When Bogie tangled with Bacall in To Have and Have Not [1945], he was 44 and she was all of 19. And 26 years ago, Brooke Shields was presented as an object of pure lust in Pretty Baby . 

But I don't know if the studios have ever made so many movies about pretty girls between the ages of 13 and 19. ///

In fact, they're pushing the female stars of the 1990s right over the romantic-comedy ledge. ....

So it goes for the middle-aged male critic who sees the undeniably chesty Lindsay Lohan in Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen , or the fresh-faced Kate Bosworth.. getting humped by Val Kilmer in Wonderland, or even one of those Nickelodeon-grown teenage stars bouncing up and down after getting her first kiss. ///

What we hardly ever say -- not to one another and not to our readers or viewers -- is something like: "Damn! They didn't make 'em like that when I was in high school." 

To do so would be to admit the truth: that men never stop appreciating the unique beauty of girls who are just becoming women -- and some of the most enticing young women in the world are the ones who are starring in these movies. 

In fact, that's one of the prime reasons they've become starlets: the way they look. They come to the table with physical gifts, and they're presented onscreen in a stylized, sexualized manner, and they are objects of fantasy, whether they're playing the good girl who writes in her journal every night or a 21st-century Lolita.

..
..

From Bring it On to Ten Things I Hate About You to Legally Blonde to Freaky Friday (the new version), if there was a plucky teenage girl heroine, Hollywood could count on me plunking down good money to sit in the theater and cheer her on. I could identify.

My inner sixteen-year-old girl was achingly lonely and needed some encouragement. She was still waiting for someone to take off her glasses, give her a makeover and turn her from bookworm to prom queen.

I sat in the theater on a Saturday morning, surrounded by teen girls and their parents, and I suddenly felt like a dirty old man. 

Partly because a single man my age in a sea of underage girls tends to look suspicious, and partially because, as I watched the movie, 

I didn't identify with Lindsay Lohan. I lusted after her. I sat there thinking, "Damn, she's hot," and not in my normal, "Damn she's hot in that fabulous outfit!" kind of way.

..
..

He didn't think he'd be able to sell a novel on such a risque subject, so he kept putting it off for other things. The idea wouldn't go away, but even after he started writing it, he considered giving up. 

He said, "I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried [it] as far as the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life."

In the summer of 1951, he and his wife drove to Colorado in their Oldsmobile station wagon, and he began to work on his novel in the car.

He finished the novel in 1953, but when he sent the draft to friends, most of them were horrified, and told him that he could never publish it. 

It was rejected by all the major publishing houses in the United States, so he finally had it brought out anonymously in France by a publisher who specialized in pornography. 

He played around with different titles, including "The Kingdom by the Sea," but in the end the novel was called Lolita (1955). 

After a few years of controversy, it was published in the United States in 1958, and went on to become a bestseller and a movie. 

Nabokov had put off writing it for so many years partly because he was afraid that it wouldn't make any money, but in the end it was the success of Lolita that allowed him to retire from teaching. 

Nabokov said, "Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."

..Fantasies of a Young Submissive

I have had feelings of submission for as long as I can remember. As these feelings began to intensify, in my early teens, I knew that I was different from my friends. 

While they were all kissing pictures of Brad Pitt before going to sleep at night, I was curled up beneath my blankets, armed with a torch and engrossed in the dark sado-masochistic novels of Pauline Reage, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis De Sade. ....

[My] book contains a collection of short stories and poetry with the theme of spanking, bondage, slavery, submission and highbrow erotica as well as a unique collection of fetish art photographs. 

I am still very inexperienced in the ways of the erotic world and so it was something of a journey of self discovery.

I derive pleasure from my pain, power from my submission. The sensual excitement that I receive from being punished does not end at the physical level. I feel a deep psychological strength, relief, even pride at having endured it. 

I have tried to analyse my own feelings in order to derive some kind of psychological explanation for the way I am. I know that I am physically aroused by the sensation of pain on certain areas of my body but it is the mental rewards that are most important in understanding why I crave such sensations.

Growing up in a conservative, Presbyterian family, I was made to feel guilty over the slightest inappropriate thought let alone having naughty fantasies about being dominated and punished. 

In an endless and ironic cycle, I found myself chastised for these feelings by the very subject that they were centred around - being spanked.

..
..

"You are who you are and you can't help what you look like, so I would prefer to downplay it -- the sex appeal -- because there's so much stuff all over the place and I really wanted this movie ["The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"] to be scary and real and not about protruded breast shots."

Inevitably the conversation switches gear - literally, to her infamous semi-nude photo shoot that appeared in soft-porn Gear Magazine three years ago. 

Then a rising teenage star thanks to the family-oriented Seventh Heaven, the photo shoot seemed to be a deliberate ploy on Biel's part to change her image so as not to be typecast as the good girl next door. 

Not true, says a defiant Biel who, three years later, remains clearly bitter over that experience. 

"I want to say that because I was 17 years old, it was my first adult photo shoot. It was supposed to be sexy and fun and not at all naked," Biel says. 

"It was just supposed to be underwear, but I got in a situation where I was encouraged and I was not looked after by the people I was working with." ...

..
..

"I was working with a lot of men, who were my managers which wasn't a good thing for me. I really needed to be surrounded by a woman or women who would just say, That's really not the smartest idea." 

Biel says that degree of exploitation is not uncommon in Hollywood. "I think this happens to so many girls and it's not a bad sob story. 

"I'm not looking for people to go, oh.  I mean this was one of the hardest times I went through my whole entire life.  I really embarrassed my family, I embarrassed myself.  Thank God for 7th Heaven, the fans and Aaron Spelling who was so forgiving. 

"But the reality is, when your 17 years old, you think you know everything, you want to be 25," Biel says laughingly. 

"You want to wear the sexy clothes and someone says, yeah, that looks great, why don't you just lift that up?"

Call it what you will, nature, biology, pheromones, or lust, it is the moment, that perfect moment when her hormones are sizzling, when she melts, when her eyes are dewy with promise, when everything about her is sending out urgent messages. 

In short, nature works overtime to make her absolutely irresistible. 

For me, as I open this account, that moment had not yet come. There were still two years of preparation, during which I matured from a gauche schoolgirl into a wide-eyed young woman standing on the threshold of adult life. ...

I was a solitary tomboy given to roaming the wild country around our Cornish home, dreaming of adventure and exploration, not of romance and sex. 

I wasn't coltish and leggy like my best friend, Pamela, a solicitor's daughter, who had tumbling fair curls and come-hither dark blue eyes that had the boys chasing her in droves. 

Small and sturdy, I was built like a moorland pony with shaggy brown hair and the apple cheeks of a country girl. Circumstances had not yet placed me in the right place at the right time.

..
..

Mostly, I felt unsettled, a sense of groping for the unknown, of my body developing an inner life of its own, beyond my control. ... It was a period when sex was a taboo word between the generations.

[Publishers Weekly:] Kingsland's delightfully lusty memoir of her girlhood in Cornwall and London is writ around a secret she has kept for more than 40 years and had noted only in her diaries: in 1955, at 14, she lost her virginity to her first crush, legendary English actor Richard Burton.

The contemporary spin for a young actress, however, is the question of how much to take off for whom.

"That's where your sense of self comes into play," she says. "I just did the photo shoot for my first magazine cover. I'm very excited and had a great time, but I'm half-naked. Some people might say you went naked for a film. What's the difference?

"Well," she says, answering her own question, "with 'Training Day' it was presented to me as a topless scene. And when I sat down with [director] Antoine Fuqua and talked to him about why she was topless in this scene, he said, no one's going to go for full nudity. And I said, well, I will.

"So it was basically my idea. It was the honest thing for my character in that moment. But that was a serious film that Denzel won the Oscar for. This is a magazine my 14-year-old nephews will flip through. That's the difference, and it makes me nervous."

..
..

"That scene to me was campy and I had fun doing it... I got pressured to do that scene with wet hair, really sexy. With as much control as I had, which wasn't much, I tried to take it to another place. It seemed more interesting with the towel than the wet, dripping hair."

Was there ever any talk of the scene revealing more? "Because it's a PG-13 film, that was never even a discussion," she responds. "And if it had come up, that discussion would have ended quickly with me saying no. The power of saying no is a beautiful thing. I love to say no. Rather than complain or say you're being exploited, well, say no. There's always that option."

Albert Brooks plays the manager of a men's clothing store who hires a pierced, tattooed goth teenager (Leelee Sobieski) and stumbles into a soulful (but platonic) romance with her that exposes both parties' vulnerabilities. "That's why I love this movie," Brooks says. "It's like there's some unwritten law that people of different generations can't help each other without the bed being involved."*[Premiere mag. article]

<< Randall (Albert Brooks) and Jennifer / 'J' (Leelee Sobieski) in My First Mister

"My parents were cool," she says. "Nobody ever said anything, and rightly so. I would have thought they were ridiculous if they did." As the film neared production Hemingway discovered that other performers were not so open-minded. "I was astonished at how many actresses were all freaked out about auditioning for the other role," Hemingway says. 

"And people you wouldn't suspect! I mean, you would think they would be totally cool, but they were freaked. It was bizarre. They would come in and read, and then when it came to the kissing, either they'd be way overenthusiastic about it or totally terrified."***[The Advocate, August 18, 1998]

Mariel Hemingway with Patrice Donnelly in Personal Best (1982)  // 

memoir Finding My Balance by Mariel Hemingway (January 2003)

"Young actors often don't think of the consequences of doing nudity or sex scenes," says Natalie Portman. "They want the role so badly they agree to be exploited and then end up embarassing family, friends and even strangers."

Portman did not want to do some explicit scenes in "Anywher But Here" -- and had an ally in [co-star] Susan Sarandon. 

"Susan said she wouldn't do the movie without me, so Wayne [director Wayne Wang] and Fox agreed to the rewrites. The scene as rewritten is every bit as strong -- even though it is no longer explicit." 

Portman feels taking such stands makes her a positive role model..

"More young actresses have to say 'no' to being exploited. The same producers and directors aren't asking young actors to do these kind of things." *****[Calgary Sun, November 7, 1999]

No, actually it was me. My parents never make decisions for me and they'd never stop me from doing something I want to do. 

They obviously always advise me not to do sexual scenes and nudity, not because they don't think it's appropriate to have them in films, but just because when you think about your life and how important it is to you, it always has to come before your career and any artistic decision.

Films are seen by so many people that it can be dangerous.

No, I'm not saying that, but at 16 I was not ready or able to do that. And I never want to make any general statement about myself as I change my mind every single day. 

So what I may not be willing to do today I could be happy to do tomorrow. 

But everyone can change their minds, and I think often people are scared of being hypocritical and that's why I try not to make any longterm statements.****[imdb.com interview June 2002]

He explains, "They would come and ask me questions about sex, and I just told them what I heard - like positions and stuff.

"All the other mothers went to Disney and told them I was corrupting their kids. I feel somewhat responsible for how sexual [Britney] is right now. When I see her with a snake around her neck, I think, 'Did I do that?'"... [imdb.com Celebrity News: 30th April 2002]