Posts Tagged 'gold-diggers'

For this week, here’s Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, along with Billy Barty and a vast chorus, doing a classy Busby Berkeley number about fooling around in public.

I’m trying to avoid too much critic-talk on these MMM posts, but I have to take a second to mention  what an interesting picture this number paints of issues relating to sexual consent at the time of its creation.  It’s clear that male pleasure comes first, but the ideal seems to be that the woman will enjoy it just as much, but both partners (though especially the woman) are expected to pretend to disapprove.  When the woman really is into what’s going on, the faux-resistance can be experienced as a fun game (as it seems to be between Powell and Keeler here), but obviously if a woman genuinely didn’t want to, that’s where things would get disastrous pretty quickly.  I think that the issues on display here are the same as in a number of Betty Boop cartoons, as well as the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (arguing about the implications of that song has become a Holiday tradition across the feminist internet).