Who Knew Vintage Barbie Did Porn?

Bachelor Pad Magazine, Issue One

Bachelor Pad Magazine is out now -- get it before it's gone!

Sugasm 98

The best of this week’s blogs by the bloggers who blog them. Highlighting the top 3 posts as chosen by Sugasm participants. Want in Sugasm #99? Submit a link to your best post of the week using this form. Participants, repost the link list within a week and you’re all set.

Note: Details of the Sugasm #100 celebrations will appear in Tuesday’s post request.

This Week’s Picks
Anal, her perspective
“This entire anal sex episode had started some months earlier, on a theoretical level.”

When the Muse Wants to Fuck
“Participles, linking verbs, superlative adjectives… You want more?”

Chef
“He’s already at work, but he’s left an order behind on the scraps of ordering paper that we have all over the house.”

Mr. Sugasm Himself
The Secret Diary of a Callgirl

Editor’s Choice
Whipped on this day: 1791

More Sugasm
Join the Sugasm

See also: Fleshbot’s Sex Blog Roundup each Tuesday and Friday.

NSFW Pics & Videos
Chicagoland by Rand McNally, Body by Celina, Photos by Usama Alshaibi
Erotic Orchid
Eva Angelina (Twistys)
Half-Nekkid Blogging
HNT (Hopelessly Narcissistic Thursday) - What I Want…
Three In The Morning by Westland Armitage

Thoughts on Sex and Relationships
Brothel story II
The Double Standard of Promiscuity
Eye contact
Half-Nekkid Dessert
Inclinations
Long Distance Lovin’
Playing a Role
Women aren’t the only ones with cunts

Sex News & Reviews
Beefcake Calendar Bonanza
Deeply Throaty
Sex Swing Review
Submit to CineKink!

Erotic Writing and Experiences
Craving Me
A Gift Between Friends
In Which I (Almost) Get My First Facial
Milk And Honey
The other girl
A place to live
Visit To A Sex Club
We Don’t Have Fantasies, We Have Plans

Sex Advice & Sex Poetry
How to be a Cum-Guzzler
In deep cushions redolent of perfume

BDSM & Fetish
At the Club
Back to the Garden of Carnal Delights
Catalina loves To Submit
Doll of wax
Fantasy: A man walks into a bar…
Marks like Pink Ribbons pt. 1
My Checkered Past: The Earth Moves Under My Feet
The Nooner
Post Party Portrait
The Way of a Man with a Maid
Whips and Lubes

She Wondered...

Does this hat make my breasts look small?

The Only Way To Keep A Gal, Is To Keep Her In A Cage

Deanna was working on this piece on collecting vintage sheet music, and showed me this baby:


Since neither Deanna nor I have the sheet music, she's contacting the seller, Joel, of www.sheetmusiccenter.com, for a follow-up article on "coon" music. I'll post the follow-up when she's published it, but I couldn't wait to show off this old cover with a man with a key standing outside his caged girlfriend.

This is what I could find out.

It's by "The Originator of Ragtime" or "The Father of Ragtime" Ben Harney. The Rag-Time Ephemerist has an article on Harney, Ben Harney in Context, which doesn't illuminate the cover art or the song itself much, but the online article does quote from The New York Clipper (September 26, 1896) which covers Harney's time with the Boston Athenaeum Star Specialty Company (touring under the aegis of Andrew J. Hughes, proprietor of Boston's Howard Athenaeum Theater):

His coon songs gained enthusiastic response. He was assisted in the gallery and on the stage by 'Strap' Hill, a colored dancer and singer.

In the article (again, only part of which is available online) there's a tantalizing bit more on "the negro" in question:

Based on the recollections of Harney's wife Jessie, the authors of They All Played Ragtime identified his "stage assistant," "Strap" Hill as a "young Negro ragtime player and entertainer ... from Memphis" whom Harney first met either in or on his way to Chicago in 1893.3 Clipper citations make it clear that Harney and Hill worked together, on and off at least, from the fall of 1896 until the fall of 1898

Harney wasn't favored by commercial recording, but there's an MP3 of him singing The Wagon here.

Stay tuned, as they say...

The Tiny Tim Gold Digger Connection

If someone would have asked me while I was growing up what the connection between Tiny Tim and gold digging was, I would have felt the answer lie in anyone who dated him. (Later on I found Tiny Tim to be nearly as sexy as Emo Philips -- don't mock, he got Judy Tenuta. Which is yet more proof that smart sexy women dig men smart enough to be funny. OK, and it's proof of my age. Moving on.)

The true answer regarding Tiny Tim and gold diggers is the song Tip Toe Through The Tulips With Me.


Image of sheet music via We Have Your Collectibles.

In deep cushions redolent of perfume

Fleursdumal.org is dedicated to the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), and in particular to Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil, 1857). Along with every poem of each edition of Les Fleurs du mal (each with its multiple English translations, most of which are exclusive to the site and are now available in digital form for the first time ever), the site contains audio recordings of the poems read in their original French.

This wonderful site also contains Les Épaves (1866). Les Épaves is a collection of miscellaneous poetry along with the six of his poems censored from the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal. These poems were illegal to publish in France until the 1940s.

One of my favorites of the censored six is Femmes damnés (À la pâle clarté). There have been several translations of it but the below is my favorite -- and all because of the line,In deep cushions redolent of perfume". It just feels best.

Damned Women

Delphine and Hippolyta

In the pallid light of languishing lamps,
In deep cushions redolent of perfume,
Hippolyta dreamed of the potent caresses
That drew aside the veil of her young innocence.

She was seeking, with an eye disturbed by the storm,
The already distant skies of her naiveté,
Like a voyager who turns to look back
Toward the blue horizons passed early in the day.

The listless tears from her lacklustrous eyes,
The beaten, bewildered look, the dulled delight,
Her defeated arms thrown wide like futile weapons,
All served, all adorned her fragile beauty.

Lying at her feet, calm and filled with joy,
Delphine gazed at her hungrily, with burning eyes,
Like a strong animal watching a prey
Which it has already marked with its teeth.

The strong beauty kneeling before the frail beauty,
Superb, she savored voluptuously
The wine of her triumph and stretched out toward the girl
As if to reap her reward of sweet thankfulness.

She was seeking in the eyes of her pale victim
The silent canticle that pleasure sings
And that gratitude, sublime and infinite,
Which the eyes give forth like a long drawn sigh.

"Hippolyta, sweet, what do you think of our love?
Do you understand now that you need not offer
The sacred burnt-offering of your first roses
To a violent breath which could make them wither?

My kisses are as light as the touch of May flies
That caress in the evening the great limpid lakes,
But those of your lover will dig furrows
As a wagon does, or a tearing ploughshare;

They will pass over you like heavy teams
Of horses or oxen, with cruel iron-shod hooves...
Hippolyta, sister! please turn your face to me,
You, my heart and soul, my all, half of my own self,

Turn toward me your eyes brimming with azure and stars!
For one of those bewitching looks, O divine balm,
I will lift the veil of the more subtle pleasures
And lull you to sleep in an endless dream!"

Hippolyta then raised her youthful head:
"I am not ungrateful and I do not repent,
Delphine darling; I feel restless and ill,
As I do after a rich midnight feast.

I feel heavy terrors pouncing on me
And black battalions of scattered phantoms
Who wish to lead me onto shifting roads
That a bloody horizon shuts in on all sides.

Is there something strange in what we have done?
Explain if you can my confusion and my fright:
I shudder with fear when you say: 'My angel!'
And yet I feel my mouth moving toward you.

Do not look at me that way, you, my dearest thought:
The sister of my choice whom I'd love forever
Even if you were an ambush prepared for me
And the beginning of my perdition."

Delphine, shaking her tragic mane and stamping her foot
As if she were stamping on the iron Tripod,
Her eyes fatal, replied in a despotic voice:
"Who dares to speak of hell in the presence of love?

May he be cursed forever, that idle dreamer,
The first one who in his stupidity
Entranced by a sterile, insoluble problem,
Wished to mix honesty with what belongs to love!

He who would unite in a mystic harmony
Coolness with warmth and the night with the day
Will never warm his palsied flesh
With that red sun whose name is love!

Go if you wish and find a stupid sweetheart, run
To offer your virgin heart to his cruel kisses;
Full of remorse and horror, and livid,
You will bring back to me your stigmatized breasts...

Woman here below can serve only one master!"
But the girl pouring out the vast grief in her heart,
Suddenly cried: "I feel opening within me
A yawning abyss; that abyss is my heart!

Burning like a volcano and deep as the void!
Nothing will satiate that wailing monster
Nor cool the thirst of the Eumenides
Who with torch in hand burn his very blood.

Let our drawn curtains separate us from the world
And let lassitude bring to us repose!
I want to bury my head in your deep bosom
And find in your breast the cool of the tomb!"

— Go down, go down, lamentable victims,
Go down the pathway to eternal hell!
Plunge to the bottom of the abyss where all crime
Whipped by a wind that comes not from heaven,

Boil pell-mell with the sound of a tempest.
Mad shades, run to the goal of your desires;
You will never be able to sate your passion
And your punishment will be born of your pleasures.

Never will a cool ray light your caverns;
Through the chinks in the walls feverish miasmas
Filter through, burst into flame like lanterns
And permeate your bodies with frightful odors.

The bleak sterility of your pleasures
Increases your thirst and makes your skin taut
And the raging wind of carnal desire
Makes your flesh snap like an old flag.

Damned, wandering, far from living people,
Roam like the wolves across the desert waste;
Fulfill your destinies, dissolute souls,
And flee the infinite you carry in your hearts!

-- William Aggeler, The Flowers of Evil (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954)


Should this poem not move you to click and visit fleursdumal.org for more of the Charles Baudelaire's works, here's a seductive snippet of the poet's biography:

One of the greatest French poets of the 19th century, called 'the father of modern criticism,' who shocked his contemporaries with his visions of lust and decay. Baudelaire formed with Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine the so-called Decadents. Baudelaire was the first to equate modern, artificial, and decadent. In LE PEINTRE DE LA VIE MODERNE (1863, The Painter of Modern Life) Baudelaire argued in favor of artificiality, stating that vice is natural in that it is selfish, while virtue is artificial because we must restrain our natural impulses in order to be good. The snobbish aesthete, the dandy, was for Baudelaire the ultimate hero and the best proof of an absolutely purposeless existence. He is a gentleman who never becomes vulgar and always preserves the cool smile of the stoic.

Still not fascinated? (What's wrong with you?!)

How about this: Baudelaire was a translator of Poe's works, an opium addict, an art critic, sympathetic of prostitutes, and a man who worshipped his mother.

While Baudelaire never married, his long-time relationship with Jeanne Duval (a Creole woman, actress, and dancer) suggests that even if he didn't love her -- that he only viewed her as "the archetype of the sexually exciting exotic woman" and could only regard "her as the personification of the animal-like, of the natural" -- he was intensely devoted to his muse, his "Black Venus".



(Though the authors of the above link may be operating off of faulty information. The painting by Edouard Manet may not be of Jeanne Duval but rather of "an unidentified "Adele" referred to in Baudelaire's journal, or one of the casual acquaintances the poet encountered after he terminated his relationship with his long-time mulatto mistress in 1861." Others argue the 'odd' painting style was the style Baudelaire preferred -- he was not sympathetic to realism) It is clear, however, that the two spent over two stormy decades with one another -- before each died of syphilis.


Baudelaire viewed himself as a fallen angel, so perhaps it's no surprise that he died in his mother's arms on August 31, 1867, in a Paris clinic.

Sketches by Charles Baudelaire via Art.com.


Baudelaire's grave and cenotaph are at the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.

The Venetian Courtesan

Read the gossip about this painting at The Diary Of An English Courtesan.

Paperback Reader

Via Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror, specifically this review of One For Sleep by Frank Bonham (Gold Medal paperback, 1960).

I Need To Visit More Junk Yards

The story of what's left behind...

Preserving Your Paper Prints And Other Artistic Smut

An abso-freakin-lutely excellent pair of posts on how to properly frame your artworks, papers and prints is at CQ.

Read Is Framing Preserving or Harming Your Collection? Part One and Part Two.

The Beauty of Constance Bennett

Thanks to Fabulon for this delightful video for Constance Bennett Cosmetics, featuring (who else?) but Constance Bennett in what can best be described as a kitschy pitch for faux glamour. (I'm not saying the stuff wasn't wonderful; but the vintage advertorial is hardly realistic -- which is just one reason I love it!)



Another reason to love this old promo clip is Constance herself.

Constance was the eldest of the three daughters born to stage matinee idol Richard Bennett and actress/literary agent Adrienne Morrison in 1904. The middle sister was the least known sister, Barbara; she had a brief bit of fame as a dancer but is most known as the mother of talk show host Morton Downey. The youngest sister was Joan, who also found great film success; both Constance and Joan were enormously popular in the 30's, featured on the covers and inside pages of the popular movie magazines.



While Constance was the oldest, sister Joan joked of her sister, "With all of Constance's juggling of dates over the years, I started out as the youngest, then became her twin and finally wound up as the oldest sister."

The Bennetts were every bit as distinguished and as spirited another theatrical family, the Barrymores, which they were friends with. Richard was famous for having battles with critics of the day, writing scathing letters not only when his his performances were panned but when they were praised too. In fact, the entire Bennett family was known for their arguments with the press and Constance and Joan were no exception.

Constance may have gotten her start in film in one of daddy's films, but it was clear that both her beauty and talent would allow her to shine in her own right. Constance would appear in 57 films, several of which are considered true film classics.



Standouts include George Cukor's What Price Hollywood? (a 1932 early version of A Star Is Born, with Bennett in the role later played by Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand), Topper (with Cary Grant in 1937) and the musical comedy Moulin Rouge (1934, in which Constance's singing voice is more than decent). Another fun film is Ladies in Love (1936), starring Janet Gaynor, Loretta Young, Don Ameche and Tyrone Power (in a small part which made him so popular that the studio groomed him for greater stardom). While this film doesn't exactly showcase Constance it is based on the play Three Girls by Ladislaus Bus-Fekete and the film's storyline would became studio standard, inspiring inspiring How to Marry a Millionaire (1953).

I urge you to watch whatever Constance Bennett films you can find -- just note that most of Contances' best work was done Pre-Code and that it looks like the icky code put the kibosh on her just as her star was rising. (Dammit!)

There are a number of sites which will list and review Bennett's films, so I'm going to dish on other matters, including, of course, her love life.

As mentioned, Constance Bennett, like the rest of her clan, feuded with the press and it is said that she 'enjoyed lawsuits'. Constance was never called "Connie" and was often described lovingly as "a steamroller" and a "headstrong girl" -- which might appear to be less than flattering, but it is quite apparent that Constance was intelligent, confident, determined and assertive. And all in a charming manner.

As her son, Peter Plant, said in an interview with Eve Golden (Films of the Golden Age, Issue No 11, Winter, 1997), "Today, a lot of people are horribly aggressive rather than pleasantly assertive." (Perhaps if you read the words "headstrong girl" and feel it is unattractive, you should ponder Plant's words.)


Also from that interview with Golden, titled The Public and Private Lives of Constance Bennett, is this bit on Constance regarding the cosmetic line and another failed business venture:

In the mid-1930s she developed her own line of cosmetics. As Plant says, "the cosmetics were a good, quality product, but at some point she gave someone a license or franchise for it, and he ended up putting nothing but lanoline in the jars, and it ruined the product." All that remains is a deliriously bizarre promotional short she made, which was released as Constance Bennett's Daily Beauty Rituals and shows up on TCM as filler once in a while. Constance also became involved in Fashion Frocks, "a dress line from the Midwest on which she put her name -- mail order dresses in women's magazines." That too failed. One of her drawbacks was that "she was very smart, but would not take advice -- she had a number of good advisors, but she had the idea that she was capable of doing things where she was in over her head."

Not taking advice, being headstrong, seems to have also had its up-side -- especially when dealing with studio heads.

While negotiating her contract with Warner Brothers, Constance insisted that Jack Warner pay both her agents fee and income tax along with a salary which would make her the highest-paid player up to that time ($300,000 for just two films).



Constance was also a highly skilled poker player -- one who was not just permitted to play in the "men only" games but most often won them too. It is said that when someone commented that Constance could not take her money with her, her father said, "If Constance can't take it with her, then she won't go."



You know the saying, 'lucky at cards, unlucky in love', well that might have been true for Constance. Or maybe she just loved to gamble; she was married five times.


First, in 1921, she eloped with Chester Hirst Moorehead (the son of a Chicago surgeon). Claiming that the marriage took place on a dare, she had the marriage annulled in 1923.

Next, in 1925 (the year her parents divorced), she eloped with millionaire socialite Philip Morgan Plant (son of Mrs. Mae Caldwell Manwaring Plant Hayward Rovensky and thus the adopted son of adopted son of steamship/railroad tycoon Morton F. Plant). When the couple divorced in 1929, Constance was awarded a $1 million settlement (consider this foreshadowing, folks).

In 1931 she made headlines when she married Henri le Bailly, the Marquis de La Coudraye de La Falaise (a French nobleman and film director who was one of Gloria Swanson's former husbands). About this time Constance brought back from Europe a three-year-old boy, Peter Bennett Plant, whom she said she'd adopted. Bennett and le Bailly founded Bennett Pictures Corp. and produced a couple of films. (Constance would also produce Paris Underground, released in 1945, for a total count of three films produced -- which is apparently how she makes it as a SIMPP member [Kindly disregard this info on the cosmetic & clothing companies; I'd believe the son over this info.]) Constance and the Marquis divorced in 1940.

In 1941, Constance married actor Gilbert Roland. Though Bennett and Roland would divorce in 1946, they would have two daughters: Lorinda (a sculptress) and Christina (aka Gyl Roland, an actress and image consultant). However when Philip Morgan Plant (husband number two) died in '41, a funny thing happened...

A large trust fund was established to benefit any descendants of Plant, and Constance went to battle saying that her adopted son, Peter Bennett Plant, actually was the natural child of both herself and the deceased Plant, born after the divorce and kept hidden in order to ensure that the child's biological father would not get custody. The story may sound a bit strange, but Constance won the claim for her son. According to Time in November of 1943:

Last week, when Plant's mother and his show-girl widow were fighting a court battle with Miss Bennett over the trust fund, she promised that if she got to the witness stand she would give a complete account of her life with Plant. The matter was settled out of court. Miss Bennett picked up her baggage and doll and returned to her theatrical mutton.

Later in 1946, the same year as her divorce from Roland, Constance married US Air Force Colonel John Theron Coulter (who would become later Brigadier General). They remained married until her death in 1965 and when Coulter passed in '95, he was buried beside her.


After her marriage to the colonel, Constance concentrated her efforts on the stage, radio and with providing relief entertainment to US troops (earning military honors for her services). She did return one last time to film in 1966's Madame X.

Playing Lana Turner's rich-bitch mother-in-law in the campy classic Constance looked frighteningly thin. This due to cancer, which no one but her immediate family knew about. Shortly after filming was completed, Bennett collapsed and died from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 60. Madame X was released after her death.

In that 1997 interview, Plant this to say about his mother's work and her death:

"It was a grueling production experience," recalls Plant. "But my mother, knowing she would soon be gone, but being true to her profession, got through it fine."

"I'm sure her cancer was caused by smoking too bloody many Chesterfield cigarettes for too many years," says Plant, "and also due to taking massive injections of hormones in the 1950s to preserve her figure and make her appear younger than she was. I could name several of her female star peers who met the same fate pursuing their youthfulness."

Constance died on July 24, 1965, in the Watson Army Hospital in Fort Dix, New Jersey and as Eve Golden wrote:

By that time, Joan had surpassed her in reputation as an actress; Constance was recalled in her obituaries as more of a "glamor girl." Not long before she died, she said of her professional longevity, "If there's a secret to it, it's working like a beaver to be happy. What I mean is, I've always been interested in everything I did. When you're that interested in anything, you're happy.

I'm still interested in you, Constance. And I hope that makes us both happy.



For more on Constance Bennett, read The Bennett Playbill by Joan Bennett and The Bennetts: An Acting Family by Brian Kellow.

There's also a neat Constance Bennette thread at TMC.

Images of vintage movie magazines via www.classichollywoodbios.com.

Some other photos of Constance Bennett via venusnaturalis at Flickr and here.

Constance Bennett 1904 - 1965

It's Not Me, It's You

I just don't like you that way, Donna. But I do love my sweater.

I am ambivalent about the photographer.

The Autobiography of A Flea

The Autobiography of A Flea is an anonymous tale which was published by Olympia in the later years and was later, in the golden age of porn, made into a film by the same name.

The story is the insect's-eye view of the sexual antics in town and Olympia has a hot excerpt, and the download is only $1 -- in fact, all downloads are so cheap that I feel a spree comin' on...

Reading For The Collector & Connoisseur

A brief chronological Compendium of a Few Banned or Challenged Works, and Censorship and Anti-Censorship Efforts: Covers the 1st to 9th decades of the 20th Century.

Speaking of censorship... Coverage of The Great Porn Debate between self-proclaimed "Porn Pastor" Craig Gross and porn legend Ron Jeremy. (Don't miss the conversation in the comments.)

An excerpt from 1906's The Memoirs of Josephine Mutzenbacher, by Felix Salten (which was also censored).

I Love... Gratuitous Vintage Photos

I love my art.

I love my new car and the seats with their new car smell.

If It's Greek To You...

If you'd like more help understanding ancient Grecian pottery? Such as this, the famous and controversial Middle Corinthian aryballos of Pyrrhias, excavated by Mary C. Roebuck from Temple Hill in 1954. (The aryballos is controversial as neither the painted scene nor the inscription mentions Apollo, but rather depicts a dancing competition.)

According to researchers Alexandra Pappas (University of Arkansas) and Robin Osborne (Cambridge University) the writing on pottery from ancient Athens, Corinth and Boeotia is performative in nature.

"The writing does more than produce a relationship between word and image which is intellectually satisfying," Pappas and Osborne wrote. "This is a vessel to be used in the very context of gymnastic performance that it illustrates, a vessel whose use involves exactly the turning up and turning back that is performed and encouraged by the text. The cleverness of the text, and with it the prowess of Pyrwias himself, is put on display in particular when the aryballos is put into use."

Pappas and Osborne are co-authors of "Writing on Archaic Greek Pottery," a chapter in Inscribing Images, Illustrating Texts: Art and Inscriptions in the Ancient World, edited by Zahra Newby and Ruth Leader-Newby and published by Cambridge University Press in 2007.

No word on what the dirty text on nude pottery works was like. *wink*

For more, see Writing Was Performance Art on Archaic Greek Pottery.

The Biggest Fall?

Vanessa Anne Hudgens, star of the Disney made-for-kids TV movie hit "High School Musical," is under fire because of a nude photo circulating on the Internet. The photo, shown below, was taken for a boyfriend. According to Reuters:

A representative for actress Vanessa Hudgens confirmed on Friday that the image is of the 18-year-old performer. The picture shows her smiling and standing naked directly in front of the camera in what appears to be a bathroom.

"This was a photo which was taken privately," Hudgens' representative said in a statement. "It is a personal matter and it is unfortunate that this has become public."

Kudos for admitting it -- even makes me think that Vanessa is a real person rather than one of those Disney-bots they churn out. (Though we all know there will be hell to pay from the corporate rat mouse.)

What strikes me about this, and is the reason for posting it, is that 'we' are all so freaked out by actions like this.


The photo isn't horrible -- isn't in my mind 'porn' in the nasty way even if it's clearly designed to turn someone on. It's a very natural thing to do. Those of us who have taken such photos raise your hands -- and the rest of you are liars (or have some intimacy or body issues).

Why do we become so upset when celebrities are discovered to have lives, including sexual ones? Why do we kid ourselves that they are not human beings with sex urges (among other things) -- even while we admire, covet and lust after them? People are people.

Why do we freak-the-hell-out when we hear a celeb is a sexual human being?

Yeah, sure she's a product of Disney, marketed for tween consumption, but even then these are people (made of marketing, not in some Disney lab) and so they have lives.

According the the press, "some parents" were outraged:

"She's damaged," Renee Rollins-Greenberg, a Los Angeles mother of two, told Reuters. "She's got this teeny-bop audience, young pre-teens and younger, who are admiring her and thinking she's this wonderful, pure innocent person. Eighteen is awfully young for this kind of display."

"I'm devastated because I have an 8-year-old for which I now have to have an explanation," said another Los Angeles-area mother, Rosie Konkel. "She's always looked at this character as a very smart and proper young lady."

Damaged? Wow. That's overly harsh.

This mom thinks 18 is awfully young for this kind of display? Hey, does she remember what she did at 18? And even if this mom had no sexuality of her own at that age, does she forget we send our 18 year old babies off to fight wars? Eighteen: Young enough to die, but not allowed to be nude.

To the other mom, the one who is devastated at having to give an explanation to her daughter, I have to wonder how her 8 year old would even know? Is she unsupervised on the Internet? If she's so precious, why don't you supervise and control the media she views? And why would this need an explanation anyway? Why don't "some parents" teach their kids the following:

1) An actor or actress is not the role they play. They are human beings who may have little or nothing in common with the characters they play.

2) Adults have the right to participate in and make their own decisions regarding sexuality.

3) Having sex or posing nude does not mean you are not "a smart and proper young lady" (or gentleman). or "damaged". (Heck, posing nude doesn't automatically mean you are having sex, for that matter.)

So, get over it, America. (And that includes you too, Disney.)