Her life and era

Challenges to moral and sexual values

Comparison to contemporary sexual icons

Conclusion

Come up and see me some time

Some 70 years after her prime Mae West is still remembered for her many famous one-liners, focused on sexual innuendo. But just as her comedic talent continues to weave its way through our cultural consciousness her impact on sexual custom remains significant.

The following is a study of the influence of Mae West on the 1920s and 1930s in terms of accepted sexual allusions in Hollywood movies. Mae West pushed the boundaries of accepted social behaviour. We can compare contemporary values with those of her era and ask how the expression of sexual freedom has changed for better or worse.

Her life and era

Mae West was born in Brooklyn in 1893 and lived to 1980. She spent much of her youth and teens in the theatre world, which at that time was dominated by vaudeville shows. This was prior to the ascendancy of movies.

Mae West was both performer and developer of shows. She was probably opportunistic, relying on social developments and customs used by others to develop her own style. For example, she used the sexually provocative style of black dancers within her own routines to create controversial and popular performances. However by 1915 her own stage personality was showing some of its distinct future characteristics. She exuded and aura of toughness and acted as a sexual predator. This was reflected in lines like "If you don't like my peaches, why do you shake my tree?" from a 1915 performance.

It is arguable that the stage persona of Mae West had certain critical features in common with her real personality. While her stage characters were sexually bold and brash, her personal life involved a series of affairs with men. She had an apparent preference for tough guys, particularly boxers.

The vaudeville shows that stared Mae West were considered vulgar by the social elite but became popular with those looking for raunchy, sexually charged comedy. As her performances became increasingly popular and notorious the censors began to take an interest in her acts.

A breakthrough show for Mae West's fame was titled "Sex", created in 1925. The title of this show was itself controversial, using a word that was not uttered comfortably in most newspapers of the time. Nevertheless this show was a hit and toured widely in the US. However there was a potent resistance to sexual libertarianism. In 1927 a police raid was conducted against her show, with the argument that it was considered to have offended public morality. Mae West's arrest on a charge of "corrupting the morals of youth" was ironically to be a great boost. The publicity surrounding her arrest and imprisonment for 10 days provided nationwide exposure.

By the 1930s it became increasingly evident that movies would become the dominant form of entertainment, especially with the recent emergence of sound. This presented an opportunity to Mae West who could both act and talk. In addition she presented a key ingredient for successful movies: a toying with sexual decorum.

Mae West's first Hollywood movie Night after night was made by Paramount in 1932. She developed in this movie a character she had already used in her plays. This was the persona of the bar room madame of the 1890s. "Diamond Lil" was one of her last plays in 1928 using this character. This was a prostitute/saloon singer who became her standard persona, revived in many later movies. The essence of the character is captured in one line: "I'm a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it".

Her second film She done him wrong, was made in 1933 and also stared Cary Grant. This is the movie in which she said "Why don't you come up and see me sometime". It also included the famous line: "When I'm good I'm very good but when I'm bad I'm better". This movie was banned in Australia and saw protest to Congress level in the US. The opposition to Mae West and the cultural trend that she represented was gaining force.

By 1934 the infamous "Hays Office" had emerged to enforce a rigid censorship of US movies that was to last until the 1960s. It has been argued that this was largely in response to Mae West's movies, such as I'm no Angel, also filmed in 1934. Denny jackson argues that the increased scrutiny of her script enhanced her effort to "double talk so that a person could take a word or phrase anyway they wished."

The movie Belle of the Nineties was made in 1934, followed by Klondike Annie and Go West Young Man in 1936.

In 1937 Mae West stared in Every Day's a Holiday. This movie was subject to heavy censorship which made the movie relatively tame, according to some critics. In the same year NBC broadcast radio nearly lost its license due to running a radio play with her on the "Chase and Sanborn Hour" in which she exhibited her usual bawdy style.

It is arguable that Mae West's career ended during the period of World War II. Her last significant movie was perhaps My Little Chickadee with W.C. Fields, the notorious alcoholic mysanthropist. In the following years Mae West continued to perform on stage and in occasional movies. However these events were nostalgic rather than particularly popular. One notable example is the film Sextette made in 1977, only three years before she died at the age of 86.

Challenges to moral and sexual values

Mae West played a stylish woman with sophistication, perhaps a battler, and yet one who was also very interested in men and was confident in their company. She constantly alluded to her interest in sexual congress with them.

This female archetype personality was frequently played out within the context of prostitution and its necessary easy overt sexual relationship with men. This licentious persona, was a fairly rare type, but gave an opportunity to develop a strong comedic vein. However comedy was certainly not the only reason why Mae West and her character flourished. It was the social message implicit in her comedy that made her both popular among many people and hated by a few powerful interests.

Using the vehicle of prostitution allowed Mae West to characterise a type of woman who was sexually available to men and interested in sexual activity. Yet at the same time her personality was a potential role model for women in general. The personality she adopted therefore transcended the theme of her films and showed women a model of womanhood that was bold, confident and sexual. Mae West thereby signified what can be interpreted either as sexual liberation or of sexual degeneracy, depending on which political and social ideal that people held.

It was precisely the newness and revolutionary quality of Mae West that was opposed in some quarters, due to the social impact that it might have. This is the moral force that arguably gained the upper hand when the films of Mae West began to be heavily censored in the mid-1930s. American sexual culture remained substantially repressed for the subsequent decades until the 1960s.

Women have for decades been encouraged to form a bastion of sexual repression. They have been significant guardians of sexual propriety and puritanism in western societies. It is notable that it was women in particular, and no less feminists, who formed campaigns in the 1920s against alcohol. This movement is paralleled by more recent feminist campaigns against pornography and even the depiction of women in advertising as partially naked and sexual. Christine Wallace, in her biography of Germaine Greer, indicated that in the 1950s the nuns in Australian Catholic Schools, where girls were educated, promoted the idea that only men could enjoy sex. Women could not.

Mae West represented the opposite sentiment, more than three decades before. She sang a song in She Done Him Wrong entitled: "I Like a Man Who Takes His Time," which promoted the notion that a woman can enjoy sexual relations and indeed knows how she wants to be satisfied. This was surely an important lesson to both men and women.

Sexual promiscuity was perhaps in some respects one of the many promiscuities that emerged within the US especially, at the beginning of the decade. The US was a dynamic society with rapidly increasing wealth. Yet the tradition of puritanism and "abstinence" had the effect of tempering aspects of social development and progress toward liberty. At the same time, sexual debauchery was also a social danger, as it was associated with unwanted pregnancies and therefore poverty and social disgrace for many women.

Women who were sexual and promiscuous had been held in low esteem. Mae West challenged this moral position by stating with confidence "I'm a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it". In doing so she redefined what women could afford to be without a loss of social standing.

The backlash against Mae West, as represented by the Hays censorship office, resulted in 40 years in which US movies could not even suggest that men and women had sexual intercourse. This is why couples were always depicted as sleeping in separate beds, in movies and soap operas of the era. Puritanism had triumphed after the liberalisation of the 1920s and 1930s. It is notable that the issue remains with us today. In high school girls who are sexually active are still called sluts, by other girls.

"I want to do all day
what I do all night."

Comparison to contemporary sexual icons

Mae West was acting on stage prior to the first World War. She only achieved worldwide fame with her entry into movies, continuing to promote her brand of sexual comedy. It is worthwhile considering whether movies have made progress since that period. It is also appropriate to consider actresses and performers who might be compared to Mae West, in terms of their sexual impact.

Mae West was the highest paid woman in US movies in the late 1930s. For this reason the most comparable female of the last 10 years must surely be Madonna, who has been ubiquitous in this period.

Madonna, while not a significant movie star has been a performer who represented for a time the height of popular sexual expression. She dressed in overtly sexual clothing, with bras that made her breasts look like ice cream cones. She also appeared in movies topless. One album cover showed her in an outfit where the belt buckle read: "boytoy", alluding to her interest in males. Film clips showed her surrounded by fawning men. Her song "Like a virgin" was not so much testimony to purity, but rather to the loss of sexual innocence. All of these features give her some parallel qualities to Mae West. Yet there are also shortcomings. Madonna has never displayed the articulateness of Mae West. She may lack the complexity, intelligence and wit of Mae West.

Conclusion

The outstanding feature of Mae West - throughout her life - was her demonstration of a level of female desire that is uncommon even by today's standards. MW exuded a friendly lasciviousness. She appeared to be a woman who was overtly sexual and raunchy, rather than merely a vixen who used her attractiveness to lure men. She was liberated, but not a predator or vixen. The study of Mae West also reveals something about our age. Even her 1950's performances, when she was in serious decline, surpass in bawdiness and overt sexual expression most things the modern era can dish up. This suggests that the portrayal of sexuality, specifically of women, has actually regressed since that era or in any case has only just caught up, if we use someone like Madonna as comparison. It is necessary to realise that sexual values and liberties and cultural practices change and not always in a single direction. There is not linear progress to greater freedom. The complacent assumption of progress and liberation as a natural attachment to modernity is dangerous. But at the same time it is necessary to acknowledge that the issue has certain complexities, as liberty is not an unambiguous good. In the 1930s and today there are people who rightly oppose an extreme of sexual liberty that could do damage to the stability of social relations.