Why I can’t watch ‘Breakfast Club’ with my ‘very liberal’ teenage daughter

As the star of John Hughes films such as “Pretty in Pink” and “Sixteen Candles,” Molly Ringwald was the poster girl of ’80s teen cinema.

But four decades later, Ringwald, 55, can’t watch 1985’s “The Breakfast Club” with her own teenage daughter — Adele, 13 — because of its sexist tropes.

“She’s very liberal. I mean, I’m very liberal, but she’s another level,” Ringwald told the Guardian. “Which she should be, and I’m glad.”

But she knows that “The Breakfast Club” — in which Ringwald spends high school detention with Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez and Anthony Michael Hall — was the product of an entirely “different time.”

“There were certain things that were accepted [in the ‘80s] that just wouldn’t be accepted now,” she said.

For instance, Ringwald points out the “Sixteen Candles” storyline in which Jake (Michael Schoeffling) trades his drunk girlfriend Caroline (Haviland Morris) to have sex with Farmer Ted (Anthony Michael Hall), in exchange for a pair of stolen underthings.

“The whole storyline with Caroline — that didn’t have anything to do with my character,” she said. “So I really couldn’t change that. I didn’t have that kind of power.”

Still, Ringwald said that she did “feel protected” as a young actress during that time.

“I had my parents around, and I felt like they were very protective of me,” she said.

But her ’80s image was hard for Ringwald to escape. 

“I was projected as this perfect, sweet American girl next door,” she said. “Which wasn’t me, but I was figuring out who I was, too. I was pretty young.”

And Ringwald — who now stars on the CW’s “Riverdale” — accepts that she may be stuck with her teen screen image well into her golden years.

“There will be some people who will always see me that way, until I do something that’s as big as one of those movies — and it would be pretty hard to top those in terms of box office,” she said.