 Similarly, Simmon notes that the genre offered a mixture of repression and liberation, in which repressive narratives are regularly challenged, partly via mise-en-scène and acting but also by conflicts within the narratives themselves.He further states that such resistances were present in some of the earliest woman's films and became the rule with Douglas Sirk's postwar American woman's films.Others have argued, however, that the narratives of these films offer only the repressive perspective and that viewers must read the texts "against the grain" to be able to find a liberating message.