Am I The Same Girl? Dusty Springfield. 1969. Philips.

 Photographs of Candy Darling from the late 1960s show a heavily made up, white, female beauty telegraphing such a delicate frailty she appears almost otherworldly. Her look is a deceptively provocative mask of sexuality itself, as powerfully dangerous as implied consent. What gives Am I the Same Girl? its lasting vitality, fifty three years after its release, is the distinctive, breathy reading Dusty Springfield gives the song’s lyric, eroticizing its theme of feminine vulnerability. Against the backing of her session and touring band the Echoes Dusty not only makes vulnerability sound sexy, she makes sexuality sound utterly dependent upon the power of vulnerability in order to function, an attitude that may run counter to our current age of Wet Ass Pussy. Dusty’s version of Am I the Same Girl? also helped create the kind of mid-tempo sixties pop that charmed AM radio audiences into a risk-free acceptance of conventional, pro-nuclear family relations. But Dusty had a secret. And sex is rarely conventional. It often presents itself, sometimes overtly, as a contest of inventive wills, a dual game of dominance and submission in which consensual players are evenly matched—but not always; one with the magnetism of an offensive threat, the other with a boldly imagined web of entrapment. Both Candy Darling, born James Lawrence Slattery, and Dusty Springfield, born Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O’Brien, challenged reality and the paradigm of fixed sexuality by offering example, model lives of individually crafted female personalities that continue to resonate today. With less improved upon coiffures.


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