wouldn't even let me sit on a guy's lap, and I've been on more laps than a napkin" - and admitted "I believe in censorship. After all, I made a fortune out of it." (Leff & Simmons 53-54)
A mistress of the one-liner, Mae West refused throughout her life to let serious consideration of the issues of censorship she provoked dampen the humor of the situation. Sex was her chosen theme, and sex (as she did not say) is everywhere as long as men and women inhabit the same planet. The difference between Mae West's method of treating the subject and that of her contemporaries is where the issue of artistic freedom lies. America in the 1920s and 30s was a young nation with a cultural inferiority complex. Hidden away in its own wildernesses for a hundred and forty years, the United States found itself in the center of the world stage during The Great War. Like many newcomers to the uncomfortable social situation of suddenly being thrust into the midst of a more sophisticated public, Americans grasped onto the first convenient role model. In this case it was a British-oriented Victorianism that was outmoded by the turn-of-the-century in its country of origin. The death-blow to Victorian morals in England was dealt during the grueling four years of World War I even while Americans were picking up on its key ideals: authoritarian family models, with strong male/submissive female roles to play, and sex as an unmentioned (and unmentionable) marital necessity. Mae West, as can already be imagined from her quotes so far, liked to talk about sex. The unmentioned and unmentionable "marital necessity" was, to her theatrical persona at least, the grist for her hungry and public attention.
How that theatrical persona developed is a matter of public record, for Mae West was in the public eye from a very early age. Born in 1893 middle-class Brooklyn, she was the first child of a prominent heavyweight boxer/entrepreneur (carriage service, ...