just thinking about the way camille thinks about violence inflicted on herself as incidental, nothing all that serious, just an inherent part of her life, and only recognizes the severity of violence inflicted on others, especially re: discussions of sexual violence in sharp objects. i’ve seen a couple people say that the book is actually problematic in the way it talks about sexual violence, specifically because of the scene where she describes her own experience of rape (which she does not consider a rape) as a 13 year old at a party by several young men while she was drunk. in this scene, she tells richard that his criteria for sexual violence is sexist, that sometimes the girl just did something stupid and it’s her decision. of course, if gillian flynn intended this to be taken seriously as her opinion on the nature of sexual violence, i would agree that this is a particularly egregious take, but camille isn’t making a generalization here, she’s blaming herself for what happened. it’s interesting that she offers the story as an example of violence in wind gap but almost immediately, defensively, rescinds her judgment of the incident as violence, insisting that it doesn’t count. but later in the book, when a similar incident, instigated by amma, takes place, camille recognizes it as sexual violence in which the young girl is a victim, retroactively understanding her own experience of violence as actual violence. i think that this makes it clear that the previous sentiments expressed are not, in fact, supposed to be taken as a statement of a belief held by the author, but as an expression of camille’s mindset about herself and her sense of whether or not she is a victim of sexual violence. similarly, when she sees one of the boys from the football team who participated in sexual violence against her, he apologizes and says he’s been haunted with guilt ever since, but she doesn’t want to hear anything about it, she says he did nothing wrong and whatever, she’s moved past it, just forget about it. this is reminiscent imo of amma’s theory of experiencing violence: “sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them.” she says this in response to camille telling her that sex isn’t reciprocal at her age - again, only recognizing this fact when it doesn’t apply to her. in her conversation with the football player, she actually does hold power over him, if only through the leverage of shame, as she’s the only person who can forgive him and give him closure, which, despite her insistence that she doesn’t care, she doesn’t provide for him. of course, as she recognizes through amma’s experience, this isn’t real power, since it’s dependent on him feeling the obligation of guilt at all, and ultimately she was the one who had to experience harm first in order to “gain power” over him - and in amma’s case, when this logic is applied to what she believes is a transactional relationship with adora in terms of care, she gets the bad end of what she sees as a rotten deal: letting herself be sick so she can get care from adora, only for her to turn around and give care to other little girls. this theory of gaining power by submitting yourself to violence is proven to be false repeatedly over the course of the story. i also think camille’s response to the conversation she has with anne nash’s father is telling, particularly the way it is directed in the tv series. he expresses gratitude for the fact that anne was simply killed, and not raped first - more specifically, he says that he would rather that she would be killed than raped at all. he redacts this comment in the book (“that was a stupid thing to say. but you know what i mean.”) but in the show i think there’s a wonderful nuance to amy adam’s acting in this scene where she looks kind of hurt (?) or saddened (?) by this idea, like as someone who has experienced sexual violence herself, what is she supposed to make of the idea that sexual violence is worse than murder? like would it really be better if she were dead than be a victim of sexual violence? i think this may account for the way that, in the first scene i talked about, she demands that richard specifies his criteria for outright violence in response to the way he reacts to the story of her experience of sexual violence - because it’s difficult to conceptualize the self as a victim of serious abuse. which of course plays into other modes of violence in the story, and the way that amma conceptualizes herself as a perpetrator rather than a victim, even while she’s both, both in terms of sexual violence and parental abuse (arguably, she is only the victim in her relationship with adora, but she thinks of it as something she does as a bargaining chip for love and attention). i think that the way sharp objects addresses these issues calls our cultural rhetoric around sexual violence into question and tries to engage in a deeper discussion about the agency of victims of sexual violence and how they experience what that means about themselves on a personal level, rather than presenting a clean cut narrative that is less fraught (and therefore seen as less problematic) than messy, imperfect experiences of violence, and in doing so affords full agency and personhood to the people with those experiences instead of trying to sweep it under the rug
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