Great blog, Janice. I can’t add any comment beyond what your readers have already written. I would, however, be interested in knowing if you or your readers had ever seen the 1974 French film “La Punition”, released in English as “The Punishment”. It was based on the bestselling story, allegedly autobiographical, by Xavière Lafont. I have not read the book but would be interested in knowing how the film differs from the story it is based on. The film gets a 4.1 star rating on imdb.com. I would give it about twice that. I would be interested in knowing how Janice or her readers would rate it. It tells a rather grim story about a naïve French country girl, Brit (the actress who plays her, Karin Schubert, was from Hamburg, Germany) who gets into what looks like the glamorous life of a high-society hooker, then finds herself imprisoned naked in a room to satisfy the needs of repellent male clients because of offending a rich client in a trivial way. I have seen it twice, and it really merits a second viewing because the action flips back and forth between past and present in a way that makes it difficult to follow. This isn’t gratuitous artiness though. If filmed in a strictly chronological way, the early scenes would be dull, as poor Britt thinks she is going to live the high life. Near the start, the film shows the revenge killing of the man who sentences her to her punishment by another prostitute, which creates the sense of foreboding in the scenes that follow, which would otherwise be absent. In a Marxist analysis, all of the prostitutes in the film are victims, but the high-income people who live off of them are women as well as men. It is a feature film, not a feminist diatribe. November 26th marks the 79th birthday of Karin Schubert, one of the most beautiful of film actresses, with one of the most tragic histories. She made this film before turning 30, and still had a couple of decades of film-making ahead of her, but like Karen Sillas after making “What Happened Was”, she would never repeat the brilliance of her signature film. Lovely actresses seem to have a shorter shelf life, at least in serious roles, than handsome actors. Most of them don’t get to go on into old age, like Katherine Hepburn, still getting plum roles.