June 12, 2007 1:55 PM,  Colleen Shirazi said...

I always "got" Brigitte Bardot, but then I'm not sure how much of it is generational, a time and place thing.

In 2007, if you want to look at a sexy image, you need only type a few words into Google and find thousands upon thousands of them, from all around the world.

But that's new. There was no such thing when I was young. The closest things to sexy images (beyond going into a porn shop, which only men did in those days), were European movies, Rolling Stone magazine, sexy calendars, that kind of thing. When people found a beautiful, sexy image, they kept it and cherished it...since there were so few of them, they became iconic.

If Bardot is making her comeback in pop culture, I would say we, as a society, have not gotten over this mentality. We still don't accept nudity and sex as "respectable" or natural, it becomes pushed beneath the surface of our society.

June 12, 2007 5:49 PM,  Dain said...

I think you're right. I did some research, and that is her claim to fame. She wasn't able to get jobs in Hollywood because of her limited English, and she was considered waaaay too racy. America's pretty prudish, I guess. Puritan culture. She was the star of "European" films. It's funny, though, how demure Bardot seems in comparison to pop culture today.

June 12, 2007 6:31 PM,  Colleen Shirazi said...

How do you like the new comments format? It's a PITA to implement. All of the "good stuff" went to the Blogspot users, not the FTP Blogger accounts. mumbles...

In some ways, we are fantastically lucky. We are allowed to date, we can dress pretty much as we please. In other places, people are pushed down so much...they push each other down, don't get me wrong...that something like a picture of Brigitte Bardot, or Kim Basinger, or what have you, becomes iconic almost in the literal sense. Sort of a symbol of...? a mythological land? I'm old enough to relate to this although I'm not sure I've found this land yet.