Brooke Shields Shares How She Got Revenge On Ageist Trolls

It’s a Hollywood story that’s told time and time again. A beautiful actress grows older and public perception of them completely changes. They don’t get offered interesting roles anymore and, in some cases, rude and nasty trolls lash out at them for being no longer pretty.

That sounds mind-boggling, that someone would have that level of entitlement over a public figure’s body, but it happens. And it happened to Brooke Shields.

Shields is 59 years old now, and she’s just released a new book, aptly titled Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old: Thoughts on Ageing as a Woman. In an interview with the Radio Times to promote the book, Shields explained how it came about. She had been incensed when her agents put to her the idea of a book about “what it’s like to start a company in your 50s.”

“My first reaction was, that’s not going to be enough of a book, who really cares? Why is it so shocking that a woman in her 50s can take on a new endeavor? It’s like [they think] you took one foot out of the grave and decided to do this, you know? I thought, ‘Well, that’s making me insanely angry.'”

Shields channeled that anger into Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old. She detailed all sorts of immensely personal things in the book, including a time when a doctor performed intimate surgery on her without her consent. After Shields underwent labia surgery for health reasons, a surgeon gave her a vaginal rejuvenation procedure without asking, another example of a person feeling entitled to Shields’ body.

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The book is a real eye-opener about Shields’ life and the saddening, sexist obstacles she’s faced. So, readers might feel a sense of schadenfreude knowing that Shields used the back cover of her book to get a small revenge on some of the people who trolled her online over her appearance. They’re really something. “She looks strange. It’s unfortunate, because she was beautiful,” reads one quote from an obnoxious internet user. “It’s hard to believe she was pretty at one time,” reads another.

Putting the quotes on the back cover was Shields’ idea. “I don’t normally read them and I said I don’t really feel like doing the research on this, but if somebody from the publishing house can dig up some of the most ridiculous quotes, let’s look at them,” she said. “There was one that they didn’t put in, which I thought was hysterical, which was ‘She’s aged like sour milk’. I have to laugh at these things, right?”

Shields is doing more than just laughing; she’s standing up for women her age. There’s a terrible misconception in Hollywood that once you hit the menopause, your life is over. Actress Naomi Watts recently spoke up about this too, saying, “I was told I would never work again if I admitted to being menopausal, or even perimenopausal. Hollywood’s lovely term for such women was ‘unf***able.’”

Of course, this all speaks to a bigger problem that no one woman is going to be able to solve. But Shields thinks that older women together make a powerful group. “Less than one percent of all marketing has a woman over 60 in it,” she told the Radio Times. “But the millennials are turning 40, so this aggregate number of who we are, starting at 40, is just getting bigger and bigger. I think we’re formidable, and I think people are worried we’re going to take over the world.”