Skin versus skills: Do talented celebrities need to "bare all"?

is not exempt from the "need to please men." Far from it. From a profile piece in The New Yorker:

“Let’s face it,” she told Barney Reisz, one of the producers of “Elizabeth I,” while discussing possible actors for one of the leads. “Every woman likes a man who makes a decision, doesn’t she?”

Want more? Here she is on her various boyfriends:

“I have to say, without sounding like a total tosser, that everything I’ve learned in life, and that has taken me out of my natural interior life, has been with men. They exposed me to things that I wasn’t aware of. I learned from all the guys.”

And she has used this professionally, especially early in her career:

From the outset of her career, Mirren made a legend of her daring, which included a certain sexual brazenness. “She was like a Rubens in bluejeans,” Cranham said. In 1968, as Cressida in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Troilus and Cressida,” she spun almost naked across the stage, and was soon dubbed by the British broadsheets “the Sex Queen of Stratford.” “I never wriggled out of that,” Mirren said. Over the years, she has both condemned and parlayed the idea of herself as a sex symbol. “I have traded on it,” she told the Independent in 2001. “I do the tousled thing from time to time. . . . I can do the dirty thing. . . . when Mirren auditioned for the R.S.C., in 1967, Trevor Nunn, then a director with the company, recalled, “A girl came out who appeared to be wearing a garment constructed of black string. It had more spaces between it than it covered. Conversation stopped completely. Jaws dropped. We saw from her C.V. that she’d had no professional experience. She was passionate about doing classical work. I make no bones about it—I think the red blood cells and testosterone were up a considerable level. I don’t think anybody contemplated for a moment that she should be told to go away and get experience somewhere else.

Smart? Savvy? Obviously. I just wouldn't compare her to Ms. Hayek.

I think it would be pretty hard to come up with solid answers based on solid facts to any of these questions.

There are women out there who haven't done the sexpot thing and have no intention of it . . . Rachel McAdams refusing to go bare for Vanity Fair comes to mind and I'm sure refusals like that happen everyday.

One of the topics that hasn't been touched on is: what do women get out of looking sexy aside from attention? Self-esteem boosts and some awesome boudoir clothes? The quality of knowing that people still want you? These are all fairly personal questions.

Here are some of my own personal answers --->

Do talented celebrities need to bare all?

No, but ...

the paycheck for baring all is pretty large, everyone else is doing it why shouldn't I, its only a couple of pictures who cares?, and my personal favorite I'm not well known for my sex appeal so here goes nothing.

Does a traditional "need to please men" really trump everything, or does it merely mask the business-savvy need to please the ones with the money?

No. Usually the need to pay off loans, buy a house, buy a car, or buy a better agent trumps everything.

Is it really worse when talented celebs disrobe, or is it sad that anyone has to operate in a skin-over-skills system?

No, its not worse when talented celebs disrobe. Its pretty much the same.

Yes, its sad that anyone operates in a skin-over-skills system, but that's sort of a throwback to the whole "good girls don't do that" sort of mindset. In other words, that mindset says that there's a bunch of rules that all of us "good girls" should follow like mindless zombies without ever seeing those rules. I'm no zombie and neither is a talented artist. She/he can decide for herself/himself.

Does the line between between tasteful and tasteless exist or matter, and where do we draw it?

The line exists and its different for each person. Example: I'm married, so I would only pose alone, and anything else would be upsetting to me; I also think its tasteless when people who pose are married and have to "get sexy" with a random person.

And can I enjoy pretty pictures one moment and interrogate the complicated factors making them available to me the next?

Yes, you can and you should.

I think Cochrane sees this issue a little narrowly. That's not to say that there's no objectification going on in the world. But reading this post made me think of this amazing quote I read a few years ago by Kevin Costner (I know, right?). He was doing some interview and talking about when he was at the height of his fame as a movie star. And he said something like (this is a paraphrase), "That is the closest I ever got to knowing what it feels like to be a beautiful woman." 

That kind of blew me away. Everyone -- men, women, gay, straight -- can be awed by a beautiful woman. It is a real power that a woman can generate, regardless of whether it is base or primal in its nature. It's real and is something that few can realize. More importantly, no man can ever have or experience it. And I think that almost every woman has felt it at some time. I don't consider myself beautiful. I'm really not and that's cool, that's just how it is. But there are those days where everything just seems to sit right, my hair finally works, everyhthing fits and looks perfect and I feel different. And I can tell that people notice me. And it's not about tryng to attract men. It's about being physically beautiful. And I wish I had a camera with me on those days. I wish, thirty years from now, I could look back on one of those days and see it.

Physical beauty doesn't last. I think many of these women want to get it down on film what they look like at their best, their sexiest, or whatever their own idea is of their most beautiful moments. I know I'll have my camera ready next time.