A few nights ago I sat down with my whole family to watch a movie: Sixteen Candles directed by John Hughes (who also gave us Home Alone and the Breakfast Club)
I don’t know what it was about this PG rated “sweet and funny” (Roger Ebert) teen classic; maybe it was the fact that when it came time for “the geek” to rape the beautiful, passed out prom queen, nobody gave it a second thought. That when the “jock but actually a really nice guy” character says “I can get a piece of ass anytime I want. Shit, I’ve got Caroline in the bedroom right now, passed out cold. I could violate her ten different ways if I wanted to,” it’s taken as a sign of his great maturity and sweetness that he doesn’t in fact violate her “ten different ways” …rather than a sign that he isn’t a rapist and a criminal. That aforementioned Carolina clearly deserves to be raped, after all, she’s a beautiful cheerleader, and it’s about time the tables turned!
I won’t even go into the racism; suffice to say there is a foreign exchange student from China named Long Duck Dong.
If this is a PG rated classic, the kind of movie we show to twelve year olds, the kind of movie a whole family watches together on thanksgiving, the kind of sweet nostalgic movie taken as the antithesis of the violent, misogynistic, torture porn and regular porn and all the other garbage my mom finds so offensive…and it’s blatantly endorsing sexual abuse.
Well, I guess I already knew we lived in a rape culture…
Thoughts?
Gender Agenda 
Great critique of the movie, bejai. It’s too bad really and it’s this tragic thing that always happens when I look at so much art that deemed to be culturally significant (I agree with the consensus, by the way, that it is culturally significant, but significant in bad ways as much as in good ways).
I love John Hughes (and people influenced by his work like Richard Linklater and Judd Apatow) in so many ways. I think he’s really brilliant at pulling meaning and comedy from mundane experiences like going to the dance or getting detention. And the fact that I love him makes it hurt that much more when I have to feel isolated from the work he does, because I see it how its being affected by the assumptions that define rape culture and racist culture.
Honestly, on a daily basis I usually don’t feel, in any tangible way, my gendered lack of privilege (probably partly due to the fact that I have enormous privilege in other respects) but when I feel that isolation from the art I love (and I feel it where ever I go on the artistic spectrum) it becomes painfully real.
You might be interested in this piece on Salon: http://www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/feature/2009/08/11/16_candles/index.html
beej, awesome post! nice to see actual radical thought from someone with male privilege (and white, class, cis, able-bodied…you get my drift). much appreciated.
xo
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