“Call Me by Your Name,” which opened a few weeks ago, is about an older man’s affair with a 17-year-old boy. And while the movie is garnering rave reviews from urbane elites, their acclamations about the storyline are not quite accurate.
This is not a romantic tale about the awakening of homosexual desire in and between two men: It is a story about a man and boy whose relationship sparks homoeroticism and flirtation, which then turns romantic and carnal.
Summed up in a single word, the movie is about pederasty.
A secondary message is the suggestion that handsome, together, “straight” men and boys can be seduced and recruited.
The film has received high praise from leftist establishments.
“Call Me By Your Name Just Officially Became This Year’s Oscars Frontrunner,” trumpets a W Magazine headline. Rolling Stone declares it “the most romantic movie of the year” and “an instant classic.” The New Yorker calls it an “erotic triumph, emotionally acute and overwhelmingly sensual,” and it is hailed by Entertainment Weekly as “gorgeous and intoxicating.”
Even National Review, way back in early October, called the movie “a charming gay romance” which “will probably mop up” at the Oscars.
It’s a wonder Hollywood is thrilled. It shouldn’t be.
Hollywood’s Stunning Hypocrisy
The stunning hypocrisy of the left is revealed in its promotion of this movie as an “Oscar contender,” at a point in history where real-life Hollywood celebrities, Washington VIP politicos and other powerful men find their careers lying in ruins––or on the verge of ruin––for precisely the type of behavior this movie glorifies.
Recriminations from recent alleged sexually inappropriate behavior, or tales sexual indiscretions exhumed from long ago, have resulted in a huge public outcry against men in positions of power who opportunistically seek to satiate illicit sexual cravings.
Alabama candidate Judge Roy Moore is being held up to public scrutiny just a few weeks before the state’s special election to choose a Senator because he has been accused of seducing––or trying to seduce––teenage girls and women substantially younger than him.
Perhaps more apropos, actor Kevin Spacey’s career crashed and burned nearly overnight in a global public spectacle reminiscent of the Hindenburg disaster. Why? Because over the course of his career, many now allege Spacey aggressively sought to coerce teenage boys and young men into engaging in homosexual acts. And according to some allegations, he succeeded.
This raises the question: Why would Hollywood praise a movie depicting behavior which in real-life it now decries and vigorously condemns? Perhaps it’s because Hollywood culture––which is religiously dedicated to the advancement of the ideology of the sexual revolution––can’t help itself. To do so would be heresy.
This movie seeks to mainstream pederasty (not to be confused with pedophilia) in a warm and fuzzy way. And after first being released on the big screen, its message will find its way onto home TV’s, laptop computers, and yes, onto the tablets and smartphones of adolescent children. It is not explicit pornography, but it is overt propaganda.
To understand the strategy which propelled this movie into being, look back to the publication of After the Ball, a 1989 manifesto which presented a comprehensive plan to establish the normalcy of gays and lesbians and to secure broader acceptance and rights. It was followed “to a tee” and it worked. Here are two main elements of the strategy:
“We have in mind a strategy … calculated and powerful … manipulative … It’s time to learn from Madison Avenue, to roll out the big guns. Gays must launch a large-scale campaign—we’ve called it the waging peace campaign—to reach straights through the mainstream media. We’re talking about propaganda …”
“You can forget about trying right up front to persuade folks that homosexuality is a good thing. But if you can get them to think it is just another thing—meriting no more than a shrug of the shoulders—then your battle for legal and social rights is virtually won.”
After scoring win after win in courts across the nation, culminating in the United States Supreme Court’s landmark same-sex marriage Obergefell decision in 2015, the progressive left has moved on to its remaining frontiers: transgenderism and adult/child sexual relationships. Hollywood is now applying the same “After the Ball” strategies which worked so well regarding the mainlining of homosexuality.
First pederasty will be normalized, then pedophilia. And it will come about in the same way that the complete acceptance of homosexuality came about during our lifetimes: By talking about it relentlessly in media and portraying it so frequently in movies and on TV as a good thing that it becomes not only commonplace, it becomes boring.
Objections to Criticism Don’t Hold Water
Many will defend the movie’s subject, saying that criticism of the film overlooks the story’s important cultural moral loopholes, rendering it impervious to moral outrage.
First, they will point to the age of consent in Italy, as did the movie’s star, Armie Hammer, in a Hollywood Reporter interview: “We weren’t trying to make some salacious, predatory movie. The age of consent in Italy is 14. So, to get technical, it’s not illegal there. Whether I agree with that or not, that’s a whole ‘nother Oprah, you know? Would it make me uncomfortable if I had a 17-year-old child dating someone in their mid-20s? Probably.”
The second objection is that the movie doesn’t actually portray predatory behavior by a man against a boy. Hammer continues, “But this isn’t a normal situation: The younger guy goes after the older guy. The dynamic is not older predator versus younger boy.”
Interestingly, Hammer nonchalantly employs the term “boy,” to describe his costar’s character.
What Hammer fails to recognize and address is that it doesn’t matter who initiates the seduction: A morally mature man would never succumb to such flirtations, no matter how enticing or flattering, and no matter the gender of the initiator. For some reason, the gay world is not held to the same standards as the straight world, where mature men engaging in sexual activity with a seventeen-year-old girl would be condemned. Real men do not entertain sexual relationships outside of marriage, let alone sexualized relationships with boys and girls. Rather, they protect children and young people, treating them with dignity.
Most Troubling
Perhaps the most problematic component of the movie is that seventeen-year-old Elio’s father expresses his approval for his son’s sexual relationship with an older man. He laments with regret having forgone similar opportunities when he was his son’s age.
This is meant to establish a new baseline of normalcy for parents, nudging them to second guess their natural protective instincts to save their kids from men who would happily and without conscience invade and end their sons’ and daughters’ innocence.
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