Brooke Shields on the Sexualization of Girls in Hollywood

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 4 April 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

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Summary

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 “Pretty Baby,” playing a child prostitute; by fifteen she was in the heavy-breathing desert-island love story “Blue Lagoon.” She was the face of a series of ads for Calvin Klein jeans featuring notoriously smutty innuendo. Yet Shields herself—rather than the filmmakers and ad men who developed her roles—became the object of fascination and public reproach, as the new documentary “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” premièring 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. “You’re making money, and you’re selling something, and, in most cases, sex sells,” she says. “ ‘Oh, I’m being objectified.’ You’re a model! That’s the point!”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:10.6	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In the late 70s and into the 80s,
0:16.1	Brooke Shields was one of the most famous and controversial people in America. But if she was somehow notorious,
0:22.8	it had nothing to do with her exactly. It was the position that she was put in as a child actress
0:28.0	and as a young model. When she was 11, she starred in Pretty Baby, playing a child prostitute.
0:34.4	And when she was 15, she started in a heavy-breathing desert island love story called
0:38.7	Blue Lagoon. And there was a notorious series of ads for Calvin Klein jeans that set a new
0:44.2	benchmark for skeezy suggestiveness. So for a while there, Brookshield seemed to be at the
0:50.3	center of everything that appalled or titillated people about the era.
0:58.5	A new documentary about the life of Brook Shields is airing next week on Hulu.
1:07.1	My next guest is really a beautiful young lady, who at 13 has already achieved an incredible amount of recognition.
1:09.0	Brook Shield starred in the highly publicized film Pretty Baby, and she's the subject of a new
1:14.0	book called The Brook Book.
1:15.8	She is quite a fascinating young lady.
1:17.6	Would you welcome, please, Ms. Brooke Shields.
1:21.5	Shields spoke the other day with the New Yorkers, Michael Shulman.
1:25.7	I really didn't realize the extent to which you lived your entire life in the public eye.
1:33.2	I mean, it seems like you were, you know, from infancy, you were modeling.
1:39.0	Do you have memories of like coming to realize that your life was unusual in some way?
1:45.9	Here's the problem with that way of, not your way of thinking, but that kind of rationale is
1:52.1	I never knew anything different.
1:56.0	So I think I've seen, especially actors, go from real, not relative, but anonymity, to fame, sort of in one movie or overnight.
	...

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