"Cultivate your curves - they may be dangerous but they won't be avoided"
About this Quote
Mae West turns the language of scandal into a strategy for power. To cultivate is to act with intention, to train something to grow. Curves are literal and metaphorical: the body that does not conform to a narrow ideal, and the personality that refuses straight lines and simple answers. Calling them dangerous acknowledges how female desire, confidence, and visible sensuality were framed as threats to propriety. Yet the twist is cheerful defiance: danger can be magnetism; what polite society tries to suppress is what people cannot look away from.
West built a career on that paradox. A vaudeville performer who wrote her own material, she crafted a persona where appetite, wit, and control belonged to the woman on stage. In 1926 she wrote the Broadway play Sex and was jailed for it, a publicity windfall she cleverly used to amplify her fame. In early Hollywood, as the Hays Code tightened censorship, she smuggled frankness through double entendre, proving that the very boundaries meant to tame her only sharpened her punchlines. The line celebrates that alchemy: cultivate what is supposedly risky, because the culture is already fixed on it. If you claim ownership, you set the terms of the gaze.
There is also a broader counsel about individuality. Curves suggest nonlinearity, detours, eccentricities, the parts of a life that do not run straight. Conventional wisdom urges smoothing them out; West urges the opposite. Develop them, polish them, turn them into craft. The risk is not in having curves but in leaving them unclaimed, where others define them as flaws. By making the forbidden her signature, she models a form of agency that converts stigma into style and desire into authority. The result is not just body positivity but creative sovereignty: the audience will not avoid what you unapologetically inhabit.
West built a career on that paradox. A vaudeville performer who wrote her own material, she crafted a persona where appetite, wit, and control belonged to the woman on stage. In 1926 she wrote the Broadway play Sex and was jailed for it, a publicity windfall she cleverly used to amplify her fame. In early Hollywood, as the Hays Code tightened censorship, she smuggled frankness through double entendre, proving that the very boundaries meant to tame her only sharpened her punchlines. The line celebrates that alchemy: cultivate what is supposedly risky, because the culture is already fixed on it. If you claim ownership, you set the terms of the gaze.
There is also a broader counsel about individuality. Curves suggest nonlinearity, detours, eccentricities, the parts of a life that do not run straight. Conventional wisdom urges smoothing them out; West urges the opposite. Develop them, polish them, turn them into craft. The risk is not in having curves but in leaving them unclaimed, where others define them as flaws. By making the forbidden her signature, she models a form of agency that converts stigma into style and desire into authority. The result is not just body positivity but creative sovereignty: the audience will not avoid what you unapologetically inhabit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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