I did warn you guys today was going to be girly. But as the last party of my nostalgic self-indulgence this weekend, I watched The Babysitters Club movie for the first time since it came out in theaters fifteen years ago. It's got this weird flash of temporary nineties starletism: Larisa Oleynik and Rachel Leigh Cook are two of the main characters, on the cusp of their brief breakouts as sex symbols and comediennes. Pretty much everyone else in the movie never even got that far. But really the most striking thing about the movie is how insanely wholesome it is.
Movies these days seem aimed at very young children or at girls who are solidly in their teenage years. The Babysitters Club is aimed squarely in between those periods. There's one chaste kiss, and a scene where two of the girls are refused admission to a teen club in New York because they're not sixteen. The girls are young enough to call their fathers "Daddy" and to find a closed amusement park scary, but they're also grown-up enough to run a pretty good business, and to navigate early conflicts with adults on mutually agreed-upon terms. It's a world where family, both biological and chosen, matters, where girls are unspoiled enough to expect that guys will behave decently, and the boys are nervous too. But the characters are old enough to understand that not everything will always be all right—fathers can abandon their daughters, irresponsibility carries a price. There's no pressure to sleep with anyone, in fact, no implication that such a thing is even possible. It's a space that more girls, and more people period, should be allowed to occupy for a longer time. There's no shame in taking a little time to grow up.