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Movie recommendation: "Baby Face" (1933), a pre-Code classic in which Barbara Stanwyck (yes, the mom from "The Big Valley") is forced into prostitution by her father at 14, then (at the urging of a kindly, avuncular proto-Nazi with a boner for Nietzsche) escapes to the big city with her Black maid/lesbian lover, where she then very openly fucks her way to the top of a big corporation, with every new affair illustrated by an exterior shot panning up to a higher floor in the office building.
The Hays Code is why people mistakenly believe film isn't literature. It WAS literature, radical transgressive literature, until it was censored.
P.S.: Sometimes it's easy to believe our elders were hyperconservative, and there's an old trope that every generation believes it invented sex.
Just to strike yet another blow against ageism and stereotyping, here's Barbara Stanwyck at 58 in "The Big Valley" (when I first encountered her work), and another when she was 18 and working as a dancer for the Ziegfeld Follies (and modeling on the side). Now that I'm 62, I can guarantee that the exact same person resides inside both images. Hopefully we learn and grow, but our sense of self, including our passions, never goes away. Please remember that next time you're talking to Grandma.
@msbellows Dancers <3
