Happy Birthday Brigitte Bardot

Today is BB’s birthday & she really is a classic free-loving multiple conjunct Libran — Sun, Mercury and Jupiter. Saggo Rising, a tight Venus-Neptune conjunction and Moon in Gemini on the cusp of her House of Love.

This is from the Guardian

“…Simone De Beauvoir wrote: “When Marlene Dietrich exhibited her silk-wrapped thighs while singing in her husky voice, she was casting a spell . . . Brigitte Bardot doesn’t cast spells; she acts. Her flesh doesn’t have the generosity that symbolises passivity. Her clothes are not fetishes and when she undresses, she reveals no mystery. She simply shows off her body, which is in constant movement. She walks, she dances, she moves. In the hunting game, she is both hunter and prey. Males are an object for her, as much as she is an object for them. This is precisely what hurts males’ pride.” It was clear to all that Bardot, like Albert Camus’s stranger, experienced the world through her senses.

 

Nowadays, feminists both in Britain and the US would shriek in horror at the thought that Bardot might be heralded as the emblem of the liberated woman. But that is just how designer Nicole Farhi remembers her: “Bardot was totally liberated; it was extraordinary to see, especially at a time when no women were allowed to be, and it was all the more unusual that she came from a bourgeois family. It was fantastic to see that she could just throw conventions away. She lived the way she pleased, she dressed the way she wanted; in that sense her freedom was very provocative.”

 

Provocative but never lewd. “A liberated woman is the opposite of an easy and frivolous woman,” wrote De Beauvoir. For her, Bardot’s sense of freedom was absolute, almost existential. Unlike today’s self-acclaimed liberated young women, who claim to feel empowered by the act of pole-dancing, with Bardot there is no attempt at manipulation or deception.

 

“Bardot’s naturalness seems more perverse than any kind of sophistication. To despise as she does jewels, makeup and high heels is to refuse to transform oneself into an idol. It is to assert oneself the equal of men. It is to recognise that between men and women, there is only desire and mutual pleasure. This is precisely what made her appear so dangerous in the eyes of society,” wrote De Beauvoir…”

And, yes there is probably some argument against her for her denouncing a certain racial group over their animal rights abuses but you know what? The woman is Saggo Rising (ie; will say what she wants, freedom of speech LOUD being paramount to Saggability) but I think a lot of the hostility toward her has more to do with the above-mentioned free-living, lack of corseting etc and growing old…old, barefoot, sun-tanned & apparently individuated as all get out.