I've always been a fan of Jodie Foster, she's a great actress and a genuinely good person, with a talent for choosing quality movies to appear in (or making mediocre movies into good ones with her performances). I've seen most of her movies since the 90s, and Contact is one of my personal favorites.

But I hadn't seen much of her early career and recently decided to watch some of her movies from the 70s, and I couldn't believe just how often she was being sexualized at a young age.

1. Taxi Driver - she was famously cast as a 12 year old prostitute, and dressed the part. It's a well made movie with a couple of creepy scenes for her, but relatively tasteful compared to some of her other roles.

2. Bugsy Malone - A mostly harmless G-rated musical about gangsters with all of the roles played by kids, not my cup of tea but some people really enjoyed it. There are two scenes in a nightclub where Jodie and other little girls in short-shorts do a song and dance routine. Call me a prude if you want, but the way it was filmed seems designed for the male gaze.

3. The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane - I'm sorry, but this movie seems actively designed with pedos as the target audience. Jodie turned 13 during filming, and plays a girl who for some reason lives in a house by herself. The opening scene is a man barging into her house, calling her beautiful, trying to touch her whenever possible, and making excuses for it like "I gave you a spank because it's your birthday".

Her character falls in love with a boy in town (played by a NINETEEN YEAR OLD), they share a bed together and there's a NUDE SCENE, absolutely wtf. Fortunately Jodie's older sister performed that scene, but it's meant to be a 13 year old girl. The movie ends with her evading an attempted rape by the man from the opening scene (this part wasn't graphic at least).

She has mentioned that this is her least favorite movie she's made and I agree, the weird choices this movie makes completely distracted me from the story.

4. Moi, Fleur Bleue - a French movie, I haven't seen it. Apparently features her at 14 as a girl seeking to lose her virginity, doing so offscreen with a man in his 40s.

5. Beach House - an Italian movie, I haven't seen it. R-rated sex-themed comedy that apparently just had to have 14 year old Jodie in a bikini, including this creepy scene where a middle aged man inspects her feet and kisses her on the lips.

Next, she was offered a starring role in Little Darlings, the story of two 15 year old girls competing to see who can lose her virginity first. Instead she signed up to do two Disney movies including Freaky Friday - good for her!

6. Carny - a mediocre R-rated movie about carnival workers, but they made sure to include a scene of 16 year old Jodie dancing in lingerie while a topless stripper performs, and one of her being sexually assaulted. The review linked here calls her character a "sexy young runaway" and says that she "ranks with Brooke Shields as the leading child/woman sex symbol". What in the actual fuck.

BTW, Jodie did a recent interview discussing how often male screenwriters rely on using rape as the motivation for why female characters do things. In addition to performing two of those roles by age 13, she also won her first Oscar in The Accused, a story focused entirely on her character's rape and her testimony against the rapist in court.

Finally, I just saw that at age 9 she did a scene with a (poorly) trained lion which picked her up in its mouth and shook her before dropping her. Reportedly the same lion had previously tried to attack Bob Denver on Gilligan's Island. It's just unbelievable, the things she had to go through as a child actress.