Parenting & Family Quote by Susie Bright

There is something deliciously mischievous in Susie Bright phrasing motherhood as an act of seduction. "Turning my daughter on" is doing double duty: it’s the everyday slang of introducing someone to a passion, but it’s also unmistakably erotic, the kind of linguistic tripwire Bright has spent a career laying. As a sex-positive writer and editor who built her voice in the kink- and porn-adjacent counterpublics of late-20th-century America, Bright knows exactly how charged that verb is. The line dares the listener to flinch, then exposes what the flinch is really about: our reflex to quarantine mothers from sensuality, and to treat culture as "safe" only when it’s scrubbed of adult heat.

The object she’s "turning" her daughter toward is telling: old movies. Classic Hollywood is often sold as wholesome nostalgia, but it’s also a museum of coded desire, censorship workarounds, and glamour engineered to be felt in the body. Bright is pointing at the way film education happens in the home, through pleasure rather than pedagogy. This isn’t a lecture about canon; it’s a handoff of appetite, taste, and permission.

The subtext is inheritance. She’s not just sharing titles; she’s passing along a way of looking - at art, at sexuality, at the past - that refuses shame. The sentence lands because it makes a gentle maternal moment sound slightly scandalous, and in that scandal it argues for a more honest, less sanitized version of intimacy and cultural transmission.