If you are still struggling to understand how so many people, including TV commentators and reputable news organizations, were sympathetic to the Steubenville, Ohio teen rapists, look no further than the recent film Spring Breakers.

In the opening five minutes, the audience gets slow-motion shots of bare breasts and scantily clad bums jiggling as young co-eds dance and drink on the beach. Despite the fact that college men are also engaged in this debauchery, the camera lingers on the females. The message is clear: the girls are the ones really letting loose. Even a scene in the dull university lecture hall features two of the female protagonists mimicking blow jobs in the middle of class.

In other words, Spring Breakers isn't just a terrible movie, it's 90 minutes of reinforcement of the party girl image, the kind of bad girl who's "just asking for it". The kind of girl whom some in the media and in court tried to portray the Ohio rape victim as – pointing out she was allegedly drunk and living it up the night two football players took advantage of her.

The "questionable reputation" of girls is a constant theme in Spring Breakers, which follows four young females on their quest to escape their boring small-town life with a fun beach vacation. Before they even get to the beach, the four women – including "good girl" Faith (played by former Disney Channel star Selena Gomez) – participate in a bizarre handstand ritual where they fling their legs in the air and shout, "I wanna take my clothes off," before they go smoke marijuana and, ultimately, steal a car and money for their trip.

In another scene midway through the film, one of the girls is partying at what looks like a frat house. She is drinking even more than the guys and making sexual poses as the young men encircle her and urge her to "take it like a stripper". She tells the men they can't have her, at the same time she takes her top off.

So much for the tireless campaign to make it clear that "no means no" when it comes to sex, and that if someone is obviously drunk or passed out and can't consent, you should never sleep with them. Films like this make it all the harder to combat the rape culture that exists at many high schools and colleges. Despite the fact that many students don't participate in these extremes, the image in people's heads is "college girl equals wild girl". Nothing is off-limits. Even good ones like the character of Faith just need a little nudging to let loose.

Of course, Spring Breakers is hardly unique. The same themes have played out in countless movies and TV shows. Who can forget the Girls Gone Wild franchise of the 1990s or the many MTV hot-tub sex scenes over the years. While these movies and TV shows aren't promoting overt rape, they repeatedly tell young women that their worth is their bodies and what they let men (or other women) do to them, whether it's a grope, nude photo or sex. In one particularly lewd Spring Breakers scene, young men lick drugs off a topless woman. The audience doesn't really see her face. She's just a sexualized serving platter.

The film is supposed to be a mockery of spring break culture, but even the young 20-year-olds next to me in the theatre, who laughed their way through the previews, were silent for much of the show, unsure what to make of it. They called it "crazy" on their way out.

Ironically, the film itself has several lines where the characters talk about wanting to "pretend like it's a video game" and "act like you're in a movie". Perhaps director Harmony Korine and the producers do want people to make a distinction between reality and the screen, but they don't do much to reinforce that. The film takes a bizarre twist after the four protagonists get arrested for drug use at a party. They are bailed out of jail by a gangster named Alien (played by James Franco, the only character who inserts any humor at all into the film).

The rest of the movie is about how the girls evolve into true criminals. They relish the fact that people call them "bad bitches", and the final scene truly does resemble something out of a video game shootout. It's easy to leave the theatre thinking that the spring break shenanigans early on in the film – drugs, hyper sexualized women – wasn't so bad compared to gunning people down. The very spring break party culture the film is supposedly trying to mock comes off looking tame by the end.

What's particularly frustrating with a film like this in 2013 is that it comes on the heels of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In and the push to get women to aim for the boardroom, not the boardwalk. And never mind the fact that thousands of college students are spending their spring break not on a beach, but volunteering with groups like Habitat for Humanity and the United Way, especially after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. Empowered women aren't the stereotype. That's not the story Hollywood wants to portray.

We're left with a homage to the worst of spring break. It's a film that tells young women that the "time of their life" is getting drunk and exposing themselves to guys. And we wonder why we have problems with rape culture.