Yes, Doris Day, the cute girl next door type in her movies, had many wonderful characteristics, but she also represented, at least from some male viewpoints, a darkish side. She was, to put it quite bluntly, in her romantic comedies a high profile hero of the female dick tease. No wonder she had relationship troubles with men.

You see girls of the post war era weren’t supposed to like or enjoy sex. That was for the local wholes only. For females of that time, talking mostly about the middle and lower middle class girls (upper middle class and wealthy women were usually more sophisticated about sex) were raised to see sex as merely a tool to get what they wanted from men — marriage, a home, children or maybe a new dress. Any other reason was being just plain whorish.

So Day’s dancing around sex, but never getting caught actually doing anything in her movies, fit in perfectly with the social message of the times — God fearing women stayed good girls, like the Virgin Mary, even in marriage to a point.

But men, conditioned to want to marry only virgins, didn’t help matters much either. Thus you could easily say that with most marriages back in the day there wasn’t a lot of fun being had in the bedroom by either party — just like Doris Day.