The great beauties and stars Clara Bow or Gloria Swanson also played sexually liberated women, but they belonged to the silent era. They were images. Mae West made sex speak. She wrote racy, witty dialogue filled with innuendos and come-ons. She is still remembered for her quippy, suggestive wordplay; for her, “essence was not sexual but verbal,” writes Mary Haskell in From Reverence to Rape.
