High Plains Drifter (1973) is much more complex than I first understood

If you are going to see the movie and haven't already don't read this:

For example: did you know that Clint Eastwood's character is a ghost of the sheriff bullwhiped to death? And did you know that the woman he rapes at the beginning is actually a prostitute?

My wife was telling me how in College she and her friends psychoanalyzed this movie and so she had a lot to say about it at lunch today with a friend.

When I saw sections of this movie I couldn't believe that Clint Eastwood's character rapes this woman near the beginning even though I remember a lot of women were like this in the 1950s in the schizophrenic way they behaved around sexual mores.

So, a whole lot of healing has taken place on some levels because of the invention of the birth control pill that was legalized in 1960 here in the U.S. which set off the Sexual revolution for women and men too then which really got going by the late 1960s and early 1970s and ended with AIDS in the 1980s when millions of all persuasions died around the world from AIDS.

what surprised me the most is how much mores and morals have changed in how everyone sees this movie now where there is not doubt in my mind that Eastwood's character rapes that woman. Whereas in the 1970s among college males they would say things like "She had it coming because of the way she confronted Clint Eastwood. Because if a man said these things to another man he might be killed for it. But, a woman in the cowboy days might be raped or murdered too for saying these things to a man. This was just the way things still were in some ways even in the 1950s through 1970s here in the U.S.

So, it shows you just how much things have changed from those days (or have they?).