As I’ve written here in this thread, I’m not saying that the woman was assaulted, it appears she was, but consider that the left so often projects what it wants to on any and every situation, in order to further its agendas.
And just consider the following excerpt from a Salon article about a 2015 movie. Note the attitude it has about both women and sex, and then also consider that the character being discussed here, Minnie, isn’t an adult, but a 15 year-old!
And if that isn’t enough, also consider that the plot of the movie concerns this 15 year-old girl “having a sexual relationship” with a 40 year-old man! The liberal sites like Salon, as well as “respectable” outlets like the New York Times, just love this movie, and play coyly about the relationship actually being statutory rape:
“But in “Diary,” director Marielle Heller’s debut feature film, Minnie Goetze gets what she wants, when she wants it, a refreshingly frequent amount of time. For most of the film what she wants to get is sex — something the film approaches with a rare respect for the exigency of female desire, perhaps specifically the desire to be desired. Played by British actor Bel Powley, Minnie “gets to get” in a pool shed, hotel room, the belly of a sailboat, the back of a car. The perspective offered is patently female; Minnie is less objectified gamine than woman on the prowl for a good lay. Even the way she sees herself (as revealed in the film’s opening shot) is as a moving sexual agent: the lens looks up at her trousered booty as she strides surely forward. Given Minnie’s small stature, we know that this shot is how she imagines her body and sexuality as towering and powerful. I can think of few shots of a young woman’s caboose that carry such surprisingly positive connotations.
“Surprise” seems to be the operative term that many critics take. HuffPost’s Leora Tanenbaum asserts that “[t]he surprise of this movie … is that it portrays Minnie as someone in control of her body and her life — even when her surrounding circumstances may lead us to conclude otherwise.” That a female sexual coming-of-age can happen sans victimization might indeed prove a surprise to any fan of the genre; typically a girl becomes a “f-—ing woman” not through, well, f-—ing from a standpoint of desire, but through enduring any number of bad things that assault her body — having her period, suffering cramps (or cliques) or submitting to a painful, violent, or at least awkward loss of virginity. So Minnie as lusty protagonist comes as a welcome “surprise,” though it’s sad to admit that’s the case 39 years after 1976, when the film is set, a time when the FDA has finally approved a version of “female Viagra” for women with flagging libidos.
(snip)
“Flash forward and today seems prudish, even downright hostile to sexually adventurous young women. As pointed out last week by Amanda Hess in Slate, “the underlying sexual and technological panic” streaming from recent anti-Tinder-heads “looks remarkably similar to the Victorian version” over a hundred years ago. But staged against the enviably libertine seventies, the central controversy of “Diary” — Minnie’s affair with Monroe, her mother’s boyfriend, 25 years her senior — somehow seems a lot less reprehensible, less like statutory rape and more like just another break from taboo.”
“But staged against the enviably libertine seventies, the central controversy of “Diary” — Minnie’s affair with Monroe, her mother’s boyfriend, 25 years her senior — somehow seems a lot LESS REPREHENSIBLE, LESS LIKE STATUTORY RAPE and more like just another break from taboo.””
Here are some quotes from a couple of reviewers. The New York Times:
“What you call Monroe, other than an expletive, depends on what you call a man having sex with a 15-year-old girl. “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” takes place in 1976, when the age of consent in California was 18 (it still is), but it unfolds in an anything-goes milieu in which Monroe might be branded more of an opportunist than a creep...
“It would be easy to call Minnie a victim, and Monroe the villain, even if that’s not at all how it plays out in the movie. Monroe may not be exactly the light of Minnie’s life, but for much of the story, he is the fire of her loins, to borrow and bend some opening words from Nabokov’s “Lolita”... The novel is life-specific, but what makes Minnie — on the page and now on the screen — greater than any one girl is how she tells her own story in her own soaringly alive voice.”
And Time Magazine:
“...And what makes this movie stand out from the admittedly underdeveloped subgenre of films dealing with young female sexuality is its refreshing candor in relaying that tension. It is presented without judgment, with full agency in the hands of its protagonist and with a nuance rarely achieved among its predecessors.
“When coverage of the Patty Hearst trial comes on the local news in the Goetz home, it is more than a subtle nod to the time (1976) and place (San Francisco). The family’s debate about whether Hearst was a victim or a willing participant in her own ordeal could just as easily have been about Minnie’s budding sexuality: Is she a victim of what she may someday perceive as trauma? Is she being controlled or is she in control?”
http://time.com/3984455/the-diary-of-a-teenage-girl-empowerment/
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/3334514/posts
The New York Times also thought the filmmaker was to be pitied, as though it wasn’t her choice to make such a film, putting herself in a position to have to answer for it:
“The question that the women behind “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” had been dreading came during a Q. and A. session at a screening in a Park City, Utah, mall two days after the film’s triumphant premiere at Sundance.
“What was your ulterior motive?” a man in the audience asked the director, Marielle Heller. “Were you trying to condemn pedophilia or glorify it?”
“Ms. Heller barely let a second flicker by.
“Neither,” she replied. “I had one intention, which was to tell an honest story about a teenage girl and what it feels like to be a teenage girl.”
Overall, from the awards and accolades heaped on this film, it’s clear that the left just can’t say that a 15 year-old “in a relationship” with a 40 year-old is a victim of statutory rape. They can’t decide there’s a victim there, and a rapist too.
That moral confusion is bound up in the “public outrage” over this case, which seems to be most about the left exercising their power in order to increase it. The university intellectuals, the media and the rank-and-file activists/social media mobs simply agitate until they achieve a goal, which makes people and organizations reluctant to do anything they don’t approve of and ready to surrender to them.
I read it earlier. I do agree that there may be some agenda by news organizations covering the story from a certain slant. However, I too, had an abusive father, and it was mild in comparison to some others’ abusive situations, as you’ve said about yours. With that being said, I side with this young lady in that people drink all the time, and don’t go raping others. I think this young man felt entitled, and he learned it from his dad if no where else. I think the hook up culture that they’ve been teaching in HS and college was dangerous, and this is one of those fallouts from it. The bottom line for me though, is that this was still rape rape, as Whoopi is quoted to have said. Because of that, I think if the minimum sentence is 1 year to a maximum of 15 years, the judge should have given him at least the minimum. Why didn’t he do that?