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Like a lot of people, I bingewatched the second season of Orange Is the New Black as soon as the show was dropped on Netflix in one giant lump. While I enjoyed the first season perfectly fine, I felt the second was much stronger, particularly because I was so taken with Lorraine Toussaint‘s performance. As the villainous Vee, Toussaint nailed the scheming nature of a sociopath perfectly. I can’t think of the last time I was so unnerved by a character in the way I was with Vee.

Over a month later, I’m still thinking about her. There’s one scene in particular that stuck with me, and if you’ve seen the show, you know what I’m talking about: Toussaint’s nude scene.

There’s a lot of nudity on the show, often in the context of lesbian sex in the prison showers (which, admittedly, is a pretty fantastical version of what life in prison is really like). Just as the show is quite diverse in terms of its cast’s ethnicity, the OITNB had the opportunity to show a variety of bodies — normal bodies, not just the usual you’d find on the big screen (or even on something like Game of Thrones). For the most part, the show doesn’t get very radical with the nudity — that is until the penultimate episode of the second season.

In “It Was the Change,” Vee’s backstory is given much more prominence (before this we see her in flashbacks from Red and Taystee’s points of view) and shows the extent of her ruthlessness. After sleeping with R.J., her drug-dealer protégé, she arranges to have him killed — right there in bed after he walks out on her. This is contrasted, of course, which a post-coital scene, one that doesn’t fall into the trap of dishonest covering-up. (As Roger Ebert once said, it seems like movies are the only place to find L-shaped sheets that cover up a man below the waist and a woman just above her chest.)

The scene plays out so naturally — all while Vee sits in bed, topless. It’s almost as if no one on set noticed (although, of course, it’s a conscious directorial decision); her breasts just happen to be exposed. It’s not sexual in nature, even though it takes place after the two characters have sex. It just is.

This kind of visual honesty is already commendable, but what’s striking it’s a 54-year-old African-American actress in the scene — not typically the kind of performer you expect to be topless. Furthermore, Toussaint brings a raw sexual quality to the scene that feels so effortless — she’s in complete control, both as a sexual being and as a business mogul. Again, that ruthlessness is constantly on display for the viewer, even when the other characters in the room casually miss it.

It astounds me that none of the think-pieces filed to various sites in the weeks after the second season premiered focused on the scene. I’d be willing to say that it’s the most revolutionary thing about the season — it was its most unflinchingly honest moment.

Toussaint herself was interviewed on HuffPost Live a few weeks after the season hit Netflix, and she was asked about her topless scene. She hadn’t seen the scene until the interviewer rolled a clip, and she admitted she was nervous about doing it in the first place. But she also said she didn’t want to be called brave for going through with the nudity.

It’s very American, isn’t it? Because in America, certainly in Hollywood, it’s about youth and it’s about the glorification of the young body, the firm body, the teenage, post-teenage, early-20s body… It’s also about being stick thin. It doesn’t actually reflect the way women’s bodies actually look or how women’s bodies actually mature.

For all of the writing about Lena Dunham’s nudity on Girls — and there’s a lot of it that unfortunately examines whether or not she’s attractive enough to be naked on film — it seems people casually forgot to talk about Lorraine Toussaint. After all, a 24-year-old is generally perceived as a more attractive character than a menopausal woman. Orange Is the New Black isn’t perfect by any means, but the way the show displayed Vee’s body — and the way in which Toussaint used her physicality so adeptly in her performance — was astounding. Let’s hope we’ll be talking more about her next summer when she’s up for an Emmy for her performance.

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Photos: Netflix / Emily Schweich, courtesy Everett Collection