R.A. Cornets de Groot, collage op schoolkaart, ± 1960-1980, 2x2 m.
Klik op de afbeelding om te vergroten.
'Seen from behind, her slender, muscular, dancer's body is almost androgynous. () She goes about barefooted, she turns up her nose at elegant clothes, jewels, girdles, perfumes, make-up, at all artifice. Yet her walk is lascivious, and a saint would sell his soul to the devil merely to watch her dance. (...)
She walks, she dances, she moves about. Her eroticism is not magical, but aggressive. In the game of love, she is as much a hunter as she is a prey. The male is an object to her, just as she is to him. And that is precisely what wounds masculine pride.
In the latin countries, where men cling to the myth of the 'woman as object', BB's naturalness seems to them more perverse than any possible sophistication. To spurn jewels and cosmetics and high heels and girdles is to refuse to transform oneself into a remote idol. It is to assert that one is man's fellow and equal, to recognize that between the woman and him there is mutual desire and pleasure. (...)
But the male feels uncomfortable if, instead of a doll of flesh and blood, he holds in his arms a conscious being who is sizing him up. A free woman is the contrary of a light woman. In her role of confused female, of homeless little slut, BB seems to be available to everyone. And yet, paradoxically, she is intimidating. (...)
It would be simple-minded to think that there is a conflict of two generations regarding BB. The conflict that does exist is between those who want mores to be fixed once and for all and those who demand that they evolve'.
(Uit: Simone de Beauvoir, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita syndrome, Londen, 1962).
Vandaag feliciteren wij het onvergankelijke fenomeen van harte met haar 75e verjaardag.