For Our Daughters? Nope. Spoilers

This movie really, really wanted to send a strong message that holding men and women to different standards of judgment due to sexual promiscuity is wrong, but ultimately it failed, because it sold itself out.

Instead, the plot actually reinforces the opposite.

In the story, Laine is accused of having participated in a sorority hazing during college, that is brought up during confirmation hearings as proof that she is not qualified to be the Vice President. Of course, she maintains that what she did sexually during her college years has nothing to do with her ability decades later, to be VP. And, she refuses to acknowledge, discuss, defend or explain the accusations against her. She is presented as having too much integrity and being above having to even address the claims. In the movie, up til the end, it's very much set up that she did participate in an "orgy".

So, she refuses to even dignify the allegations, and she comes across as a likable character who refuses to budge on her insistence that her personal and sexual life is personal. Good for her.

But then, it comes out that while she claimed not to have ever committed adultery, she did , in fact, begin sleeping with her best friend's husband while he was managing her campaign. I'm not sure why she defended that as not being adultery (maybe it's just fornication? Who knows?), but it did involve sex and her personal life, yet she had no problem publicly making excuses for that, and trying to give justifications and explanations about how "love has no boundaries", or something like that?

So she supposedly has integrity for refusing to discuss personal sexual activities as a young, single woman, but has no problem publicly defending sleeping with a married man as an adult woman? That makes no sense. If keeping sexual things private was really her thing, she should also have refused to comment on, defend or discuss having had an affair with a married man, too.

But then, it gets worse. She confides in the President that she never even did the sex-hazing thing at all. She just wasn't going to dignify the accusations with an explanation about how the allegations were false. So, she didn't have an orgy in college, but won't say so out of integrity, but will publicly admit and defend sleeping with her best friend's husband? That makes no sense.

Here's the worst part -- it was a sell-out that the story has her eventually denying she ever participated in the sexual impropriety she was accused of. It should have had her admitting she had participated and had no regrets. That would have taken some integrity and made the point the movie maker was trying to push -- that it is a double-standard to judge women harshly for sexual actions when men are not held to those same standards.

Instead, the message the movie ended up presenting to "our daughters" was:

If you are accused of doing something sexually with multiple partners you aren't in a relationship with, (that you did not do), keep your mouth shut and don't defend yourself, because you have integrity and shouldn't have to explain yourself. But, if it involves a relationship, and "love", and you actually did something sexually questionable, then defend it publicly and openly. SMH. What it doesn't do is send a message about what our daughters should do if they are accused of sexual situations that they DID actually do. The movie copped out by having her deny it in the end.

It could have sent a strong message, but it ended up sending the same mixed messages "our daughters" get all the time.