Unironic trigger warning: discusses child sexual abuse and someone’s suicidal ideation.
After many years, this still haunts me. Years ago I would, on a daily basis, talk in person with someone who, out of nowhere, would bring up the topic of adults sexually abusing prepubescent children. She didn’t directly tell me the reason for this fascination. But now I have a strong suspicion for the reason. At first it started as a joke. She said that her favorite signature on internet message boards was “The internet is where men are men, women are men, and small children turn out to be undercover FBI agents.” The last part refers to the police’s sting operations to catch child molesters.
Later she said that I reminded her of an ex-boyfriend back in her native Europe. She said, “He was very sweet.” Then she stared into space, giggled, and said, “He would always joke that he was a pedophile trying to trick little kids into having sex with him.” Suffice it to say, I don’t appreciate being compared to that guy.
Then one night she said to me, “When a convicted sex offender moves into a neighborhood, why do Americans get so irrational about it?” My eyebrows raised. I stammered, “Wh– What do you mean?” She replied, “When a man who had sex with a little girl moves into their neighborhood, Americans want to run him out. They should learn to accept that she consented to it.” I was so flummoxed that I could not respond other than by staring with my mouth gaping open. She changed the subject.
She also mentioned that she had a long history of wanting to be dead literally. She blamed much of this on an incident when she was thirteen. She was mistreated by a boy who was also thirteen at the time. I don’t doubt that this happened. Even then, I thought that this didn’t explain completely why she was so fixated on full-grown adult men in particular preying upon prepubescent children in particular. Then my friend said to me, “Promise me that you will always protect me.” I replied that I would.
When she was not in Hawai‘i with me but was in her native Europe for the summer, she got mostly uncommunicative. But during a short interruption from that uncommunicativeness, she told me that she was having a panic attack every day. Greatly concerned, I made contact with her paternal aunt in the USA. Her paternal aunt soon started telling me about other topics, such as that, as a small girl, the paternal aunt was sexually abused both by my friend’s paternal grandfather *and* one of his brothers, the latter of whom killed himself later. She also said that when she told her mother (my friend’s paternal grandmother) about this, her mother denounced her and feigned ignorance about it. She also mentioned that she finds it doubtful that my friend’s father knew nothing of this.
My friend then had an “internet-famous” artist guy go through the effort of photoshopping her pictures to make her look like a recently-deceased corpse with a chalky-white face. That was his specialty: he would take photos of himself and photoshop himself to look like a dead body with chalky-white skin. To this very day, many people across the world enthusiastically re-upload his corpse photoshops on their social-media accounts. Everyone around my friend found her corpse photoshops concerning. But it was of especial worry to me because she had previously told me of her long history of wanting to be dead literally.
Corpse Artist said he wished she would dye her hair a particular different color. When she returned to Hawai‘i, her hair was dyed that color.
It turned out later that my friend has another relative who is a celebrity among Ralph Nader/Noam Chomsky-type Socialist activists. Her son and daughter-in-law were supporting actors in very famous movies; her daughter-in-law was even the main supporting actress in an Oscar-winning drama. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist even wrote an entire mainstream book about this socialist activist. In the book, she is quoted saying that, as a small child, she was sexually abused by stepfather. On my own, having read some important obituaries online, I learned that the stepfather is my friend’s grandfather’s other brother.
That means: My friend’s paternal grandfather and two of his brothers were all accused of sexually abusing small girls whom they were supposed to be watching over. It took me an embarrassingly long amount of time to face that this consideration might be connected to my friend’s insistence on repeatedly bringing up the topic of grown men molesting prepubescent girls. The aunt gave me the impression that my friend probably didn’t know of these accusations from her aunts and other relative. If my friend’s fascination with child molesters came from her family, it was something she learned about, not from her aunts and other relative, but horrifyingly more directly.
One day my friend stopped uploading the Corpse Artist’s pictures of her photoshopped as a dead body with a chalky-white face. She looked alive again and wasn’t dyeing her hair the color that Corpse Artist said. She was instead touting herself as a businesswoman and uploading photos of herself on the peaks of mountains. But then she did something else. Up until that point, my friend’s legal last name was not her father’s. There is an odd story about that, which relates to further trauma on her father’s side I haven’t mentioned. And now, with great fanfare, she legally changed her last name to that of her father. That’s much more subtle than uploading photos of oneself photoshopped as a dead body. But it looks to me to be a try-too-hard attempt to convey to everyone that her relationship with her father is just fine; great even.
When in Hawai‘i, she was especially manipulative in that she expected me to play along with her morbid gestures. I was to act as if everything with her was just fine and safe. I remembered what an immigrant from Russia had advised: “Do not help them to fake reality.” On my birthday, of all days, I summoned enough courage to confront my friend about these matters. I told her that I cannot, in good conscience, see her face-to-face and help her feign normality when she’s refusing to return to seeing a mental health professional on a regular basis. She told me that my saying this to her was more intimidating, threatening, and evil than all the times that men had assaulted her — sexually and otherwise — and threatened to murder her.
Minutes later, she feigned memory loss. She acted as if she didn’t remember anything said previously in that conversation, and casually asked me about my day. That’s when I learned the hard way: it might be fun to watch an Alfred Hitchcock movie, but it’s the opposite of fun to live through one.
I have often considered trying to reestablish contact with her and reconcile. But if she greets me warmly — not with hostility — and still refuses to return to regular psychiatric care, then this entire cycle is going to repeat. Recently I let my curiosity get the better of me, and I looked at Corpse Artist’s social media again. Corpse Artist actually stopped making the dead-body photoshops, but he uploaded other really pretentious photoshops where his self-image is literally distorted. His sister-in-law and especially brother also make art portraying people — apparently modeled on themselves — in a grotesque, morbid fashion. I feel sorry for those who see themselves, and even humanity, that way. (Their father is a genuinely competent portrait painter.) That my friend still makes a big show of using her father’s last name, and continues to enmesh with Corpse Artist, his sister-in-law, and his brother, all remain very bad signs. When I consider an attempted reconciliation with my friend, I remember those bad signs and the danger of what would happen if she welcomes communication only for her to maintain her refusal for the regular professional treatment that is needed.
