But, Internet, this economy is not just going to reach around and stimulate itself, so this weekend I ponied up and bought a ticket to Taken, the Jack Baueresque action flick featuring everybody’s secret boyfriend Liam Neeson.

The plot is pretty straightforward: Retired superspy (Neeson) is trying to build a relationship with his 17-year-old daughter, much to the chagrin of her ice queen mother and mom’s wealthy new husband. Daughter goes to Paris, daughter is abducted by sex traffickers, Dad flies to Paris and uses his mad spy skills to save the day. Daughter is saved, mom is grateful, scores of bad guys die in grisly and intensely satisfying ways (and if you think any of that constitutes a spoiler, well, you see even fewer movies than I do).

Fine. Good. It’s an action movie. BUT, oddly, Taken left me with a lingering sense of discomfort, and I think I know why. The producers of the film went to near-exhaustive lengths to first inform and then remind us again and again that Kimmy, the daughter, was a virgin. From her wardrobe of jumpers, jean jackets and sneakers more suited to a 7-year-old than a high school senior to Kimmy’s squealing glee at receiving, yes, a pony for her birthday to the repeated references to her ‘first time’ in future tense, the message is agonizingly clear: Virgin. Virgin, virgin, virgin.

What Taken implies is that this young woman’s assault, kidnapping, trafficking and ultimately systematic sexual abuse would have somehow been less awful, and her plight less sympathetic, had she been sexually active in the first place. Case in point, about halfway through the movie, Neeson is in a grimy makeshift brothel, searching for his daughter. Instead, he finds Amanda, Kimmy’s much more overtly sexual friend who brought her to Paris in the first place. Amanda is handcuffed to a bedpost, beaten and dead. Without pausing even a beat, Neeson and the film move on. Amanda was a slut; she got hers. Point taken.

The writers go so far as to make clear that even in the time between her abduction and when Dad swoops in to save the day, Kimmy isn’t raped; i.e., her purity isn’t compromised. It’s honestly not clear whether Dad is on a mission to save his beloved daughter or on a Sharia-esque crusade to salvage her honor. Ultimately Kimmy is snatched (heh) in the nick of time, just before she’s deflowered by the lecherous (and, naturally, Arab) Sheik and swept back to the safety of Beverly Hills, honor intact.

Now, of course I’m not saying Kimmy isn’t a sympathetic character or that any father worth his salt wouldn’t go to the absolute ends of the earth to prevent his daughter from being raped. But I do disagree with, and was more than a little upset by, Taken’s assertion that only “good girls” deserve to be saved.

girls are like apples on trees.
the best ones are at the top of the tree.
the boys don’t want to reach for the good ones
because they are afraid of falling and getting hurt.

instead, they just get rotten apples from the ground that arent so good but easy
so the apples at the think that somethings wrong with them
when in reality they are amazing.
they just have to wait for the right boy to come along
the one who’s brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree.
DID GOD PUT U AT THE TOP?

Perhaps I’m just a bitter rotten whore apple, but things sound pretty self-righteous at the top of the tree.