#but also this is 2k of word vomit so will anyone even read it hahahahaha

[sunsandships]

the age gap issue, and how i’ve made my peace with it

or: a meandering word dump as i try to sort out my feelings on CMBYN

disclaimer: these are unedited thoughts. i welcome discussion & people engaging with my thoughts. age gap specific thoughts are towards the end; the beginning is just,, literal word vomit. pls handle gently.

to begin with, both the novel and the movie hit me like a freight train; sort of like that part in Inception where they’re on the first level of the dream in that ugly taxicab and the train just literally slams into them from outta nowhere. descriptors like lush or intimate are probably way overused with respect to CMBYN but they are truly what spring to mind. what struck me, and stuck with me, as i read the novel then watched the movie (in that order) was how difficult it was for me to do in one sitting.

for context: i’m the type of person who usually blazes through a novel, no matter how long, in one sitting. and movies, of course, i usually watch in one sitting as well. but i also have a recorded history of sucking at handling second-hand embarrassment. my freshman year college roommates will testify to my ridiculous behavior when trying to watch She’s The Man. i had to cross the room. at one point, i think i rolled on the floor a little in mortification. when it comes to novels, i usually skim past the section that’s causing me second-hand embarrassment, or just flip forward the page entirely.

call me by your name is not a long book. it took me nearly a week to finish reading. i just couldn’t handle too much of it in one sitting -- i would read somewhere between 5 to 30 pages, and something would be too much, and i would have to go do something else for a few hours. it took me three evenings to finish the movie. and i couldn’t even watch the movie in the daytime; the ambience just felt too wrong. but even in the darkness of my bedroom, with no one else in the world to judge me for what i was watching or feeling while watching it, i couldn’t finish the movie in one go either. i paused in strategic places, and had to return to it the next day.

it’s wrong to call what caused these pauses second hand embarrassment. nothing particularly embarrassing happens, except perhaps elio’s straightforwardly fervent attraction and sexual awakening. yet the fact that i needed to take these pauses remind me of the times i’ve had to pause in a movie or skip forward in a book due to mortifyingly visceral second hand embarrassment. and i think that’s the connecting factor, the reason it took me so long to finish both book and novel, despite loving both. something about the narrative is just so gut-wrenchingly real. the novel reminded me of reading Richard Siken’s Crush for the first time as an angst-ridden middle schooler. when, for no reason i could pinpoint, the prose just kind of socked me in the stomach and makes me feel things like a physical ache in my sternum. CMBYN was something similar; less of a punch in the gut, more of a long, slow burn. like the twinge of muscles after you’ve overexerted yourself exercising the day before. and the movie -- god, the movie -- is shot so beautifully; the elegant piano in the sunlit itallian villa, the sounds of summer in the background, the cerulean sea, the ripe peaches like the world’s best and worst metaphor at the same time. and again, the words that spring to the lips when talking about CMBYN -- lush, sensual, intimate. 

and there, that’s another key word -- intimate. the novel and movie both feel a little like voyeurism, like the whole thing was a real, private experience between two real people and you’re spying in on them through an omnipotent camera operator, seeing something not meant to be seen, much less by you.

and maybe that’s why i fell head first into yet another hyperfixation; it’s been a long long time since i read something that made me unflinchingly feel that much. maybe because primarily i’ve been reading trope-laden fanfictions, self-indulgent fics that i can know what to expect of. the equivalent of eating literary fast food for years and then suddenly tasting fresh fruit -- am i cheeky enough to say a peach?

but now, and wow it’s taken me a long time to get to the main point, having stewed in my love of the prose and the movie’s cinematography and the frankly gorgeous acting (and persons) of A.H. and T. C., a little niggling doubt in my hindbrain -- what about the age gap? after all, that was the main reason i’d put off reading the book for so long, when i’d first started seeing buzz around CMBYN months and months ago. especially with all the recent sexual abuse allegations floating around, i was hesitant, weary.

to quote oliver, i know myself. i know my kinks, which yes, sometimes include age gaps; i know intimately that what makes it a kink for me is the inherent power dynamic of an age gap. and i think 99% of my kinks trace back to there being that power dynamic. the other 1% is fear. so, y’know -- it’s not that the age gap, by itself, weirded me out. ya girl ain’t about to kink shame herself. but the difference for me was, in the weird cesspool of fandom, it goes without saying that kinks that push the edge of social norms (heck, kinks that go way beyond the edge) are definitely fictional. fantasy. in the realm of things you can explore with fictional characters. unhealthy power dynamics are just that -- unhealthy. played with in the context of kinky fic, yeah. but definitively not glorified, not romantic, not real.

and by god, CMBYN is all of those - glorified, romantic, achingly real. so why, why when i read the novel and watch the movie, did my concern fade into the background? had fic desensitized me? was my moral compass loose? and of course, much ado has been made about the age of consent being so much lower in italy (14, holy smokes), and the absolute ego of applying U.S.-centric morality to everything, so is it really a non-issue?

maybe the first thing is to place the novel in its own context -- the author is not a teenage boy. the author is a college professor of comparative literature. the author is a married man. the author is even a straight married man, in fact. and yeah, despite setting the novel in the head of a seventeen year old, it’s also framed as older!elio looking back nostalgically. so wow, does the narration not sound like a seventeen year old boy. and oliver, poor oliver, does not get his perspective in. everything is framed by older-elio-recalling-younger-elio’s thoughts. and when you’re reading it, you’re caught up in the narration, the feel of the words, the story, and you’re not thinking about the age gap at all, not really, unless the narrative itself calls your attention to it, and by then you’re in it for the long haul, and suspension of disbelief has kicked in, and it just kind of,,, stops bothering you.

and the movie, wow. the casting. T.C. can definitely pass as younger-than-twenty. maybe not seventeen, precisely, but young-ish. still a teen. meanwhile, A.H. is definitely older than twenty-four. he’s thirty-one and at best passes for late-twenties. so hoo boy, did the movie accentuate that age gap. by the time i watched the movie though, i was already a goner for the book. so i didn’t focus on it too much, or at all. it doesn’t hurt that T.C. and A.H. are both gorgeous by themselves, and that together their chemistry is amazing, and that their acting is just,,, subtle and superbly mind-blowing at the same time.

and so wham bam, i finish the movie. i plunge into hyperfixation pretty quickly. and then suddenly, deep in the CMBYN tag, i read a well-written, non-aggressive review of the novel which does a pretty neat take on why it’s an issue the novel is written by a much older man fantasizing about the sex life of a seventeen year old with a older man. when you put it like that, it’s pretty,,, squicky. 

so, the age gap problem. time to face it head on, me.

the age gap presented breaks no laws. canonically, elio’s parents are even aware of what’s developing and approve (and perhaps even encourage? setting them up in a bougie hotel for the overnight Rome trip, hello??). but after i separated a little from the initial euphoria of just existing at the same time as the gorgeousness of CMBYN and thought about it a little more, it just,,, felt weird, in a intrinsic level, the same intrinsic level that felt all the positive feels possible for CMBYN when i was immersed in it and had full suspension of disbelief happening. 

why does it feel weird? well me, right now, i’m twenty. and i feel so, so much older than i was when i was seventeen. i would not date someone that is seventeen. i would pretty much find it impossible, i think, to find a emotional or intellectual connection with someone that is seventeen. so much happens in those in-between years, and that’s with just the difference of high school vs. college. elio and oliver are looking at the extra gap of high school - college - grad school. it’s not a trivial age gap. and just because it doesn’t break any laws doesn’t make it a non-issue, i think.

back to that power dynamic; the way the age skew totally definitely allows the older person to take advantage, to abuse. is that what’s happening here? certainly, i had issues with the sex scene (hello, lube? hello, condoms? hello, prep?? i do not believe you can engage in anal, penetrative intercourse without needing to talk through it, yet one of the major things after the sex is elio retreats into himself, into shame over the act itself. i’m not in the camp that the sex was non-consensual; elio was clearly there for it. but i don’t think it was written or handled well, much less realistically -- the author is, unfortunate, a Straight) but i don’t think, on the whole of it, any advantage-taking is happening. oliver doesn’t hold any authority over elio, and elio’s infatuation/desire for oliver is full-blown with no encouragement (or, a less-nice word: manipulation) from oliver.

they don’t pursue a long-term relationship. there’s no mention that they might even try to extend the relationship beyond the summer. when oliver leaves, elio lets him go. canonically, elio takes that whole experience, wraps it in bubble wrap, and puts it on a pedestal. and yeah, years later, when they are both much much older, they reconnect and still feel things but also both have clearly done fine in their individual lives and elio is a drama queen ok. he’s nostalgic. he’s still feeling things. but would he have totally buried all feelings if, at the time of their fling, he’d been twenty instead of seventeen?

though on the flip side, why does elio need to be seventeen at all? would it change the story at all if he was twenty? twenty-two, even? just freshly graduated college, summering with his parents one last summer? maybe there’s something to be said about elio being on the cusp of manhood, or whatever. that it needs to be his first love, not just a love. but hey, i’m twenty, and i haven’t been in any type of relationship, much less love. so clearly, within the realm of possibility. here, i think, is a much deeper critique than the age gap in and of itself. something along the lines of Andre Aciman, and his authorial choices as a Older Straight White Male. i’m not really qualified to touch that, though; i’m really here to just digest my own feelings about the age gap, and why ultimately i’m at peace with it, and why i think i’ve made my peace with being at peace with it.

because, no, i don’t really buy that a seventeen year old and a twenty-four year old can fall in true true love without knowing much about each other beyond bonding on a shallow intellectual level over classical literature and music and idyllic bike rides and swimming. certainly, i would be much happier buying the love part of the equation if elio was twenty, or twenty-one, or twenty-two. but nothing about the relationship is manipulative, or nonconsensual, or coerced. and due to the narrative style, in my head, elio isn’t even quite seventeen - more of a amorphous precocious early twenties, maybe. 

maybe also because, at the heart of it, i don’t think CMBYN is a love story. i think it’s a story about desire, and the inevitability of time eroding pretty much everything, and enjoying and holding onto things when they’re in your grasp. and so while i think the age gap makes love a little out of my realm of understanding, it certainly puts no barrier on desire.