I didn’t realize until I was a little bit older that what we all saw thirty years ago this week in Back to the Future was a sexual assault, but I recognized the hero moment immediately. When George McFly opens the car door to find bully Biff Tannen with his hand up Lorraine Baines’s dress, he is shaken, but doesn’t move. Despite Biff’s attempts to scare him into leaving, George stays. “Are you deaf, McFly? Close the door and beat it,” he says. George stands firm. “No, Biff. You leave her alone.”

George doesn’t save the day with his weak punch that Biff immediately blocks, nor the more powerful one he later uses to knock out his tormentor. He takes a moment to savor the victory over Biff, but George’s real evolution comes when he stops the assault. I recall getting the message immediately, understanding that I’d watched George stop an attempted rape. I didn’t know the term “bystander intervention,” but I knew what it looked like to see someone do the right thing.

As a kid just out of the fourth grade, I learned from that Back to the Future scene that it was the responsibility of boys and men to stop sexual assaults and rape. But given how that the scene is set up in the film, I wish we could go back in time and make it vanish.

Back to the Future’s 30th anniversary gives us a chance to see why it’s worth reflecting on how deeply popular culture can root itself inside of us, particularly with regard to our attitudes about race and sex. We can continue to indulge in the delights of our childhood, but they’re also worth taking seriously. While I appreciate the generically positive representation of the film’s black characters, I cannot say the same for how it depicted women and the violence visited upon them. Today, I can’t feel good as a feminist about how we saw George’s vindication come about.

Few movies geared towards children and young adults in the 1980s came without a heavy-handed message. The apotheosis of this preachy genre was ABC’s Afterschool Special, which began in the previous decade and hit their stride in the Reagan era. And even if they embodied the ’80s in their obviousness and tacky dialogue, they were damned effective. Thirty years on, I still can’t shake the image of a drunken Val Kilmer running over Mare Winningham in “One Too Many.” These stories may have hit with a sledgehammer, but they worked.