Back in the early 1980s, I was very interested in my career, sports, and the Reagan presidency.  Nevertheless, I couldn't help but notice the movies at the theaters.  In other words, there were lots of crazy movies about people going to high school and college.

In many of these movies, it was cool to "score" with the girl.  I'm sure that boys in previous generations wanted to score, too.  However, the message in those Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello movies or Where the Boys Are was that premarital sex was a bad idea.  In those movies, young men were told to respect girls rather than getting them drunk for quick sex.

Hollywood made a bunch of these movies, from Animal House to Sixteen Candles, as I was reminded of by Vox:

Some of the most popular comedies of the '80s are filled with supposedly hilarious sequences that portray what in 2018 would be unambiguously considered date rape.

As long as everybody involved is acquainted with each other, these movies tend to treat those rapes as harmless hijinks.  They don't really count.  They're funny – even in movies as sweet and romantic as Sixteen Candles.

The cultural understanding of rape in the 1980s was fundamentally different from how we understand it today[.]

It was so, and that's the college scene Judge Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford grew up in.

I am not making excuses for any behavior.  At the same time, let's remember that Hollywood made millions of dollars promoting the kind of behavior alleged in many of the accusations against Kavanaugh.  It was cool in the movies, and probably a lot of students did it, too.

So do Democrats want to make college days an issue before considering a person for the Supreme Court?  My guess is that many future Democrats would have a hard time living up to that standard.

Again, I don't believe that Dr. Ford has proved a thing other than that she lived in Maryland at the same time that Mr. Kavanaugh did.  Nevertheless, if someone did that to her, then he probably learned the behavior watching one of the popular "comedies" of the time.

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