Jokes aside, it seems that we as a society are going through some major paradigm shifts. This article from Vox News, revisits the 1984 movie, Sixteen Candles, as an illustration of how our thinking has changed.
Since I'm not much of a movie buff, I didn't see Sixteen Candles. It was billed as a sweet coming-of-age teen chick flick at the time. From the article:
"Yet it is entirely willing to feature a lengthy, supposedly hilarious subplot in which a drunk and unconscious girl is passed from one boy to another and then raped.
The drunk girl in question is Caroline (Haviland Morris), the girlfriend to romantic hero Jake Ryan, and if you know one thing about Sixteen Candles, it’s that Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling)
is perfect. He is the impossibly cool, impossibly beautiful senior guy
who is dating the impossibly beautiful senior girl — and yet as soon as
Jake Ryan hears that gawky, awkward sophomore Samantha (Molly Ringwald) has a crush on him, he immediately begins to like her back, defying all the laws of God, man, and high school popularity"
Jake Ryan is the embodiment of a fantasy so compelling it instantly made Sixteen Candles
iconic: What if the object of all your romantic high school dreams
decided to pursue you without you having to expend any effort
whatsoever, just because they could see that you were, like, deeper
and more special than the rest of the school? What if they somehow saw
that without you ever having to have a conversation or interact with
them in any way?
“Jake stands the test of time,” wrote Hank Stuever in the Washington Post in 2004.
He quotes a 34-year-old woman who grew up on Jake Ryan: “Oh, gosh, Jake
Ryan. Just thinking about it now, I get … kind of … It’s all just too
good to be true.”
"...Yet Jake Ryan cold-bloodedly hands a drunk and unconscious Caroline over to another guy and says, “Have fun.”
In 1984, you could be a perfect dream boy and also be an accessory to date rape. They were not mutually exclusive ideas. In fact, they reinforced each other."
"...On many levels, it’s not far off from how large parts of our culture
think about rape today — but we bury those values now. In 2018, we no
longer enshrine these values in stories of unambiguous rape that are
embedded into beloved romantic classics. We offer alternative narratives and are capable of having conversations about date rape."
"...The dominant cultural narrative at the time of Brett Kavanaugh’s high school experience was the one offered by Sixteen Candles.
And it taught any girl who went to a party and got assaulted by an
acquaintance that whatever happened to her was surely her fault, that it
proved she was the wrong kind of girl, that it was funny, that she had
nothing whatsoever to complain about, and that it absolutely wasn’t
rape.
Under those circumstances, the mystery is not why “any
person would continue to go to … ten parties over a two-year period
where women were routinely gang raped and not report it,” as Sen. Graham
argued. The mystery is why anyone ever came forward with their story at
all"
I was turned off reading just the plot synopsis. In 1984 I don't think I would have liked that movie, even if I had been a movie buff. I recently had a conversation with my youngest sister, who was a teen at that time, and had seen the movie. She said that looking back, she was horrified at the plight of Caroline, even though she identified with Molly Ringwald's character, Samantha, at the time.
I believe time will tell what our society does with its "paradigm shift". Will it be a moment where we reaffirm every woman's (and every man's) human dignity, independent of what happens in our national political circus?
Never watched "Sixteen Candles", Katherine, but now I'm curious.
ReplyDeleteI never saw any of those '80s teen movies. Oddly, I think all of the sex in Animal House (1978), which was supposed to be about frat boy depravity, was consensual. I remember a scene in which Tom Hulce is with a drunken girl who passes out. He is tempted, but ends up putting her in a grocery cart, wheeling her to her parents' homehome, ringing the doorbell, and running away.
ReplyDeleteMaybe rethinking the'80s, which is not a decade U remember fondly, is generally good, but does it really shed much light on the Kavenaugh nomination? Will it affect the.outcome?
The sad thing is that the votes for and against Kavenaugh will be cast on grounds of political expediency. And nothing else.
You're right that it will be based on political expediency. It's not that the 80s shed light on Kavanaugh's nomination, because they could have picked another candidate (and probably by now are wishing that they had). But the social morays of the 80s mean that there are quite a few people who form the elite of the present who have some skeletons in their closet.
DeleteJean - it's been quite a while since I've seen Animal House. Your comment prompted me to find the scene in Youtube. It is the angel-and-devil scene. The girl is passed out on the bed, the angel and devil appear on Tom Hulce's shoulders and argue, the angel seems to win the argument, and then the movie jumps to the shopping cart scene that you mention. But IIRC, the girl, who is a 15 year old checkout clerk from the local grocery store, informs her father the mayor in one of the last scenes of the movie that she is pregnant, so it seems something happened with Tom Hulce. There are at least four or five good reasons for me not to provide the URL to the scene in question, so if any of y'all are curious, you'll need to find it yourselves. But I admit that when I was a senior in high school in 1978-79, we thought it was all very funny stuff.
ReplyDeleteIn point of fact: as I came of age at the time Animal House was in its original release, and am kinda/sorta a contemporary of Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford (he would have been three or four years behind me in school; I guess she would have been a couple of years later), and as, like Kavanaugh, I attended a Catholic high school, I feel pretty confident in asserting that that film, Animal House, wrecked a lot of lives. It was quite the cultural influence among my peers. It encouraged the lie that one could be a drunken idiot in school without any lasting consequences. I'd never believe that a guy like Kavanaugh who apparently was a binge drinker wouldn't have been familiar with the movie and wouldn't have loved it.
Animal House wrecked lives.
DeleteI doubt it. If anybody thought the movie's characters were presented as role models, their lives were already on the road to wreckage.
When Sixteen Candles came out, I was just out of college, and I wasn't really the target audience for the film at that time, so I never saw it, but I remember that it was kind of a cultural phenomenon - I mostly remember Molly Ringwald being a star. If there was any talk in my circle at that time of the scene in question, I don't remember it. Here is Molly herself saying the scene is problematic:
ReplyDeletehttps://theprovince.com/entertainment/movies/molly-ringwald-still-hates-drunken-sex-scene-in-sixteen-candles/wcm/6277dbbd-e6a6-4da7-8b29-b0c3f5a7a21b
Watching that Tom Hulce scene from Animal House a few minutes ago, my strongest reaction was, "Damn, I'm glad I'm not a young adult anymore."
When I was a lad, in Catholic schools, boys were taught that it was the girl's responsibility to turn off the heat, but that boys should be gentlemen. I think, without aid of Animal House, we got the paradigm of the movies you're talking about here.
ReplyDeleteThese movies were made after movies became films and too complex for my unhip mind. The "rape ballet" in The Fantasticks always bothered me, even though the first time I saw it at the old Fred Miller Theater in Milwaukee the woman in front of me literally fell out of her seat laughing -- the only time I ever saw someone do that. I am wondering what they do in the Me Too era with a song about rape as a contractible commodity, even though the story line follows the mugging of the Boy, not the "abdudction" of the Girl.
Tom, I'm glad you brought up the point about being a gentleman, because this Kavanaugh/Blasey Ford has caused me to reflect quite a bit what the 'code of honor' for men was when I was a teen and young adult. I think it's fair to say that the traditional code of the gentleman had been superseded by then, but with what? I guess with whatever Hugh Hefner had been peddling for years by the time I reached that age. But even though things were a good deal loosier and goosier than in my dad's time, there were still things that were beyond the pale - at least in my mind they were, and I doubt I was being counter-cultural in all this. Slipping a girl a "roofie" (although we didn't call them that in those days) would have been something that just wasn't done if you had any self respect. And what Kavanaugh allegedly did also would have crossed a line. Yet those lines seemingly did get crossed - although I don't recall ever witnessing anything like that (but one heard stories).
DeletePersonally, I think conservatives need to reflect long and hard about the traditional code of acting like a gentleman. It seems like something conservatives would support, but I haven't heard any of them castigating Kavanaugh for diverging from it. Of course, not many conservatives accept Blasey Ford's account of what happened, but even if that's the case, that whole party scene Kavanaugh was circulating in sounds pretty un-gentlemanly.
Sometimes old-fashioned words find fresh currency. Was Kavanaugh a cad? Would referring to him as a cad help clarify in people's minds how to think about this?
DeleteJim, I think "cad" pretty well describes his behavior. And the question is, does being a supposedly reformed cad disqualify him from confirmation? I still maintain that there should be more discussion of him being a blatant partisan, with questions about him being able to adjudicate in a fair and impartial manner. As it is, that's going to fly under the radar.
DeleteReferring to him as a juvenile delinquent works for me.
DeleteI like "cur". I think the word needs a revival.
DeleteYes, I like "cur." It suggests someone needs to give someone a good thrashing.
DeleteUnfortunately the cultural phenomenon for my graduating class ('69) was Woodstock, both the event and the movie about it. Not that any of us were at the event. I didn't see that movie, either, though I liked some of the music. But ripple effects, and all that. I think the '80s kids were still feeling the ripples from the "summer of love". People are always trying to convince themselves that there is such a thing as consequence-free sex. As we have seen some of the consequences have a long half-life.
ReplyDeleteAnd speaking of ripples, disgust with the Vietnam War fueled part of the "make love, not war" phenomenon.
Delete"Catholic gentlemen."
ReplyDeleteI impugn no one here, and I don't want to make blanket statements, but some privileged Catholic and Jewish guys I dated seemed to think that being a gentleman extended only to the Catholic or Jewish girls they might marry some day.
I remembered that Kavanaugh noted that Ford was from Holton-Arms, not one of the nearby Catholic girls schools where he seemed to be well liked and with whose students he was well behaved. He.didn't know her. She was nothing to him. She didn't matter. Sounded familiarly like that "don't foul your own nest" distinction I encountered decades ago.
If Animal House was a corrosive social phenomenon, perhaps we should look at the all-boys Catholic schools, too.
There weren't any Catholic all-boy schools where I grew up. But there were plenty of Protestant boys. Their motto was, whatever they could get away with. Come to think of it that was the Catholic boys' motto, too. To be fair, not every Protestant, and not every Catholic.
DeleteMy mom's motto to me, was, "Look out for yourself, because you can't count on other people doing it for you."
But yeah. We should expect a Catholic school to do a better job of moral formation. Not to mention Catholic parents.
"Their motto was, whatever they could get away with."
DeleteYep, that was me. In retrospect I'm grateful that I had an almost-unerring talent for being paired up with girls who didn't let me get away with much.
I went to a Catholic school - it was coed. The religion teachers, most of whom were diocesan priests, exhorted us to be chaste until they were blue in the face. But hormones eat sacerdotal exhortations for breakfast.
Jim, so it's boys will be boys, and they are so driven by hormones that they're sex fiends, and that's normal, so women watch out?
DeleteIt's no use pretending that hormones aren't a factor. But they don't cancel out free will. A decent guy (and I'm pretty sure Jim is one) respects boundaries.
DeleteWhat a lot of young people don't seem to realize is the extent to which alcohol (and drugs, but that's a whole other discussion) erase people's sense of boundaries.
Delete"Jim, so it's boys will be boys, and they are so driven by hormones that they're sex fiends, and that's normal, so women watch out?"
DeleteNo Jean. It's boys will be boys, and nearly all of them aren't sex fiends but the ones who like girls really like girls and really like sex, or think they might like sex if they ever get to have some, and would really like the girl they're with to consent to it.
Girls really like boys and think they would really like sex, but they rarely resort to sexual abuse. Not being flip, some girls can be callous or promiscuous, but dragging some guy off and forcing him to perform seems to be pretty far off the radar. So I don't buy the hormone defense.
DeleteI've lost the thread of what we're talking about. My only point, which I didn't think was very remarkable, is that teenage boys are horny. That fact of the human condition doesn't excuse anything - not rape, not sex abuse, not even the violations (with a consenting partner) of the chaste lifestyle which those priests urged us to pursue.
DeleteSorry if I went off track. I thought we were talking about how we are moving away from thinking that sexual assault could be treated in a jokey manner by accepting the basic premise that this is normal for boys because they're horny and have a lot of hormones.
DeleteMy only point is that girls are often also blindsided by their own sex urges as teenagers, but hormones and horniness. This does not result in sexual assault, so why it should for boys doesn't make sense to me.
I'm not arguing with anything you are saying, just trying to expand the "paradigm" to include sexuality among girls, which I think is often ignored.
Jean, thanks. "He's a man and has strong urges, and any woman invited to his hotel room shouldn't have had any illusions about what for" was actually used as a defense - a criminal defense - at least once that I'm aware of, in Mike Tyson's rape trial. Happy to report that it didn't work.
DeleteI don't get the idea of assaulting a woman as sexually pleasurable. Some guys must be wired differently. Doesn't seem like much fun.
ReplyDeleteHalf the fun for, I hope a small percentage of, men is domination and bragging about it to your guy friends over beers.
DeleteOne of my former boyfriends mansplained it to me one time. Women are wired to "protect their eggs" until they find a man who seems like helpmeet material, hence the emphasis on relationship and character. Men are wired to "sow far and wide," which leads to objectification and keeping score with other men.
There a lot about sexuality that this theory leaves out, imo, but he was pretty arrogant about his facile explanations, so I suggested we go see a movie where he would have to stop talking stupid.
Usta be "The devil made me do it". Now it's "My evolutionary programming made me do it". All good excuses from rectal apertures who don't know much about the devil or evolution.
DeleteI must hasten to note that aforementioned boyfriend was a good man generally, and we remained friends for some years and argued less as a result. At age 30, he learned he had son, and did the right thing by marrying the mother. They are still together.
Delete