What I like, and yet don't like, are the rampant stereotypes, and having lived in an all girls dormitory for a long, long time, I can tell you, we do not dance around topless and sit around masturbating with the curtains open while next door, our roommate gets it on with her boyfriend. Nor do we take group showers together or have naked pillow fights. We didn't even really practice kissing together, unless you count the time my friend Claire and I made out at a bar to get rid of some guy who just would not leave us alone and we'd had just enough to drink that we believe if he thought we were gay, he'd buggar off. The truth is, he didn't buggar off and was likely only more turned on, and it was not a kiss worth counting for it only lasted a few seconds. I had no lesbian experiences for the simple fact that I always liked men in that way; I never was a great college experimenter as I saw some of my friends who were "lesbian until graduation" which I found rather insulting to other friends who were sure about their sexuality. Really, it's none of my business, but I always imagined it would bother me if I knew for sure and saw other girls just playing at it, like it were a game or some such thing. But back to this, in real life, this is not how we went about our days. These are extreme situations and I just love that for De Palma, like a teenage boy behind he camera, he has all of them happening, every cliché, at the same time and in the same dormitory. It's almost funny.

What I do like, and this I'll say very loudly is that it's still early enough in the century or in time that plastic surgery had not become an obsession, nor had being Jennifer Aniston or Gwyneth Paltrow thin, and for as much as like Gwyneth and many actresses, even as a thin girl myself at one time a real waif, it's not a look that I particularly like. Women were meant to have curves and hips and tits. Today, the tits are too big and the curves are too few. I see these narrow-hipped boyish girls with enormous plastic surgery breasts that aren't fooling anybody - and this is hardly representative of what real women look like or even should want to look like. Okay, if that's your thing, but what worries me is the pressure this puts on so many other women who feel they "ought" to look like this, even though it is grossly unnatural, and then go under the knife, or the countless thousands who can't afford to go under the knife and have perfectly respectable B or C cup breasts and feel that they are too small. How absurd, I think. In De Palma films, the majority of the women are B or C cups and for the time, you have to remember, a C cup was considered very large and it was and frankly it still is, the only difference is that a real C is being measured against a saline double D and then it all becomes relative. He may not have meant to make a statement about what a woman's body should look like in a natural state (my god, even pubic hair existed, heaven forefend!) but the fact is, he did give us a representative example of what was once upon a time considered the ideal of feminine beauty. For the whole of the seventies and some of the eighties, this was the look that was in. Hell, I even remember a whole skin care line called Rachel Perry that had an illustration of a woman on the front who looked just like a character in a De Palma film with her long, wavy hair and her Nancy Allen profile.