Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.

Mae West (1893–1980) built her celebrity in the 1920s–30s by deliberately testing the boundaries of sexual frankness and “respectability” in American popular culture. Her stage work—most famously the Broadway play *Sex* (1926), which led to an obscenity arrest—and her early Hollywood films made her a lightning rod for moral reformers and censors. The quip “Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often” fits West’s public persona: a performer who treated outrage as proof of prudishness and as a tool for publicity, using wit to invert the power dynamic between the scandalized and the scandal-maker.

The line is both provocation and social critique. West suggests that “shock” is often a learned reflex—an expression of narrow norms rather than genuine harm—and that repeated exposure can loosen fear and hypocrisy. By recommending more shocks, she reframes scandal as a kind of education: confronting what one finds improper may reveal that the taboo is arbitrary, culturally constructed, or maintained to police desire and behavior. The aphorism also doubles as a defense of artistic freedom: if audiences and authorities are too readily offended, the remedy is not silence but more candor, more comedy, and more challenges to conventional taste.