HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: 'I grew up thinking Brooke Shields was what sexy was. It never occurred to me she was a child.'

There's a movie at the multiplex and it stars the most famous girl in the world. 

She's 14, playing someone one year older. And she's naked in almost all of it. She and her "cousin" are stuck on a desert island. They fall in love, and they have sex. And we see... a lot.  

Surely, at this point, we're all getting arrested. 

Except we're not. Because it's 1980, and the famous girl is Brooke Shields, and this isn't even the first time she's been naked in a major motion picture for our entertainment. 

Watch: The Blue Lagoon Official Trailer. Story continues after video.

I remember The Blue Lagoon. It wasn't a good film, not really, but it was a big one. 

I was too young to see it in the cinema – where it became one of the top 10-grossing movies of that year, and made tens of millions of dollars for its creators – but by the time it was on the shelf of my local Blockbuster video store, I was desperate to.

"A sensual story of natural love", was the tagline, and my friends and I knew what that meant. 

We knew it was naughty. We knew it was rude. And we knew that Brooke Shields was the most beautiful girl any of us had ever seen.

Long hair, long limbs, blue eyes, tanned skin, a bright, open smile. Slight, suggested curves. We were much more interested in Brooke than we were her beige love interest, Christopher Atkins. Sure, he was pretty. But Brooke Shields was... a blueprint. 

"Oh," we thought. "That's what we're supposed to look like." It's the moment of realisation that some people are so beautiful, they can charge people to look at them.

Image: Getty

Shields was a model, a breadwinner for her single-parent family, she sold everything from soap flakes to toothpaste to Barbie dolls. 

But she wasn't only a vehicle for selling stuff to her underage peers. She was also being sold herself, as a thinly-veiled sexual fantasy to fully grown men.

If you've watched Pretty Baby, the new documentary about Shields on Disney Plus, you'll know that she was 10 years old when she did her first naked shoot.

The photographs, taken by photographer Gary Gross for a Playboy publication called Sugar 'n Spice, are hard to look at now, even with the blurred TV modesty bars across the tiny child's body as she stands, with a smoky eye and a glossy red lip, shiny with oil, in a bathtub. A child, painted up as an adult. 

They are not the sort of images you would ever see in mainstream magazines. Now, they certainly breach obscenity and child protection laws. 

Then, Shields says she and her "Bohemian" manager-mum, Terri, considered them art. 

But in the early 1980s, Brooke and Terri Shields sued Gross to stop him from selling these naked pictures of a minor for profit. Gross countersued, and he won. Because by then, Shields had made the original Pretty Baby, a big-deal, arty movie about a sex worker raising her daughter in a brothel and auctioning off the 11-year-old's virginity for $400. Yes, that film was also at the multiplex. And then Blue Lagoon. And then a series of infamous Calvin Klein ads, where she wriggled into her tight jeans and suggested to the world that she wasn't wearing any underwear. With that resumé, the judge decided, Shields had sexualised herself, and the pictures posed no threat to her reputation.

Again, the actress was 10 when they were taken. 

Did the teenagers who were buying the Calvin jeans by the armful know or care that the girl they were obsessed with was being sold to us as the perfect woman, when she wasn't a woman at all?

Nope. We did not. 

If anything, we enviously ate up the adoration aimed at the young, semi-dressed Brooke, and took notes. 

Regarding Pretty Baby, academic and author of The Lolita Effect Meenakshi Gigi Durham makes the point that the 1970s and 80s obsession with sexualising children, while not new (the infamous Nabakov novel Lolita was written in the 1940s, for example) may have been a very deliberate, punitive reaction to the women's rights movement. "One of the responses to feminism was the sexualisation of little girls," she says. "'You're not going to be traditionally feminine? We'll replace you with little girls'."

That's a theory that, considering what came next, tracks. 

To our eyes, the previous generations' definition of "sexy woman" - think Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren – were old, matronly, even. We knew that desirable women were child-like, tiny and getting tinier – the 1980s ideal of lots of shiny hair, boobs and long legs was going to give way to the impossibly young-looking waifs of the 1990s – and that innocence was powerful. What we didn't know, of course, was that the young women never really held the power at all. It was a damaging illusion, still conjured as a defence by abusers today.

Image: Getty

The media of the time pretended to care about the young Brooke Shields, while making everything worse. The talk-show montage has become a trope in the revisionist history of female fame. Every documentary on the subject – whether about Paris, Britney, Pamela or Brooke – will contain a collection of cringe-inducing clips, where an old white man in a musty suit will leer and ask inappropriate questions of the stars, who invariably play along while look stunned, confused, shell-shocked. 

Pretty Baby's montage is particularly painful, as a child sits next to her mother and is asked about nudity, sex and parental irresponsibility with their glaring subtext being 'Why is your mum letting you be such a public slut, though?' 

If "concern-trolling" was a term that had been invented then – the idea that you pretend to be worried about someone while simultaneously attacking them – these late-night dudes provide the dictionary definition. 

It's also become a trope to look at the treatment of these women and say 'This was a different time'. Yes, it truly was. It is shocking to be a Generation X woman, whose past is feminist and in full colour, and realise that we were completely comfortable laying shame at the door of a child for how an industry – and yes, her family – objectified her. 

My friends and I were unaware that Shields' enviable hair was glued to her nipples in the Blue Lagoon, or that directors taunted and abused her to illicit the performance of ecstasy she had no idea how to portray in movies like Endless Love. But if we had known, we probably wouldn't have really minded. 

By then, we were fully invested in teenagers as sex symbols. The male-gaziness of those 1980s movies and ads – the way the camera travelled up a 15-year-old's thigh as she pulled up her Calvin Klein jeans, perhaps – became our gaze, too. We saw ourselves like that. Or rather, we saw how much we didn't look like that. 

Pretty Baby is extraordinary because there is no-one as well-placed as Shields to discuss what objectification, fame, trauma and a "momager" who makes Kris Jenner look like a slouch can do to a person. And an entire culture.

And also because Shields entirely refuses to declare herself a victim of anything. She stands by the child-sex-worker movie Pretty Baby as beautiful art – she wrote her thesis on it at Princeton. She says she loved making the Calvin Klein ads, and was hurt when she was dropped for becoming bigger than the brand. She admits to treating her mother badly as she finally professionally separated from her as an adult, even with clear eyes on the damage done by an alcoholic parent, chasing a pay check. She talks honestly about the jobs she had to do for money as she grew up and her teen star faded. She talks about the sexual assault she endured by a producer. She talks about ageing, her husband, her post-natal depression, and – satisfyingly for her Gen X audience – the complexities of explaining yourself to your woke teenage daughters. 

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But it's also extraordinary for exposing how young girls and women always seem to end up carrying the blame and shame for the acts of the greedy, lustful, abusive men around them. 

And how when we were those young girls, blind to all that, we were just buying into the dream. And about a million pairs of tight jeans.

Feature Image: Stock photos

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