
I forgot to mention that earlier this week I watched part of the Lifetime TV movie version of Odd Girl Out.
Really, the only way they could have made the movie a worse take on that excellent book is if the mom had been a stripper who got beaten up by a spy or something. It was that sensationalist, both freaking out at and totally dismissive of its subjects at once. The worse thing was that it was clearly told from the perspective of a mother, who's supposed to be "extra vulnerable" cause she's divorced, and who of course then has to be totally helpless about it, despite kinda being our protagonist. It killed the message about the importance of honesty between women and girls; it killed the hope for solutions that Simmons puts so clearly into her book (which, by the way, is not one girl's story, but many, and not fictional). The girls kinda get it, but mom is still pretty clueless at the end.
I seriously think that channel preys on women, capitalizing on fear as much as possible in a really, really negative way. In this case, it was Oh no! Our daughters are being MEAN! Whatever shall we do?? Although there's always that flavor of "whatever shall we do" to anything that effing channel produces, I found this particularly infuriating. Presumably the Lifetime Ass for Women network has a broader audience than might otherwise have been exposed to the book, and they chose to send a message of fear rather than to be straight up about it. GAH.