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What My ’80s Childhood Taught Me About Rape Culture
A lot of us came of age watching raunchy movies, and we’re still re-enacting them today
The year is 1986, and I am around eight years old. I am sitting in my living room in Brooklyn watching Revenge of the Nerds with rapt attention. My mother is not around; perhaps she is passed out or out of the apartment altogether as she often was due to her retreat into the depths of her heroin addiction. I am alone watching this movie on a mainstream (non-cable) station during prime-time hours on a weeknight. Yet even among those who have the privilege of being raised with more present parents, it seems that almost all my peers are also watching this film because it would be widely discussed at school the following day.
Over the next couple of hours, I watch mesmerized as the male characters on the screen raid a women’s sorority to steal their underwear and, while doing so, secretly set up surveillance cameras. They then sit around their own fraternity eating popcorn while watching women undress and shower, completely unaware they are being spied on. Even at my young age, I wonder whether that is legal because it somehow seems wrong although the tone of the scene tries to convince me that it isn’t. These women were bitches after all, and this was them receiving their just desserts…
