Brooke Shields on the Sexualization of Girls in Hollywood
In the late nineteen-seventies and into the eighties, Brooke Shields was one of the most famous and most controversial people in America. At age eleven, she appeared in the film \u201cPretty Baby,\u201d playing a child prostitute; by fifteen she was in the heavy-breathing desert-island love story \u201cBlue Lagoon.\u201d She was the face of a series of ads for Calvin Klein jeans featuring notoriously smutty innuendo. Yet Shields herself\u2014rather than the filmmakers and ad men who developed her roles\u2014became the object of fascination and public reproach, as the new documentary \u201cPretty Baby: Brooke Shields,\u201d premi\xe8ring on Hulu, demonstrates in detail. Yet, if she was exploited by adults around her when she was young, Shields denies any sense of being a victim. In a conversation with Michael Schulman, she calls hypocrisy on models who criticize their industry. \u201cYou\u2019re making money, and you\u2019re selling something, and, in most cases, sex sells,\u201d she says. \u201c \u2018Oh, I\u2019m being objectified.\u2019 You\u2019re a model! That\u2019s the point!\u201d