"Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they're doing and saying in films right now just shouldn't be allowed. There's no dignity anymore and I think that's very important"

Mae West’s remarks reflect a complex response to the evolution of media content and social norms in her later years. Known for her own provocative persona and for challenging boundaries during Hollywood’s early days, West surprisingly voices support for censorship, signaling her discomfort with contemporary changes in film. She observes that “the things they're doing and saying in films right now just shouldn't be allowed,” referencing the late 1960s and early 1970s, when cinema began to explore more explicit themes around sex, violence, and taboo subjects. This period marked a sharp departure from the stricter production codes of West’s own heyday, codes designed to police onscreen morality and maintain an artistic gentility.

West’s call for “dignity” underlines her belief that limits on expression serve a social purpose, grounding artistic works in a sense of shared standards or respectability. For her, dignity seems emblematic of an artistic approach in which suggestion, wit, and restraint, qualities she herself often embodied, created allure and sophistication. Where once innuendo and double entendre provided a sleight of hand that titillated without transgressing overt boundaries, she now perceives modern cinema as abandoning those subtleties for raw, sometimes crude directness.

Her perspective touches on a perennial tension in artistic fields: the balance between creative freedom and societal values. West’s advocacy for censorship does not necessarily arise from prudery; rather, it comes from an attachment to a mode of artistic engagement that, in her view, honored both performer and audience through cleverness and discretion. Her concern about the loss of dignity suggests anxiety about art’s power to shape culture, believing that when public expression becomes too permissive, it may undermine the mutual respect necessary for a cohesive society. Thus, West’s statement captures a generational anxiety about the costs of unfettered freedom, particularly in media that mirror and influence societal mores.