cameoamalthea:

I’m a survivor of CSA. I couldn’t consummate my marriage on my wedding night because I needed to have surgery first to repair some internal damage. I spent a year, beginning in summer 2016, in physical therapy, pelvic floor therapy, because even after the surgery the physical scar tissue and phycological scars (subconscious discomfort means I could never relax those muscles, not even to wear a tampon or have exams that I needed to have because I have PCOS). I blogged about it. It’s under my recovery tag. I’m in therapy, and DBT. 

And I’m learning to manage my triggers, but I really really really wish people like you would not insinuate that I wanted what happened to me.

How dare you. 

And you’re mocking my posts about the need to stop sexual exploitation of teenagers and the culture that enables it, because I’m pro-books, anti-censorship and tired of people tearing down works by queer creators?

“Call Me By Your Name” is an award winning novel, which won the  20th Lambda Literary Awards for gay fiction. 

Reviewing Call Me By Your Name for The New York Times, Stacey D’Erasmo called the novel “an exceptionally beautiful book”.^[1]Writing in The New Yorker, Cynthia Zarin said, “Aciman’s first novel shows him to be an acute grammarian of desire”.^[2] In The Washington Post, Charles Kaiser said, “If you have ever been the willing victim of obsessive love—a force greater than yourself that pulls you inextricably toward the object of your desire—you will recognize every nuance of André Aciman’s superb new novel, ‘Call Me by Your Name.’

The novel is by a Jewish POC author (he was born in Egypt, fled to Italy, and is now an American and a Proust scholar – so it’s fair to say he knows queer lit).  

The book has been adapted into a Film by Italian director Luca Guadagnino and written by James Ivory who are both gay men.

So this is a film written and directed by gay men, telling a gay love story about a Jewish gay boy, based on a book by a Jewish POC author.

 Call Me by Your Name was selected by the National Board of Review and American Film Institute as one of the top 10 films of the year.^[122][123] It received eight nominations at Critics’ Choice Awards, including Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Cinematography.^[124] It led the Independent Spirit Awards with most nomination, garnering six, among them Best Feature, Best Director, Best Male Lead, Best Supporting Male, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing.^[125] At the 75th Golden Globe Awards, it was nominated for Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama for Chalamet, and Best Supporting Actor for Hammer.^[126]Call Me by Your Name won the Grand Prize at the Chéries-Chéris Festival.^[127]Lisbon & Estoril Film Festival awarded the film NOS Audience Award,^[128] and Chalamet received Best Actor award at New York Film Critics Circle.^[129]Gotham Independent Film Awardsand Hollywood Film Awards both awarded Chalamet, with their Breakout Actor Awards.

The story is about a 17 year old who falls in love with a 24 year old student over a summer. It is not, as mischaracterized by @socialisttexan, a story that ‘normalizes grown men preying on teenagers’

A 17 year old character becomes friends with a 24 year old student and has a crush on him. The 17 year old brags about having sex with his girlfriend to see how the 24 year old will react. He sneaks into the man’s room while he does there and does creepy things (you can read the summary yourself, it’s on wikipedia). He tells the 24 year old he has feelings for him, and the 24 year old tells him no. The 17 year old later kisses the 24 year old without his consent, the 24 year old stops him and says they can’t do more. They stop being friends, but after a few days of distance, the 24 year old admits that he likes his friend too and they sleep together. 

This is not an older man who sought out a younger man in order to use his youth or inexperience to coerce him into sex. This is a man who became friends with a younger guy while staying at the guy’s parents house, working for his dad, and was pursued by the younger guy. 

Rape is sex when there’s not consent. Preying on someone is manipulating or coercing someone to do something they do not want to do. 

This novel features sex between a 17 year old and a 24 year old  that is consensual, and the only one who did anything wrong was the 17 year old (who acted creepy, and didn’t take no for an answer).

In comparison, Roy Moore is a real a person who hurt real teenagers. He sexually harassed them. He was in his 30s at the time, not a peer or a friend. He met one victim after her mother asked him to watch her while she went into Court to testify, thinking she could trust her daughter with the assistant DA (the lawyer in charge of prosecuting criminals). Roy Moore explicitly used his position of power to force himself on his victims.

“You’re just a child, I’m the district attorney; if you tell anyone about this no one will ever believe you.”

^[23]

^[24]

Roy Moore is a sexual predator and a rapist. 

If you don’t see any difference between defending a novel and film depicting a consensual relationship with a age gap and a rapist forcing himself on teenage girls, then you don’t understand why rape wrong.

As a rape survivor, lawyer and advocate, let me give you a hint: IT’S BECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT THEM TO TOUCH YOU. 

Because you’re too young to ever understand what they’re doing. Because you don’t want to be touched like that and they’re hurting you. And you want it to stop, but you can’t stop it. And you blame yourself for not stopping it and still wonder ‘maybe I did something wrong?’

And look at old pictures of you as a child, posing for pictures, and wondering if maybe you acted too sexy, maybe you did something wrong. Because maybe that’s less scary than the truth that there was nothing you could have done to prevent it. Because the worst feeling in the world is to be helpless.

And then you deal with people telling you that you support child molestation and rape and that voice that says ‘your fault’ is there again. 

 I like books about people falling in love and wanting sex, because I could never have that when I was 17 – I’m too damaged, but I like seeing sex presented as something that can be good, and consensual and not about hurting you. 

And I like books in general. I have an English degree with a specialty in Fiction Writing. And I’m anti-censorship in general, I was vice-President of my law school’s ACLU chapter. And I don’t believe that books can only exist as moral guidelines and examples of healthy good behavior. Fiction isn’t instructional, you want the non-fiction section for that. Fiction tells stories. 

And you don’t have to like every book or read every book or see every movie, but maybe stop attacking gay works and holding them to this standard of only 100% morally right, especially since so much of the gay rights movement has been a fight for the right for gay media to be just as sexual and amoral as straight media.  

Because it’s hard enough for gay works to get published and get adapted into movies. Publishers don’t like gambling, and it’s already seen as a gamble because it’s ‘gay’ – if making it gay means a higher chance of backlash, then that’s not incentive to publish gay works.