One thing we keep seeing on Twitter in light of the allegations made against SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh is a revisiting of the movie “Sixteen Candles,” which, if you don’t remember, includes a scene where the heartthrob character, Jake Ryan, literally gives his passed-out girlfriend to the nerd played by Anthony Michael Hall so he can have sex with her:
I…did not know that 16 Candles included a rape subplot played for laughs. Helluva window into the 1980s here, and what was and was not coded as sexual assault. https://t.co/5pEAgEL8tM
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) September 28, 2018
From Vox:
Jake Ryan is the embodiment of a fantasy so compelling it instantly made Sixteen Candlesiconic: 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.”
Jake Ryan’s reputation as the ideal dream boy of every teenage girl’s deepest fantasies has lasted for decades. Jake, writes Stuever, “is Christ, redeeming the evil sins of high school. Jake as the ideal. Jake as the eternal belief in something better.”
Yet Jake Ryan cold-bloodedly hands a drunk and unconscious Caroline over to another guy and says, “Have fun.”
Anyway, since The Atlantic fired conservative Kevin Williamson for old things he said, maybe the magazine should take a look at this old tweet from just-hired columnist Jemele Hill who wrote in 2012 that “Jake Ryan is still my dream man”:
Perfect way to cap the night: Sixteen Candles, my favorite teen-angst movie ever, is on. Jake Ryan is still my dream man #DontJudgeMe
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 18, 2012
CREEPY!
Hill, as you’d expect, is much tougher on Brett Kavanaugh, where there’s no evidence of a crime, than she is on her celebrity crush who is an accomplice to rape in the film:
I’m sure he’s drinking a frosty one while admiring pictures of when he was captain of the football, basketball, wresting, track, golf, water polo, debate, chess, and dance teams in high school. https://t.co/k6M0n3moLj
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 28, 2018
I can’t imagine being this ignorant. https://t.co/SxstWuaSPg
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) October 1, 2018
Hate to say it, but that’s the most obvious outcome. We keep saying we learn from history, and the truth is, we rarely do. https://t.co/DZJbbRpR29
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 28, 2018
She even compared Kavanaugh to the fictional character Al Bundy from “Married with Children”:
Video of Kavanaugh resurfaces from his high school days https://t.co/7XMlBi8yN0
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 27, 2018
Brett Kavanaugh is sounding like Al Bundy whenever he brought up his championship victory at Polk High. Nobody cares that you were captain of 22 different sports.
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) September 27, 2018
Sorry, Jemele. Al Bundy is a hero who in our memory never once sexually assaulted a woman on the show. As a matter of fact, Al was known to take matters into his own hands when a boy treated his daugher, Kelly, badly. Like this famous scene where he beat up a boyfriend after she caught him cheating on her.
It’s Jake Ryan that’s the real monster and Al would’ve kicked his a**.
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