Streetcar

Blanche sees Mitch as a last opportunity for stability. Mitch considers Blanche but is turned off when Stanley brings her past to light. Her intentions are undermined in the last part of the scene, before Mitch arrives, when we see a glimpse of just what it means when Blanche says she "wasn't so good the last two years or so." Culture looks more kindly on female nymphomaniacs than male – Blanche does not appear to be a predator as she flirts with the paperboy, so much as sad and pathetic. She is drawn to children, children who are innocent and gay as she imagines herself to be. Trapped emotionally in a fictional past – was her childhood so innocent with the epic fornications of her family, or her youthful love so pure with her "degenerate" husband? - she grasps at the straws of youth that she sees in the paperboy and countless other youths before him.