Hulu’s “Pretty Baby” Documentary Shows How Brooke Shields Was The Victim Of Two Different Phenomena

To understand this, we must look at two factors. The first is how divorce has the ability to deform the relationship between mother and daughter. The second is the effect the sexual revolution had on male sexual behavior. 

Do Divorced Moms Exploit Their Daughters for Money and Revenge?

Divorce is never pretty, and unfortunately, there are often side effects on the divorced mother. Her now deformed relationship with her child can take the form of resentment or of "friendship," but either way, the daughter may become the focus of abuse or exploitation. We often see exploitation at the hands of the stage mom or "momager." We see this in lots of TV shows, but also with figures like Lindsay Lohan and the Kardashians (Kim’s sex tape was monetized by her own mother), in which the mother relives her sexual youth via the sexualization of her daughter(s). Watching the documentary on Brooke Shields shows an earlier version of this type of motherhood, as Teri Shields was perhaps the first to cause a national stir about this type of child exploitation.

Why might a woman choose to exploit her daughter in such a way? One reason is that divorce places financial pressure on women who are child rearing with little help from fathers. Another, more nefarious, reason may be that women often view their children as something they gave their husbands. When divorce happens, women, often subconsciously, may harm their children (who they view as their ex-husband’s, a gift bestowed to him, that they must now take care of alone) as punishment. Brooke’s father was minimally in the picture, as the documentary shows, and when he was caring for Brooke, he never spoke of her modeling and acting career. In fact, Brooke mentions that the only thing she felt her father was proud of was her acceptance and success at Princeton. 

Teri Shields could have weaponized her own daughter to humiliate her ex-husband.

Teri Shields could have unknowingly weaponized her own daughter to humiliate her ex-husband who had left her, moved on, remarried, and had a new family. She also, in a very unhealthy way as mentioned above, leaned on her daughter Brooke as a friend and so oriented herself less as a mother, more as a momager, but also as a crutch that she herself could lean on. 

Women, grown women, are indeed sexual objects. (It’s just not all we are! And we wouldn’t want it to be.) We want to be admired for our beauty and sexuality, and we can handle it as well as adult women. Young girls’ brains simply cannot. Brooke talked a lot about how she “left her body” and disassociated to deal with the adult themes in her younger movies, especially Pretty Baby. It’s how she got through the sex scene in Endless Love, where the director twisted her toe behind the camera to give her a look of “ecstasy” when she is deflowered. She mentioned in the documentary how this hurt. And sex often does too the first time. And yet, it was all from the perspective of the perverted male gaze, falling on a young girl, not a woman.

The Sexual Revolution Made Men More Interested in Younger Girls with Less Baggage

As a young actress, Brooke Shields was something bigger than herself. She played a role at 12 in Pretty Baby where she was nude, a prostitute, and had the attention of older men. And this was not just on screen. She had the attention of American males coast to coast. The documentary states that this movie could not be made today (neither, it alleges, could Blue Lagoon or Endless Love, both coming of sexual age teenage stories), but I challenge that we have somehow evolved from hookup culture to rising body counts to the sexualization of younger and younger children. 

Why were men so interested in a girl, when, historically, men have always been attracted (for the most part) to grown women, with breasts, curves, and other sexual signs of fertility? To understand this, we must look at the sexual revolution that took place as Brooke was growing up in the limelight. 

Before the sexual revolution, men had limited access to women. If a man got a woman pregnant, they usually married. With reliable birth control in the 1960s, this all changed. Women burned their bras, but they celebrated burning the feminine with it, and instead started engaging in a masculine pattern of behavior both in their newfound careers and sexually. Casual sex became rampant. As a result, women had more and more sexual partners, and by the time a woman was ready for marriage in her mind, she had had a lot of negative experiences as well, making pair bonding to one man more difficult. Men became more and more aware of this problem, not because they were morally policing “body counts,” but because they could not frankly find loyal women. Pair bonding decreases for women as the number of sexual partners increases (there's plenty of data to back this up).

Promiscuous women are deemed "damaged" in a way that utterly terrifies some men.

Looking toward younger and less promiscuous women was, for some men, the fantasy of mixing sophisticated adult sexuality in the youthful "innocent" package of a child. It's the Lolita fantasy. It may be why Leonardo Dicaprio only dates women up to age 25. Why some men regress into this is simply a way of avoiding the psychosexual problems associated with a promiscuous woman. The reason for this is that promiscuous women are deemed "damaged" in a way that utterly terrifies some men, so they simply retreat to a less terrifying woman. Young Brooke Shields’ popularity illustrates this.

Closing Thoughts

Child actors being taken advantage of by their parents or on set is unfortunately not a rare occurrence, but now that these child stars have grown up, they are sharing their negative experiences and creating a safer future for the next generation of child actors.