Chapter 11
Lucy called him one afternoon, while he was still at work. He picked up, having no good reason not to, despite the tightness in his chest that it gave him. He said “hello” and that was all he ended up saying for at least ten minutes. He scrolled through some tacky click-bait news site while she told him all about the contents of the organisation’s meeting he’d missed the other night – what excuse had he given? Friend’s birthday dinner? She blathered on about all the events they had planned for the following month, and he slipped in a distracted ‘oh’ and ‘cool’ and ‘yep’ whenever she took a breath, just to make her believe he was listening.
He only really tuned into her when she mentioned that someone wanted to have an interview with him.
He started. “Wait, what?”
“An interview,” she repeated brightly, “Just about you and your abuse, y’know? Nothing big. Just something to teach the kids about male rape and inspire the masses to, uh, actually do something about it.”
The tension in Hiro’s chest was sharp. He didn’t know how he could pull it off, even if did want to. He didn’t know how he was supposed to speak on behalf of male victims, when it was entirely possible that he could’ve once been an abuser himself.
“I-I can’t do it,” he stammered. He shook his head, turning to face a wall so his colleagues wouldn’t stare at him. “Please, you – Luce, I can’t do it.”
“Aww c’mon, we already sort of… said you would.”
“Why would you say that?” Hiro cried out, struggling to keep his voice hushed. “Why would you think I would just agree to something like that?”
“Ummm because, are you really going to pass up an opportunity to tell the Internet that teenage boys don’t secretly want it?”
He hated it when she said the Internet. Like it deserved a capital I. Like it was the equivalent of doing a live broadcast across the entire world.
“I don’t want to do it,” he said again. “Can’t someone– literally anyone else should do it. Andy? He’s great at talking about that kind of stuff.”
“C’mon, people already know that men can rape other men, moron. People don’t know that women can rape guys.”
“Why don’t we get a female who’s been raped by another female,” he suggested anxiously, and she chuckled a little. “People know even less about that than this.”
“Yeah, that’s a bit too niche. C’mon man, you’ve done this loads of times now. What’s wrong with just doing a quick, harmless little interview? No need to be shy. I reckon you’d look pretty cute on camera.”
Hiro put his hand to his face and groaned despairingly, because that was so not the issue here. “Luce,” he said, his tone dead serious. “I just don’t think I can right now. OK?”
She just wouldn’t let it go. “But we need your voice! Look – I’ll go too, if you want. How about that? If they won’t let me in on the interview, I’ll just be right off-screen, holding up inspirational quotes for you. No one’s gonna fucking stop me!”
“Luce,” he pleaded helplessly, feeling his eyes start to water. God, he just wanted to tell her the truth. He wanted to tell her so badly that it physically hurt.
“How much bribery do you need, huh? Is it… alcohol? I got a lot of that. Games? Nah, there’s probably not a game you don’t already down… You want cash? Because I tell ya, I’m running a bit low on my funds this month after my shower broke, so it’s gotta be something else… Hmmm… I make a mean lasagne?”
“Luce.”
“Yeah dude?”
Hiro drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He closed his eyes and grimaced before he’d even said the words aloud. “I’ll… do the interview.”
“Oh you will?”
“Yeah.” Hiro shook his head. He couldn’t believe what he was agreeing to. “Why not… I’m a voice. People should hear me, or whatever.”
“That’s the spirit,” she laughed and Hiro groaned. “Ok, well, we got an interview! I’ll email you the dets soon – I gotta go right now, but I’ll call you later.”
Hiro lowered the phone from his ear and let her end the call. He sat there for a while before he could go back to work, feeling like he was out of his depth once again.
But this time it was for entirely new reasons.
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The interview came a lot sooner than Lucy had given him adequate time to prepare for. At least she was kind enough to accompany him. She dropped by his home one morning in her rundown car, and for a split-second he was violently hopeful that they would go up in flames before even making it to the interview. But he quickly put that kind of thinking out of his mind. He tried to enjoy the ride over with her, munching on cheap and greasy foods they bought from a gas station, and singing along to the music of their screwed-up childhoods as they drove an hour or so out of the city, to the studio where the interview was going to take place. Doing the interview via video call had been an option, but Lucy had persuaded him to do it in person. Somehow. He still didn’t really know how.
It wasn’t as if he’d changed his mind at all. She’d just worn him down. She’d convinced him that it would somehow all be fine, and no one would know anything about his dark secret that not even she knew about, and he was wearing a thicker hoodie today anyway, just in case he would start sweating bullets. Just in case his body tried to give it away. He supposed he could always blame it on nerves.
They reached the studio around noon. Hiro shook hands with the channel hosts and directors, nodding as they introduced themselves, trying and failing as usual to grasp onto any names. He was offered a drink, and while Lucy chatted them up, he wandered around the set. It was brightly lit, compared to the rest of the studio, and there was no room for an audience. Only cameras. And only a couple of chairs behind those cameras. The set itself was done up like an edgy living room, with coloured couches and pillows, and posters on the ‘walls’, a glass coffee table spread with magazines and bottles and snacks. It looked very casual, and it was at least a little calming.
Someone came by with a script for him. Not to tell him what to say; it was just a messy list of questions he could have a read through, just to get an idea of the kinds of things he’d be asked, and he could start to loosely prepare some answers for them. He was assured again and again that they were going for a very informal interview; they said it so much that Hiro had to wonder if Lucy had told everyone there that he was seconds from a panic attack.
He was also reminded that he had no audience here, not yet – just cameras. He was free – within reason – to mess up as many times as he needed to, and by the end of the hour they would cut and paste all of his best lines into a seamless twenty minutes that would make him look so smooth and off-the-cuff droll. He tried to look like he didn’t care, but it was hard to hide just how assured he felt after that.
He was told they’d be starting now. Lucy gave him a pat and wished him luck before sending him onto the set, where he was told to get comfortable, and he nervously sat on one end of the couch, hoping that it was the right end of the couch. God, the lights were so bright in his face; it was worse than in the lecture theatre where the seminars were held. The lights were hot too. Still, he flashed Lucy a shaking thumbs up after she did, and then a cameraman silently counted them down.
They all acted like they’d done this a million times before; they were that efficient and coordinated. The cameras rolled and immediately the fast-talking, enthusiastic host launched into what sounded like his usual snazzy greeting, and he started giving a bit of background information everyone already knew on sexual abuse. The guy was lively, as Hiro could see, but he was still somehow so dignified, still giving the topic the proper respect and delicacy that it needed.
He sat tautly while the host talked into the camera for a while, and then all of a sudden the guy was looking straight at Hiro, turning his body towards him, smiling, “welcome to our channel, Hiro.”
“Hello, uh…” Fuck. Hiro couldn’t remember the host’s name. He tried to breeze past his awkward pause with a forced smile. “Thanks for having me – great to be here.”
He swore he could feel Lucy laughing at him, from the shadows off-set. She almost certainly was.
“Great to have you here,” the host shot back, and his smile was so warm and interested and trusting and reverent that Hiro almost forgot that they were on camera. “So, as I understand it, you’re a part of rape support organisation that recently put together a series of seminars that… well, essentially, taught high school students about the realities of sexual abuse. Is that correct?”
“Yep.” He nodded, not quite sure if he was supposed to elaborate on that by himself or let the host prompt all of his answers. He nodded again. “Yep, we did that. It uh, went pretty well.”
“It certainly did,” the host agreed. “You’re actually a bit famous now, aren’t you?”
Hiro didn’t know about that. “Am I? Well… I get a lot of email now, so…”
The host threw his head back and laughed, and Hiro couldn’t help but laugh with him. He could feel himself starting to uncoil. “How much email do you get?”
“Umm. I don’t know, like… forty, fifty a day? On average?”
The host widened his eyes and nodded, a perfect show of fascination. “Right, right. Is it too much to ask what kinds of email do you get? Or would that breach confidentiality?”
“Oh – no, no,” Hiro assured, “I um… I mostly just get like, questions I guess. Not a lot of people know about the kind of stuff I talk about so… yeah. People come to me with questions and concerns, and I help them out, or else I send them in the right direction.”
“Well.” The host smiled and opened out a hand to him. “It’s great we got you on then. Maybe we could save you a good thirty emails each day from now on if we can get this kind of important information out there.”
“Ha, yeah I guess. Well. I mean, it’s all on our website and stuff, but yeah.”
The host gave a small, forgiving smile that made Hiro think his last comment was definitely going to be edited out. Yeah, he was well aware that he was choppy and awkward. He forced himself to relax more, or at least to look a little more casual as he waited for the questions to keep coming.
“In your seminars, you’ve been very outspoken about specifically male sexual abuse… because you yourself were once a victim of sexual abuse, is that right?”
“Yep.” Hiro nodded, a little slower this time. “That’s right.”
“And, uh… while male sexual abuse victims aren’t necessarily common, your case certainly differed in terms of… your abuser?”
Hiro had to wonder how comfortable the host was talking about this with him. Not many people were. He didn’t quite look so at ease in his face anymore, but then again the topic was just so… sobering.
“Yeah. When I was fourteen, I was abused by my aunt.”
“Your aunt,” the host echoed softly. “And you were living with her, at the time?”
“Yep. Well, I’d been living with her since I was three, since I’m an orphan.” He shrugged like it was nothing. “But it wasn’t until I’d finished school and I was spending a lot of my time at home that she, um…” He didn’t know how subtle he was supposed to be. He couldn’t think of what to say. He hastily ended his long pause with, “made her advances.”
“Right. Now…” The host raised his hands a little defensively and looked between Hiro and the camera. “Of course, we’re not going to ask you to go over any details of those advances… But it’s been said that in your seminars you are surprisingly er, candid about some of the things that, that occurred.”
“Yeah. Well.” Hiro raised his shoulders and dropped them. “I figure… maybe people wouldn’t really get it if it’s all so… vague? Like, just saying ‘I was sexually abused’ alone doesn’t have the same impact as saying…” Hiro couldn’t think. Cass had left him with so many horrible memories; he couldn’t hone in on just one for the sake of example. But there was something in the host’s eyes that made Hiro think maybe he didn’t want him to come up with something. “…Well, something explicit.”
“I understand. And it definitely makes it uh… a lot more real, at least for someone like me.” The host smiled with a little sympathy. “A lot of us must wonder if it gets emotionally exhausting, talking at length about something so… personal.”
“Umm…” Hiro had to stop and think about it a bit. “Not really? I mean, yeah, I get nervous talking about it sometimes, but that’s more because… well, not a lot of people really recognise or even acknowledge that guys can be abused, so…”
The host had a look on his face like he was glad Hiro had taken the conversation in that direction. “And, a lot of your advocacy surrounds the idea that certain ways of understanding sexual abuse, or the stereotypes associated with it, can be quite harmful. That’s a very important part of what you do, isn’t it?” Hiro gave a quick nod. “Could you break it down for me and our audience – what exactly are the stereotypes, and why do they even exist?”
Hiro puffed out his cheeks and slowly deflated them. It was kind of a big question, but he was sure the host only wanted a small, succinct answer. “So basically… well, sexual abuse is a pretty taboo subject in itself, right? Never seen, never heard, never talked about. And whenever anyone hears anything about it, there’s always an assumption that it’s an older male abusing a female, or maybe even a young male. Traditionally, uh, because of… human anatomy…” He raised his hands uselessly and smiled through his sudden embarrassment. “Um… y’know, like… the general… shape and function of genitalia,” – God, his face felt so red, and he was sure he couldn’t just blame it on the lights – “Traditionally, people assume that sex is something that males do to females or submissive men, and it’s either consensual or it isn’t. But uh, that’s just not true.”
“Hmmm.” The host was nodding thoughtfully, his eyes a little squinted. “I see. So, maybe, people commonly think that male rape is impossible because…” Hiro was glad that the host too seemed to be suffering from the same embarrassment as he was. “If the male victim becomes aroused then… well, he’s clearly enjoying himself, and that’s not rape.”
“Yeah, right. But, I think, a lot of people fail to realise that... well, for one thing, there’s more than one way to be raped.” Hiro shivered a little, because he could actually remember having once said that to his brother. Incredibly. “Or abused… Not just um, penetrative… And also, bodies are just weird. If a guy – especially a teenager – gets a boner, that doesn’t always necessarily mean he’s aroused, it could mean…”
“He’s hungry.”
Hiro laughed, “Yeah exactly, it’s just… It’s kind of crazy.”
“It is,” the host agreed. “So, about female abusers… What can you say about the stereotypes there?”
“Well… I guess, a lot of people don’t realise females can be sexual abusers or rapists. There’s an assumption that women, and especially traditionally feminine women, can’t do the same kinds of things, or act in the same ways that some men can? And… yeah, that’s pretty harmful. It can lead to a lot of, um… humiliation? Y’know, most guys are encouraged to be sexually active, aggressive, and there’s this expectation that they should easily be able to overpower a female. So... If a guy tries to tell his mates that he was abused by his girlfriend, say, then they might not take him seriously – they might think that he actually wanted it to happen and he’s lying, or they’ll tell him he’s not a real man. It’s that kind of thinking that keeps victims from coming forward, and they can’t get the help that they might need. And it’s a problem.”
“It’s a big problem. Which is why you’re doing all of this, isn’t it?” The host stared at him so eager and so imploring and so sincere that Hiro stiffened. “You’re trying to speak up for all the male victims out there who are silenced every day, and tell them that’s it OK to ask for help.”
“…Yep.” Hiro’s voice croaked a little. “That’s… why I’m doing this. To help people…”
The host placed a gentle hand on Hiro’s shoulder. “You’re incredibly brave, Hiro. I admire you.”
“Thanks,” he murmured, suddenly petrified, and he didn’t care if it showed on camera anymore.
“I’m sure a lot of people admire you too,” the host admitted, turning smoothly back to the camera, “people will hear your story and hopefully they’ll amend their own biases. Hopefully a lot more males will be able to get the support that they need.”
“Yeah,” Hiro murmured, and he flashed the host a dizzy smile, feeling a bit like he was going to pass out. “Umm… Sorry, could…” He turned to face Lucy and the other people on standby, behind the cameras. “Could I… take a break?”
It was a silent for a moment. The cameramen shut off their equipment and someone called out, “take five, guys.”
“Sorry,” he said hazily to the host, who insisted that it was no problem, to take his time, there was no rush, he was doing great, and all those other things Hiro wished he wouldn’t say so earnestly. He got up from the couch and walked over to Lucy, reaching out for her, and she came quickly for him.
“You OK?” she asked, worried. She handed him her water bottle, pushing it towards his mouth for him to drink. “You got a little stiff just then, but you were doing just fine.”
“Yeah, I know,” Hiro replied. That’s the problem.
“Just thirsty?”
Hiro didn’t answer her. He drained her bottle so hard and fast that he was gasping for breath by the time he was done. I’m a hypocrite. “Say something,” he murmured to her.
“What?”
“Tell me something,” he asked. “Talk to me. Distract me.”
“Look, listen.” She grabbed his face and looked into his eyes and Hiro didn’t want her to say all of the things he knew she was about to say – he really didn’t. He didn’t want the pep-talk; he needed to be talked down. “You are doing great work. You have nothing to be nervous about. No one doubts you anymore. Everyone believes you. You are literally changing harmful attitudes and destroying those stupid stereotypes and it’s amazing. It’s all because of you. So many boys have come forward and they’re getting help and they’re getting away from their abusers, and it’s all because of you.”
He thought something was going to break inside of him then. But nothing did. He felt guilt run through him, and run deep, but it was no longer panicked – it was no longer unbearable.
It was actually a kind of guilt he could live with. And it was scary. But not terrifying.
“OK,” he finally said after she’d continued to hold and stare at him so intensely, so pleadingly. “I’ll… get back out there then, I guess.”
She smiled. She patted him twice on one of his pale cheeks. And for once he didn’t flinch. “Good boy,” she said, and then she was shooing him back onto the set, and he was reclaiming his seat back on the couch, next to his host, who was still smiling with an incredible amount of patience.
“Sorry about that,” Hiro tried to say, but his host wouldn’t hear of it.
“You’re doing great work, Hiro,” he said, giving him a bro-y slap on the arm. It was nice that the host was still so friendly and assuring, even when the cameras weren’t rolling. It was nice that it all wasn’t an act. “I’m glad you stayed – we’d be afraid to lose you now. I’m confident a lot of people are gonna be interested in what you have to say. I’m really sorry but,” the host started laughing, “you’re probably gonna have a lot more email by the time this interview goes up.”
Hiro gave a shallow smile. That was just it. He was the voice. He was doing good work. He was going to stick around to keep doing these interviews and make appearances and answer emails. He couldn’t back out now; he was going to help everyone. Absolutely everyone.
His blood ran cold. Everyone but one person.
He tried to punch them back – all those niggling feelings of inadequacy, of despair, of despicability – he tried to beat them back into the depths of unconsciousness, or at the very least into submission. He willed himself not to dwell on the possibility of his own abusive behaviour. The very thing he was speaking out against. No. He couldn’t. He had to protect his image at all costs. If he came forward now, if he said anything, if he admitted to anything… If he wasn’t a perfect victim… He’d ruin everything. He wouldn’t just ruin his own credibility; he’d run the risk of ruining the credibility of every other male victim out there.
It wasn’t so hard to justify to himself after that. It wasn’t so hard at all.
He picked up the interview right where they left off. Later, after it was all over, people would tell him that he had more of a presence in the second half than in the first. That he was calmer, more confident. More resolved. More stable.
Lying was wrong. But it was acceptable in some situations.