Conservatives and illiberal leftists make your reactions their business and they shouldn't.

 
Admittedly out of character for me, I'm gonna kinda-sorta issue a trigger warning. There's no way to make this point without dealing with a sexually explicit image. I can't know whether or not anybody reading this has the tolerance to handle the details of this scene in a very good movie; so, I'm playing it safe.

Okay, here we go...

I think that there's some real wisdom to be discovered in how people react to the peach scene in Call Me By Your Name.

This isn't a massive spoiler for the film; but, there's a scene wherein a young man uses a peach to masturbate and he ejaculates inside the peach. Shortly thereafter, the older man with whom the younger man had been having sex sees the semen in the peach and almost eats it.

It's odd thinking about how people's reaction to that scene is illustrative of people's philosophy.

If you're a conservative, this is the perfect example of what Jonathan Haidt would talk about when it comes to a gag reflex.

If you're a leftist, you're thinking that anybody who has that gag reflex when viewing that scene is an evil person.

If you're a legitimate liberal, you're allowed to react how you react, and you won't judge people for their reactions.

There's a limitation to what we're happy to see. We lack complete, libertarian, free will. We can't just decide to be okay with everything and anything that we're presented with.

Liberals understand that tolerance actually means tol-er-ance. Namely, you don't have to like it, nor accept it. It just has to be a thing that you experience, or see, and move on with your life while avoiding making a political fiasco out of it. Your experience is your own. Your experience is yours to deal with. If a person watched the peach scene and threw up, that's not your business. If a person watched the peach scene and got a boner, that's not your business unless the dude whipped it out in the theater.

Conservatives and illiberal Leftists are gonna handle this the same way -- they're gonna make your reaction their business.