Article sexualizing Brooke Shields at 12 goes viral ahead of documentary release
Brooke Shields is posed to become the next celebrity to have her treatment-by the industry, the press, and the public-as a child star reexamined when a new documentary about her life, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields premieres on Hulu on April 3. But on social media, the outrage has already begun.
Twitter users became incensed Tuesday when a scanned 1978 op-ed about Shields, then only 12 years old, was shared that dubbed her "million-dollar jailbait." Written by Ed Dwyer for High Times, the article is rife with graphic sexual descriptions of preteen Shields, who Dwyer calls "the most perfect nymphette in all creation."
Below, five of the article's most outrageous passages, disturbing enough that I feel it necessary to warn all about to proceed.
• On Shields' new stardom: "She's a sultry mix of all-American virgin and nascent whore. She's the hottest new young thing in movies since a smoldering preteen Elizabeth Taylor stiffened up Louie Mayer's cigar."
• On Shields in Pretty Baby (1978): "Patrician Brooke is devastating as a little lady who fucks and sucks for bucks... [she] took to Violet's story like a whore takes to champagne. What's more, she's intoxicating to watch."
• On the countdown to Shields becoming "legal": "Producers literally hold their breaths, waiting for the remarkable Brooke Shields to reach a reasonable age of fuckability, not yet legal but oh, so sweet."
• On Shields "violating the preteen sex taboo": "Unlike pugnacious Jodie Foster or puerile Tatum O'Neal, she's the delicious stuff of teenage fantasies become flesh: barely old enough to want, but too young to get."
• On Shields' future: "She's a sweet temptation to all but blind men and eunuchs. She's sister, daughter, sex object, victim, lover, tramp. We can look forward to watching her fill out over the next decade."
Documentary on Brooke Shields is coming out soon on Disney+ and I will never not be horrified by the way so many adults sexualised a prepubescent girl. Should all be thrown in jail pic.twitter.com/Qo7z9eGWbi
- S (@carbdiem) March 28, 2023
Dwyer continues to work as a freelance journalist for such publications as Los Angeles Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post and Variety.
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