On Aggrieved

By Hope Madden

Incubate contributing author, Hope Madden, shares some thoughts about her story, “Aggrieved” : “A predator stalks a college town, seeking a very specific type of prey.”

What’s the deal with virgins? When did that become such a thing? Bram Stoker didn’t declare virgins the tastiest of morsels. His Dracula drank a whole shipful of sailors and no way those guys were all virgins. No way.

And why do the virgins always have to be female? I remember watching Fred Dekker’s 1987 almost-family-friendly The Monster Squad with my nieces. I’d waited ages until they were sort of almost old enough, and we all watched it together. It had been a staple of my youth that I eagerly shared with them, and, like most 80s films, it doesn’t age well.

I was trying to distract them from the forgotten homophobic humor and slut shaming, but the core plot point couldn’t be overlooked. A group of neighborhood boys tries to save their town and the world from Dracula’s scheme, and to do that, they need a virgin.

“What’s a virgin?” Vivian, about 6, asked.

“It’s someone who’s never been married,” I told her, because I am a liar and a coward. My sister was already going to shoot me for showing her kids this movie.

“Aren’t all those boys virgins?” her 9-year-old sister asked. Ruby is her name, and she has always been smarter than me, and yes, Ruby, all those boys are virgins. There was no reason on earth for them to put that 4-year-old girl in jeopardy when any one of them could have read the rite and righted Dracula’s wrongs.

When a girl is not a virgin – like beautiful Lisa, whom the Monster Squad peeps on through her bedroom window because that was encouraged behavior and not criminal deviance in the 80s – her impurity marks her as unworthy. Around that same general time, a boy who’s a virgin – like Jim Carrey in Once Bitten or Omri Katz as kindly Max in Hocus Pocus – is mocked as unworthy.

It’s an idiotic idea that girls only have value while they’re virgins and boys only have value when they’re not, but it’s a common thread across generations of literature, society, and culture. For an awful lot of people, it leads to shame or bitterness. Marry that with the dangerous sense of entitlement that’s awakened in the United States in the last decade, and the result has been more bloodshed than you’ll find in Stoker’s novel.

A pragmatic soul, I wanted to find a better, tidier, and more logical way of contending with the virginity issue.

Hope Madden is a writer, filmmaker and film critic based in Columbus, Ohio. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals including Wild Good Poetry Review as well as Z Publishing’s Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology. Her first feature film, Obstacle Corpse, was completed in 2022. Her first novella, Roost, also saw its first light in 2022, publishing in March of that year from Off Limits Press.