The Other McCain

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Hollywood’s Homo-Hypocrisy

Posted on | December 22, 2017 | Comments Off on Hollywood’s Homo-Hypocrisy

Headline at Mediaite:

After Months of Attacking Roy Moore,
Hollywood Releases Film
Romanticizing Child Molestation

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? When I saw that headline, I immediately had a hunch and — surprise! surprise! — my hunch was correct:

As the year comes to a close, Hollywood releases its final batch of films, many of which will go on to earn plenty of Oscar nominations. One of them is Call Me By Your Name, a coming-of-age drama about a 17-year-old boy who develops a romantic relationship with a 24-year-old man. . . .

(Permit me to interrupt and ask what sort of “romantic relationship” is involved? Do they exchange meaningful glances, write poems for each other, take long walks in the moonlight? Or, as I rather suspect, is the “relationship” actually sexual? Because it’s not a crime to exchange meaningful glances or write poetry, you know. But never mind . . .)

The awards season is just beginning and already this film is receiving a ton of praise. It has an incredible score of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, has been named by the LA Film Critics Association as the Best Picture of the Year and has already received three Golden Globe nominations including Best Drama.
The accolades are justified. Call Me By Your Name is actually one of the best films of the year. It’s emotional and thought-provoking and its stars Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer give outstanding performances. Despite how good the film is, however, it leaves you with an unsettling feeling because after all, it’s about child molestation.
It’s worth noting that the film does take place in Italy, where the age of consent is 14.

OK, enough. There are some U.S. states — including Utah and Maine, last time I checked — where the age of consent is 14, but we’re not going to see any Oscar-bait movies about “romantic relationships” with teenagers in those states, are we? No, not unless they’re gay.

Notice the absence of the word “gay” from this story? Yep, just did CTRL+F and the word “gay” doesn’t appear once in the article because, evidently, it’s not “gay” until you’re 18, and there is no such thing as a “gay pedophile,” according to the professional journalism community.

Anyway, gay or straight, 17 and 24 is not “child molestation,” and it’s insane to apply such a term to such a story. What seems to have happened, amid the current Sexual Harassment Apocalypse, is that everybody’s trying to outdo each other in their denunciations of misconduct, for fear that they’ll be condemned as a “rape apologist” if they don’t. We have entered a climate of hysteria that has made it impossible for people to make meaningful distinctions between various types of sexual misbehavior. The actor Matt Damon was castigated last week for trying to make a common-sense point about this issue:

“I do believe there’s a spectrum of behavior … You know, there’s a difference between, you know, patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation, right? Both of those behaviors need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated.” . . .
“On this end of the continuum where you have rape and child molestation or whatever, you know, that’s prison. Right? And that’s what needs to happen. . . . That’s criminal behavior, and it needs to be dealt with that way. The other stuff is just kind of shameful and gross.”

While I’m not a big fan of Matt Damon, his point is correct. The current climate is such that people are being treated as if they were guilty of crimes the moment any allegation of “misconduct” is made, in many cases involving incidents that happened years ago, or even decades ago, without any complaint being made at the time.

Damon made particular reference to Al Franken in his controversial interview and certainly Franken has not been accused of rape, yet his behavior is being “conflated” with more grievous sexual offenses, as Damon said. And it’s this same tendency that leads the Mediate writer to use the loaded phrase “child molestation” to characterize a (gay) “coming-of-age drama” about a (gay) 17-year-old boy who has a (gay) “romantic relationship” with a (gay) 24-year-old man.

Can someone please appoint an official committee to determine, once and for all, exactly what moral and legal standards we should apply to sexual relationships — of every kind, in every time and place — so that we don’t have any confusion in the future? Because it seems that there was an extraordinarily lenient standard applied in 1998, when Bill Clinton was caught boinking a young intern, but that new and more stringent standards have since been developed. Which is not necessarily bad, but then we got into this #MeToo moment where people are having their careers destroyed for things they did in the 1990s that were certainly no worse than what Bill Clinton did in the 1990s. And if this new draconian standard is to be applied retroactively, the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame is going to be damned near empty, because how many famous rockers were boinking teenage groupies back in the day? (Answer: All of them.)

We get it, OK? The Sexual Revolution is over. “No more fun of any kind,” to quote Dean Vernon Wormer. We’re going back to the Eisenhower era, it seems, or maybe the Coolidge era, with a latter-day version of the Comstock Law to prevent anyone from even talking about sex. This is apparently what feminists require, and the only sex Americans will be allowed to have in the future is (a) gay sex or (b) robot sex. No more of that oppressive “heterosexuality” that flourished for a few decades in the late 20th-century, when some people actually believed that women wanted to have ses with men. Someday, we’ll tell our grandchildren about those dark decades of phallic tyranny, and they’ll be astonished by stories of college boys and girls hooking up at frat parties. (“Grandma, what’s a ‘fraternity’?” “Institutions of heteropatriarchal misogyny that were outlawed after Kamala Harris was elected president.”)

Hollywood will continue making celebratory “coming-of-age” stories about homosexuals, however, and these will be the only “romantic relationships” that are deemed award-worthy in the post-Weinstein era. The women in Hollywood are now so full of rage toward the men in Hollywood that no self-respecting actress would ever consent to appear in a heterosexual love scene. “The Pig Monster,” as Rose McGowan calls Weinstein, has more or less ruined the genre of cinematic romance.

 

Category: Hollywood

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