The Road to Hell Is Paved With Brooke Shields.

Last Christmas, I participated in a charity that plays Secret Santa to some of Chicago’s most impoverished children, children whose underpants are bought for them by various charities so they would at least have some to wear, and whose only meals are the breakfasts and lunches provided by the public school lunch program. If you think it’s tough shopping for the person who has everything, try shopping for the person who has nothing. You don’t even know where to begin. How could you even think of buying a chemistry set for a child who has no home, or candy for a child who can’t go to the dentist? I challenge you to enter a Target armed with that knowledge and walk out without the entire store in your arms. Which is why the charity puts a limit on the dollar amount at $25 dollars, to keep things fair and rein in people like me who would very definitely get over zealous. I indulged my frenzied side by purchasing extra gifts for older children, mostly older boys, who often get neglected during the holiday season by the public who wants to shop for younger, cuter children. The child that was selected for me, a little girl named Taylor, had asked Santa for “mayckup,” and I finally settled on buying her some clear lip gloss and a new set of clothes. I went into the boys’ section first and fielded my way through all the cross-promotional movie tie-ins and brand-loyalty marketing crap, and settled on some portable Junior Scientist toys and games suitable for 9-12 year old boys. After they were taken care of and I had comfortably spent too much money, I aimed the cart into the girls’ section.

Jeez, have I been out of the loop. I’ve been so busy with little boys, whose desires in toys may be cynically manipulated for a big corporate buck, but at least encourage them to think and to do, that I was unaware of the pink-smeared nightmare that the girls’ section has become. It’s nothing but rows of vagina-mouthed Bratz dolls, plastic bling, and the relentless pushing of that mindless “Passion for Fashion” slogan. But no “mayckup,” which I found difficult to believe. Why not? Some red lipstick would not only fit nicely alongside the Bratz stripper pole (clear-heeled shoes sold separately) , but educational as well. How else will they prepare for Rainbow parties without it?

I tried to remember what was hot when I was a kid, and remembered the big deals that were Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony, both of which are still made. As it turns out, Strawberry Shortcake hasn’t aged that badly. She’s discarded he Amish/Little House on the Prairie-style dresses she used to wear in favor of cropped jeans and a stylish top, but you don’t get the sense that she’s 12 hours away from stumbling drunkenly out of a limousine and letting the world be her gynecologist.

Curiously, things haven’t boded so well for My Little Pony. My mother bought my four-year-old two ponies for Christmas. They were turquoise marvels with peach-shaped buttocks covered with what appeared to be sparkly tattoos, and manes that looked like the end of a L’oreal commercial. I remember looking at the dolls and thinking, “Wow, they’re almost doable.” And it’s not just me that thinks so, either. In the most recent issue of Bitch magazine, Jesse Rutherford wrote an entire essay about the slutting up of the My Little Ponies in an article titled, “My Little Calliponian,”¹ pointing out that while the original My Little Pony (which I owned) was brown and flat-footed, today’s have their “front legs shortened, pushing the callipygian pony’s rump up higher than its chest - a display of sexual availability known in studies of animal mating behavior as mammalian lordosis, and more commonly called ‘asking for it.’”²

Rutherford concludes, and after looking at all the encouragement given to little girls to be the best whore they can be, just in that one small Target toy aisle alone, I have to agree, “The fact is that girls’ toys are, more than ever, training them in sexual display before they are capable of understanding the meaning of the signals they send.“ And once trained, the more easily they can emulate today’s Paris-Hilton-Gone-Wild role model.

Of course, in the seventies we did have our Candies and our Farrah Fawcett, but as Janeane Garofolo pointed out, we also had What’s Happening’s fireball waitress Shirley Wilson as a role model. True, the audience was encouraged to laugh at the unattractiveness of both her blackness and, especially, her weight, but what I remember most from being a six-year-old parked in front of the TV was this: She absorbed all the criticism thrown at her, and came roaring back, pistols blazing, slaying her critics with pointed humor and her quick wit. I may have wanted to look like Brooke Shields on the outside, but on the inside, it was Shirley I wanted to be, independent, tough, funny, and smart.

But plus ça change and all that, it was hard to find photos of the late Shirley Hemphill on the internet, but the internet is flooded with photos of Brooke Shields, the big bugaboo of my childhood. Where I grew up, Brooke may not have been the devil, but she was close to it. Brooke, who was slightly older than we were, was the girl we huddled together and whispered about on the playground. Brooke did things we could! Not! Believe! Things that, at the time, were genuinely shocking to both children and adults, things that made our mothers seethe. We weren’t even allowed to mention Brooke without getting into trouble. Even talking about Brooke was taboo for Nice Girls, a little Belle Watling to simultaneously stare at and shun. And stare we did, when Brooke’s ten year old self, naked, was published in Sugar and Spice, a photography book featuring photos of famous women. Garry Gross’ photo , showing Brooke standing nude in a bathtub, may not have technically been child pornography, but certainly was in spirit. And at twelve, playing a child prostitute in Pretty Baby, whose vapid sexuality and not only a complete lack of agency, but also a complete lack of desire for agency contrasted sharply with Jodie Foster’s hard-nosed and cynical child prostitute character in Taxi Driver. And twice again at fifteen, when she made the notorious “nothing comes between me and my Calvins” jeans commercial and stared, naked again, in The Blue Lagoon³. And again at sixteen in Endless Love. She was the most naked, most exposed, most sexually explicit child ever, and to be fair to my mother, she laid the blame at the feet of Brooke’s legendarily monstrous showbiz mother/manager, Teri Shields, who bested even Joe Simpson in the awful showbiz parent contest, and his creepy salivating over the breasts of his daughter Jessica is pretty tough to take, so that‘s really saying something.

Unlike Dena Lohan, mother to out-of-control starlet Lindsay, Teri Shields didn’t just refrain from checking her daughter’s dangerous behavior and sleezy career, she was responsible for it, guiding her pretty little daughter into a national role as an empty shell designed solely for forty year old men to beat off to. When a pretty classmate of mine got pushed into modeling by a gung-ho mother, the other mothers clucked disapprovingly, “She’s a real Teri Shields” and that epithet was the social kiss of death.

And through it all, for a naughty girl, Brooke stayed unswayingly loyal to her mother, tightly holding her hand in court when they sued to have Brooke’s Sugar and Spice photos pulled out of circulation. Before giving his ruling, the Hon. Edward Greenfield, scathingly admonished Teri Shields, saying, “In public, her appearance in photographs and motion pictures is based on tantalizing allure and a veiled hint of eroticism…you had a role in choosing her films. You chose Endless Love, not Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.”4 and 5

For years, she made sleazy appearance after sleazy appearance, never complaining, never rebelling against it, never once indicating anything other than an empty, mindless compliance.

And then something happened. Brooke put her clothes back on and went to Princeton, where she graduated with honors. She fired her mother. She got married (twice). She had children, both of whom are dressed and treated like children, and given quiet lives. She even wrote a well-received book about her struggles with post-partum depression, which got her pulled into the tractor beam of Tom Cruise during his gleefully well-documented 2006 Insanity Tour. Calling her “misguided” for using Paxil to overcome her suicidal depression, he gave phony sympathy to her in his interview with Matt Lauer, saying that the only reason he insults her is because he just cares so darned much, and by the way, isn’t it sad that her career has gone down the toilet.

And finally, for the first time that I can remember, Brooke struck back. In a now famous rebuttal published in the New York Times, Brooke very carefully explained post-partum depression, and why Cruise’s advice that she “take vitamins and exercise” was not only ignorant, but potentially dangerous as well. The open letter was a knockout punch, followed up by an acidly given defense of her “absent” career by issuing a public invitation for Cruise to come to London to watch her perform the lead role in Chicago.

Little girls today may be encouraged to imitate the trampy looking dolls that fill the toy shelves, but Brooke Shields was a living Bratz doll for much of her formative years, and yet the she had the strength to stand up and walk away when she’d had enough. The little girl who quietly got knocked around by others was gone, and in her place was a forty-year-old woman who wasn’t going to be quiet any more while other people used her to push their own agenda. It gives me hope that little girls can see through the lubed-up pink smear of popular expectations of them and walk away from it like she did, that for Christmas they won‘t be afraid to ask for “mayckup“ and a microscope.

Brooke Shields, by virtue of our similar ages and her iconic status, has been steadily on my radar for most of my life, but now, the horrified fascination of my childhood has been replaced by genuine admiration, and above all, public respect that she earned herself, by being independent, tough, funny, and smart.

It looks like there’s room at the feminist role-model table for both Brooke Shields and Shirley Hemphill after all.



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¹Bitch Magazine, Issue 35, Spring 2007, p. 19

²Rutherford also points to a hilarious website, Brunching Shuttlecocks, who have a quiz called, "Porn Star or My Little Pony?", where you have to guess which featured name belongs to who.

³She had a body double. Mercifully, somebody, somewhere, drew the line.

4 He then went on to rule against her, which I strongly disagree with. While it is difficult to argue that Shields had Brooke’s best interests at heart, does that mean that Judge Greenfield is correct in allowing her exploitation to continue? Why could he not rule in their favor for the sake of Brooke, if he was concerned about the moral impropriety of it all? And why is Garry Gross off the ethical hook for this? Or the editor of Sugar and Spice? Or the publishers? Or everybody that bought the book and whacked off over the image of a naked child? Sure, Teri should never have allowed that photo to be taken, but hey, it takes a village and all that. Just because a parent has failed to protect her child doesn’t mean it’s okay for everybody else to do it.

5. Time Magazine, November 23, 1981, by Graydon Carter (the very same guy who would go on to edit Vanity Fair and publish photos of an eighteen year old Paris Hilton, naked and spread out on the beach, with men thowing money on her body.)