.
I escaped, but not everyone did.
I got out of that trailer, out of that friend group.
In my college’s honors dorm, I was the only freshman girl on my hall who had lost her virginity.
People asked me for sex advice, and I honestly told them, “I did it before I was ready. Make sure you’re ready.”
(Okay, I also pointed out where the clitoris was, and advised against missionary.)
Where were these virgin, smart girls in high school? These girls who wrote stories and made collages and loved their parents — these unabashedly lame girls?
They were in their own high schools, not fitting in.
Sometimes I feel like Fuchsia from Animal Crossing.
I remember when I was a “rebel.” Or, at least, when I tried to be.
Sometimes I feel like I’m boring now. I’m married. I have a house and a dog. I’m happy(ish). Even my friends are stable.
I dye my hair fun colors and get tattoos in an effort to appear “interesting.”
I’m not.
In the end, I stayed a nerd. I like to read and draw.
Things could have gone a different way.
Something horrible could have happened to me.
Something horrible did happen to other women who have come forward.
I believe them. I stood on the precipice, and I know what’s down there.