For those who don’t remember — it has, after all, been a quarter century since the film came out — the barely conscious drunk girlfriend in question is Caroline, the evil prom queen. An epic party at Jake’s place leaves her leveled. (“I have Caroline passed out in the bed upstairs,” Jakes muses at one point, trying to put his finger on what’s missing in his relationship with her, and why he feels drawn to Sam. “I could violate her 10 different ways if I wanted to.” Ladies and gentleman: Our romantic hero.) Over martinis with the Geek, played by Anthony Michael Hall, Jake hatches a plan, letting Anthony Michael Hall cart her off in his parents’ Rolls Royce at the end of the night when she’s too drunk to anything — including, um, consent. She wakes up in the morning in the Rolls with her hair chopped off and says something to the effect that she doesn’t remember what she did, but she thinks she liked it. In other words, when she’s drunk, she can get past appearances and stupid popular girl prejudices and see that, actually, he’s a really great guy.

The scene only works because people were stupid about date rape at the time. Even in a randy teen comedy, you would never see two sympathetic male characters conspiring to take advantage of a drunk chick these days. (“Observe and Report” had a similar scene, but it was meant to be envelope-pushing and outrageous, and a sign of the character’s moral depravity.) The “Sixteen Candles” scene echoes an even weirder scene in “Revenge of the Nerds,” when the head cheerleader goes into an amusement park fun house with the head nerd, who is wearing a mask. She thinks he’s her boyfriend. They definitely have sex. When she finds out he’s actually a nerd, she tells off her arrogant jock boyfriend and makes it clear that the nerd is way, way better in bed than he is.

Not to get too heady about it (and certainly not to dismiss their weirdness), but there’s something almost Shakespearean about all these scenes: It’s all about mistaken identity and this idea that when one literally drops one’s mask — in high school “nerd” vs. “jock” or “punk” vs. “prep” — you can see people for who they really are. In “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the characters lose themselves in the forest. In “Sixteen Candles,” they lose themselves in Budweiser.

The theme of mismatched couples carries through all the John Hughes movies, I think, almost without exception. In almost every case, boys and girls, the “quirky” character is rewarded by getting a conventionally hot popular person to like them. Think about it: Anthony Michael Hall gets Caroline; Molly gets Jake Ryan; Andie gets Blaine; Duckie gets a bland blonde who looks so much like Caroline she may as well be the same actress; Claire gets Judd Nelson, “the criminal”; Ally Sheedy gets Emilio Estevez, the jock. Even Ferris Bueller has a cheerleader girlfriend, and his uptight, rule-abiding sister? Of course, she ends up with an actual criminal to loosen her up.

The irritating part about all of this is that it seems to presume that two “quirky” characters can’t validate each other — like only getting the bland, conventional hotty will actually prove how cool you really are. It carries through to today’s Judd Apatow comedies, in which the “quirky” guy ends up going after some conventionally hot girl.

But the “date rape” scene is not just some strange aberration by a beloved director. It’s actually part of this evolving dialogue Hughes has about teen sex throughout all his movies in the 1980s.

There are several scenes in the Hughes canon in which guys are trying to cop a feel off a girl without her consent : In “Sixteen Candles,” Samantha’s undies are shown to a group of gaping freshmen who pay a dollar for the privilege (but proving sexual humiliation is a given in adolescence, she also gets felt up by her grandma); there’s the scene in “The Breakfast Club” when Judd Nelson’s character Bender goes up Claire’s skirt under the table; the scene in “Ferris Bueller” when Ferris’ best friend Cameron pretends he’s in a catatonic state while conveniently watching Ferris’s girlfriend, Sloane, change into her suit by the pool.