I was a teenager in the 80s and became an adult at the end of them. But as I got older I realized some of them normalized sexual assault.
16 Candles flat out has rape in it when Anthony Michael Hall's character has his way with a passed out prom queen in the backseat of Jake's dad's Rolls Royce. Fast Times has a scene with a 20 something dude having sex with a 16 year old high school girl at a park. Even Ferris Bueller's Day Off has Cameron pretending he's catatonic to see Ferris's girlfriend partially clothed.
I saw those movies at a really impressionable time in my life. I remember thinking, "oh, so when a girl gets drunk, guys take advantage of her, that's what's normal." Thankfully I had strong women in my life so that never really took root with me, but I remember there being a general attitude like that in the area I lived in. And you would hear about things like that all the time, some girl getting drunk at a party and being had sex with. It almost seemed like the goal for some guys when it came to underaged drinking. "Let's party, let's get drunk, let's get naked..."
Not that John Hughes was the main culprit, there were dozens of coming of age comedies back then that normalized drunken sex, date rape, voyeurism, and statutory rape. And maybe it was just a reflection of society at the time, but I do know that many of these movies implanted negative ideas about sex into my still developing hormone charged teenaged boy brain. And they sure seemed like they had an even bigger effect on a lot of other boys.
Breakfast Club was a great film, that really captured high school life in the 80s. How cliquey it was and how clueless most parents were about what their kids were dealing with. But even that movie, John Hughes couldn't resist having Bender trying to grope Claire's crotch when he was hiding under the table. Like what was the point of that scene?
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