If any one of us can recall or were even alive to remember, there was a time before the Internet (yes Virginia, we didn’t have cell phones or X!) And back then, seeing nudes of a celebrity was a big deal. As we reported here, Penthouse ‘acquiring’ and publishing nudes of the newly crowned Miss America Vanessa Williams in 1984, celebrity “sex tapes” making the rounds and even a glimpse of some actor showing more skin than usual in a mainstream movie, was enough to cause a wild storm of vapers across the culture and media.
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And then there was Playboy, a magazine that would occasionally convince some well-known lady celeb to show some skin. Which is exactly what Drew Barrymore did in 1995.
This week, in a long Instagram post she titled “Phone Home" (referencing her turn in the film “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial”) Barrymore addressed what she calls and surely were, those “chaste nudes” she allowed to be taken just before she turned twenty.
What Drew said
Barrymore talked about the vulnerability she feels now being a parent and specifically referenced that as a young person, she was brought up and living in an environment that led her to be what she calls a “big exhibitionist.” Still, she views those infamous Playboy pics as art and looking back she does not judge the pictures or her decision to take them. She only bemoans the fact that, at the time, she couldn’t have known how the images would outlast the paper they were printed on.
Now, the host of her own talk show and a partner in the powerful Flower Films production company, Ms. Barrymore says she simply wants to protect her children the best way she knows how.
The world has changed
The advent of the Internet has surely allowed Drew (and many other celebrities) to either see salacious shots taken long ago surface on occasion or suffer a Cloud storage ‘leak.’ But we don’t view nudity and sexuality the same way we did back in 1995.
From a Kim Kardashian ‘breaking the net’ by showing a copious amount of derrière real estate in Paper Magazine, to all that we get across our various X feeds even when we don’t ask for it, to the cotton candy-sexuality displayed across Cardi B's WAP video, sporting a controversy that seems like so much pre-pandemic noise (like the song or not) it could be argued that maybe we keep evolving over this issue. Yes, there are still those websites whose sole purpose is to post intimate pictures stolen from some celeb’s online account or propagate revenge porn. But beyond an occasional prurient thrill, as a collective culture, do we care about seeing skin these days?
In her recent The Nudes Internet - The Atlantic writer Jane Coaston says that “…the procurement of sex, the display of sex, sex as a competitive marketplace, sex as an economic vehicle, sex as a cure-all, sex as a moral cudgel—the nudes internet is less about sex itself and more about what it symbolizes.” Coaston claims it is not the nude itself that really is surprising anyone anymore, it is how the nude is “leaking out into the broader internet,” which, Coaston says gives both pro and con nude/sex/pornography posters always more ammunition.
But it seems to Drew Barrymore, as to us all, those bullets surely don’t penetrate like they used to.
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