Brooke Shields on the Sexualization of Girls in Hollywood

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K 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.
0:11.1	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:14.2	In the late 70s and into the 80s, Brook Shields was one of the most famous and controversial
0:19.1	people in America.
0:21.1	But if she was somehow notorious, it had nothing to do with her exactly.
0:24.9	It was the position that she was put in as a child actress and as a young model.
0:30.1	When she was 11, she starred in Pretty Baby, playing a child prostitute.
0:34.5	And when she was 15, she starred in a heavy breathing desert island love story called
0:38.8	Blue Lagoon.
0:39.8	And there was a notorious series of ads for Calvin Klein-Geeds that set a new benchmark
0:44.8	for scheezy suggestiveness.
0:47.5	So for a while there, Brook Shields seemed to be at the center of everything that appalled
0:51.8	or titillated people about the era.
0:54.3	A new documentary about the life of Brook Shields is airing next week on Hulu.
0:59.1	My next guest is a really beautiful young lady who at 13 has already achieved an incredible
1:07.3	amount of recognition.
1:09.1	Brook Shields starred in the Holly Publishized Film Pretty Baby and she's the subject of a
1:13.8	new book called The Brook Book.
1:16.0	She is quite a fascinating young lady.
1:17.7	Would you welcome, please?
1:18.7	Miss Brook Shields.
1:21.9	Will spoke the other day with the New Yorker's Michael Schoelman.
	...

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