Brigitte Bardot: The Sex Kitten Who Roared

My, oh my, what is France to do with Brigitte Bardot? She's been oddly quiet lately, but she's due for an outburst. If you aren’t aware, every two or three years Brigitte causes a scandal by protesting the presence of Muslim immigrants in France.  She doesn't approve of the "mixing of genes" between the Arabs and the French.  She doesn't like the fact that 8% of France's population is now comprised of Muslim immigrants.  She doesn't like that Islam is on the verge of eclipsing Catholicism as France's dominant religion.  She especially dislikes that Muslims have brought with them their practice of slaughtering animals for religious holidays.  She wants Muslims to leave France, go home and slaughter no more.

If you're Muslim, don't feel singled out.  Brigitte has also been vocal about her contempt for gay men as well as people who are unemployed.  If you're gay or unemployed, don't you go feeling singled out either.  Brigitte has effectively said she holds the entire human race in low regard.  So condemn her all you want.  She's not listening.  She doesn't like you, me, or anyone else, and she doesn't care how we feel about it.  She's kind of cool like that.

She has been called a racist, a Fascist, and a neo-Nazi.  Mostly they call her a "crazy old bat."  You will see that, and many variations of it, in every comment section of every article written about her.  In our sanitized, politically correct world, we don't know what else to call a woman who refuses to respect the PC Handbook.  

France routinely punishes the crazy old bat by sending her to court when she acts up.  She has been convicted five times in eleven years for inciting racial hatred.  She has never been imprisoned, but she has paid massive fines for her comments.  She doesn't care.  She keeps doing it and she doesn’t apologize for it, not really.  The closest she ever came to apologizing is when she said in open court, "I never knowingly wanted to hurt anybody.  It is not in my character."  That was it. 


We're not used to that.  Certainly we're accustomed to celebrities and politicians saying offensive things.  It happens all the time.  They say something outrageous.  We express the obligatory outrage. They offer the obligatory apology, sometimes tearfully. Then we all settle down and move on.


The problem with Brigitte is, she skips the tearful apology part. In fact, it's possible that Brigitte has never apologized in her life. Dirk Bogard, her co-star in the 1955 comedy Doctor at Sea, says that as a girl of twenty, Brigitte taught him to never apologize.  He said, "According to Brigitte, one should never say, No, I'm sorry, but instead, simply, No."  It would seem that withholding apologies is not just a strategy for Brigitte. It is not meant as a personal affront. It is a mindset.   It is who she is.

People who disapprove of her sensibilities find a number of ways to punish her. Most commonly, they attack her for aging poorly.  It's an easy shot to take. Reporters and bloggers simply place before and after photos of her side by side.  Look!  Brigitte Bardot nude, Brigitte Bardot young.  Now look. Brigitte sun-damaged and jowley, just a crazy old woman who doesn't have the decency to get a face lift.  Pow.  The punishment meted out by we the people is more cruel than any fine her government can impose on her.

By representing her with before and after pictures, we're dividing Brigitte's lives into two halves.  We do this because Brigitte herself divided her life into two segments.  At the age of 38, aware that her visual appeal would be declining soon, she retired from acting.  She said she was "sick of it all" and she left.  She looked back only once, when she did a Playboy pictorial in honor of her 40th birthday.  Once that was done, she essentially drew a thick black line behind her.  Then she turned away and began the second half of her life.  Ending her career at that point, she said, "was a way to get out elegantly."  There were no further visits to the past; no talk show circuits; no cameo appearances on sitcoms.  She was gone.

Brigitte in St. Tropez
in the 60's.

It's just as well.  The sex kitten years weren't Brigitte's happiest.  She married three times during the first half of her life.  There were scores of affairs, some adulterous.  Reportedly there were turnstyle one-night stands, a convenience afforded by the playground that was the Riviera in the 60's and 70's. There were several suicide attempts.  One might assume that she allowed herself to be used by men, which is what many beautiful women do.  Quite the contrary is true.  Brigitte used them.  She picked them up, played with them for a while, then moved onto the next toy.  Sometimes she forgot to toss aside one toy before picking up the next.  She showed little respect for her marriages, and even less for the marriages of her lovers.  When an affair became inconvenient or complicated, she walked away from it.  She did not allow men to grow bored with her.  "I leave before being left," she said.  "I decide."

If a woman is beautiful enough, a man will often allow her to hurt him as she sees fit.  There's no question Brigitte was beautiful enough to do whatever she pleased, but so were a lot of women.  Italy had Sophia Loren.  The U.S. had Raquel Welch; France had not only Brigitte, but Catherine Deneuve.  Not only were they achingly beautiful, but they were magnetic too.  What set Brigitte apart from them was a tangible, chemical sexuality that surrounded her like a haze. ("Sex on legs" is how first husband Roger Vadim described her).  Brigitte's sexuality was cat-like, almost predatory.  She didn't have to fake it for the camera.  It was already there.  One can see, just by looking at her photos and listening to the songs she recorded, that she was a woman who loved sex.  This is confirmed by her friends, by her husbands, and by all the men in between.  They all say the same thing. She was naturally sexual and she was insatiable.

                                       

Brigitte representing the 70's woman.
The days before breast implants,
daily workouts, & waxing.

Exactly when she began to feel sated is anyone's guess.  It happened at some point after her retirement.  A lot of things happened after her retirement, actually.  She became an activist for the protection of animals.  She sold her jewelry, her clothing, and her memorabilia in order to fund her campaigns.  Essentially, she sold her past.  With the money she accrued, she cast a net across the globe.  Her cause became any animal anywhere who fell prey to the cruelty of humans.  It was (and is) an obsession for her.  In forty years she has not wavered from it.  "I gave my youth and my beauty to men," she says. "I am going to give my wisdom and my experience to animals."

While the first half of her life was defined by men and sex, the second half became defined by three elements.  She is primarily known for her animal protection activism.  Secondary to that role, she is known for her extreme right-wing political convictions and her fight against the "Islamization of France."  Third--and this is nothing short of bizarre--she is known for her resistance to cosmetic surgery.  Much has been made of this, especially within the gay community.  In the 1990's, Elton John was so offended by her appearance that he publicly offered to pay for a face lift for her.  Brigitte responded publicly, too.  She asked him to donate to charity whatever dollar amount he had allotted for the reconstruction of her face.  

Clearly, she does not understand the unspoken obligation that comes with beauty.  If a woman is granted that rare blessing, she must exhaust all of her time and money in order to preserve it.  Brigitte thumbed her nose at that rule.  She had the audacity to age.  She didn't even put up a fight. 

This may account for the mean-spiritedness that is woven throughout the articles that are written about her. Her critics claim they dislike her because of her bigotry and homophobia and conservative politics. However, it's likely they are not facing an underlying truth. They dislike her also because she has not behaved as an aging film star is supposed to behave. She has made no effort to fight the aging process. She has dismissed the first, more glamorous half of her life, the half we most enjoyed.  She has not become a savior for starving children in third world countries, or fought for cures for degenerative diseases.   It would seem she threw out that rulebook, too.

One of her most flagrant violations of the handbook is her failure to become a goodwill ambassador for France.  Of the infiltration of tourists to St. Tropez, she once said, "I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists."

She describes the immigration of Muslims as a "subterranean, dangerous, and uncontrolled infiltration, [they] not only resist adjusting to our laws and customs but they will, as the years pass, attempt to impose their own." She praises previous generations for "pushing back the invaders."

She is even less delicate when she speaks of gay men. She approves of the understated, deeply-closeted, polite gay men of her youth. These old-style types comprise her social circle these days.  The comments she has made that many consider homophobic are directed at modern, extroverted, uninhibited gay men.   In her book A Scream in the Silence, she describes them in very unflattering terms.   She mocks their gait, their hand gestures, and the pitch of their voices. She hates their "whining."  Some of them, she says, behave like "fairground freaks."

Brigitte and husband Bernard d'Ormale in the 1990's

Who among us does not have an elderly, Archie Bunker-type relative who says things like, "I don't care what they do in private, as long as they don't throw it in my face"?  We roll our eyes when they say such things but we let it go.  We understand it is a mindset typical to those born before 1950.  It is not homosexuality itself that is objectionable to people of that generation, but rather, the stereotypical "out there" behavior. 

Regardless, it is clear that Brigitte doesn't understand that we just don't say things like that anymore.  We aren't supposed to even think like that.  If we do, we are supposed to keep it to ourselves.  When we express how we feel about something, we must say it in a way that others do not find offensive. 

That was not always so.  In Brigitte's day, the onus of responsibility was not on the speaker; it lay with the listener.  When someone said something that offended us, we were expected to exercise tolerance and maturity.  In short, we sucked it up.  Somewhere along the line, the rules changed, but no one told Brigitte.

One has to wonder.  If she had done what she was supposed to--if she had just kept her mouth shut and boarded the PC Train with the rest of us--would her critics be more forgiving of her appearance?  Would they stop spitting out the word "old" as though her age were a character flaw?  Would they stop calling her "crazy" because she and her convictions go against the new social norms?  Would they allow her to be who she is?

La Madrague, Brigitte's villa in St. Tropez
She has lived there since 1958

Today, Brigitte Bardot lives rather reclusively at her villa in St. Tropez with ultra conservative fourth husband Bernard d'Ormale.  She tends to her animals.  Her friends come to visit.  She gets out once in a while.  Occasionally she gives interviews.  She talks very little about the first half of her life.  When she does, it is with disinterest, as though it all happened to a girl who died a long time ago.

She walks with the help of a cane, the result of an arthritic hip.  She says that at seventy-eight, she has finally reached her prime.  For her, this is probably true.  Every day, she wakes up and sharpens the sword anew.  There is more human brutality than ever.  There are animals to protect and immigrants to repel.  There are letters to be written to world leaders.  There are always new people to offend.  She has not grown tired of the battles she has chosen.  Much to the chagrin of her countrymen, the heat of battle actually seems to invigorate her.  "It is sad to grow old," she said recently, "but nice to ripen."