Lifetime movie marathon reveals men to be perverts, psychopaths

A co-worker has been telling me for weeks now that I don't write enough about things women like. But, really, if I had even the foggiest notion of what women like, I might not spend this much time in front of a TV.

And even though her advice can be a bit spotty -- she also said I should be watching VH1's "Daisy of Love" -- she had a point. So I did a little investigating to see what it is that women enjoy.

And by investigating, I mean I spent a week watching nothing but the Lifetime Movie Network (unofficial motto: Mistreating women every two hours since 1998).

Seven days, more than 30 movies. If it wasn't on Lifetime Movie Network, I didn't see it. No late-night channel surfing. No Hulu. No watching DVDs on the treadmill. (Although, to be honest, that last one wasn't happening all that much anyway.)

The results, though, weren't exactly pretty.

In retrospect, "For the Love of a Child," about a group home for adorable little moppets who'd been raped while being slashed with a razor or had "bad boy" written across their back in cigarette burns, probably was a little much to watch over breakfast.

And I don't mean to go all Sarah Palin and start cavalierly throwing around the word "rape," but rapes are to Lifetime movies what car chases were to "T.J. Hooker."

Anne Bancroft? Raped. Penelope Ann Miller? Raped and harassed. Shannen Doherty? Raped, harassed, thrown in jail, shot and paralyzed.

In "A Reason to Believe," a coed sought justice after she was raped at a frat house. In "Silencing Mary," Melissa Joan Hart sought justice after her roommate was raped at a frat house.

It wasn't long before I started eyeballing every man I crossed paths with like he was a pervert, a psychopath or both.

Because when they weren't being raped, these women were either being knocked up and abandoned -- Gail O'Grady in "Sex and the Single Mom," Laura Leighton in "Love Notes" -- or, in the case of "Plain Dirty's" Dominique Swain, "beaten and terrorized and chained to a coffee table like a bad 4-H project." (Terrible movie, excellent line.)

After the double feature of "Moment of Truth: Cradle of Conspiracy" -- in which Danica McKellar fell for a man who traveled around impregnating girls as part of some crazed, murderous baby-selling ring -- and "Baby Snatcher" -- in which Nancy McKeon had a baby with a married David Duchovny, only to have it stolen by a delusional Veronica Hamel -- I couldn't sleep for days, haunted by thoughts that someone, somewhere was trying to steal my (so far as I know) nonexistent baby. Although given the way Delta Burke was terrorized by her son in "Dangerous Child," maybe that wouldn't have been such a bad thing.

You're probably shocked -- shocked! -- to hear these kinds of things are going on in Lifetime movies. But not all of the stereotypes are true. For instance, Valerie Bertinelli wasn't in any of them. And Meredith Baxter didn't turn up until the final day, but, boy, was she in a doozy.

In "A Long Way Home," Baxter, who was molested by her father, welcomes home husband Robert Urich, who was molested by his father, a year after he molested their daughter. There's something just head-slappingly wrong about a movie that actually tries to elicit sympathy for a sexual predator.

But that wasn't even the most ridiculous thing I saw.

Take "Gospel of Deceit," in which preacher's wife Alexandra Paul, who was impregnated by her father at 14, carries on a steamy affair inside her husband's church, then, while rolling around on their front lawn covered only by a sheet, wails this confession: "Luke is my son and ... Luke is my lover!"

Then there was "My Stepson, My Lover," which was, well, pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

Those are all part of the women-in-heat subgenre that also includes "Gossip," in which Kelli Williams couldn't keep her hands off a married ex-lover; "Infidelity," which found married Kim Delaney unable to stop having insane, "91/2 Weeks"-style sex with a jazz musician; and "A Murderous Affair: The Carolyn Warmus Story," which saw an almost comically sensual Virginia Madsen kill her lover's wife.

There's also the love-in-unexpected-places motif. New York photographer Teri Polo found it on a Wyoming ranch with cowboy Andrew McCarthy in "Straight From the Heart"; fussy book editor Jennifer Beals found it while posing as an alcoholic at AA meetings in "My Name Is Sarah."

But those turn up far less frequently than movies that revel in showing women getting smacked around. For a channel that claims to love women, Lifetime Movie Network sure has a strange way of showing it. It's like those hunters who work to protect animals -- until they can get around to killing them.

Some of the more entertaining entries, though, were complete departures. High school student Katee Sackhoff made a wish on an eclipse and leaped 17 years into the future in "How I Married My High School Crush," which may have been written by monkeys. And a singer from backwater Texas tried to fit in at a prestigious music academy in "Brave New Girl," which contained nine of the most frightening words in the English language: "based on a book by Britney and Lynne Spears."

So what did I learn?

Southern accents are tricky. An inordinate amount of these movies took place in small towns in the South, where the twangs came and went like one-night stands.

Beware of men whose every entrance into a room is accompanied by wailing saxophones. They're almost always up to no good.

And after a steady diet of these movies, it's a wonder women even tolerate us. I only watched them for a week and I kind of hate us.

But that's likely nothing that can't be cured by a steady diet of Spike TV, ESPN, ESPN 2, "Entourage," "Monday Night Raw," "A-Team" reruns ...

Christopher Lawrence's Life on the Couch column appears on Sundays. E-mail him at clawrence@reviewjournal.com.