Was Julia Child a sex symbol?

As a child I remember seeing various cooking shows on PBS featuring Julia Child. While she would have been 100 years old yesterday, she never seemed that old to me. I never paid much attention to the female chef but I do remember thinking that she had a strange accent and prepared strange foods. Those were my observations as a five year-old trapped inside on a weekend during our painfully long winters during my childhood.

Maybe I thought that Julia Child prepared strange food because I was five years old. Maybe I thought that the food that Julia Child was preparing was weird or strange because it was actually strange food.

Many years later I have to wonder about the venerable Julia Child. What was she like off-camera? Was she just another person going about her life on Earth? Or was Julia Child viewed as a sex symbol? Sex symbols 30 or 50 years ago were far different than our modern-day sex symbols. A woman with a healthy body and curves was fit to be considered a sex symbol in those days. Now I only remember Julia Child as seeming old -- I know she wasn't always old unless the had some sort of Benjamin Button disease -- but at some point Ms. Child was a young twenty year-old who had likely flawless skin, a young body and a burgeoning talent (cooking) that she would parlay into a multi-decade long career.

In the early part of the 1900s, a woman who could cook and please a man with hearty meals was likely viewed as sexy. She provided what a man wanted after whatever he did during his long day of work. Those scenes were portrayed in cheesy black and white family sitcoms in the 1950s and 1960s but the meals served were definitely up to the standards of Julia Child.

French cuisine was Julia Child's specialty and she honed those skills for well over a decade before landing in her very own TV show featuring the tall chef preparing her favorite French cuisine for viewers.

While I cannot find much in the way of photos prior to Julia Child's rise to popularity in the early 1960s I will have to stand by my question of whether or not Julia Child was a sex symbol.

So what if I watched Frontline

Last Thursday, between the final new episodes of "Chuck", I started my TV channel flipping at the very bottom of the dial -- channel 2.4 to be exact. That's when I caught the beginning of the venerable PBS series "Frontline". They were featuring teens and online social networks. I was instantly drawn to it.

I immediately started to think how this show related to the rather timely happenings in Eden Prairie involving the ignorant Eden Prairie High School students who thought it was cool to post pictures of themselves tossing back various alcoholic beverages on their public Facebook profiles.

The topic ran the gamut of what can happen and how various teens handle their increasingly public inline lives and it also got me thinking. I wondered how it is that these teens, all in a New Jersey town, even have real life interactions after they base so much of their lives in an online venue where, as one stated, it's all about collecting friends and openly admitted that there's no possible way she could know even a small percentage of her over 2,000 friends.

Some of the stories were about legitimate uses that teens have for online social networks and some stories featured the darker side such as relentless online bullying, one instance which even led to a teen's suicide.

I'm not going to deride these teens as I spend a fair amount of time online but I do so because my job requires it. I make money scheming about new ways to make a buck online and how each new development ties in to the growing portfolio of products and sites we as a company own. They (social networks) are great for keeping in touch with distant friends. I have plenty of friends who live a hundred miles away and it beats e-mailing photos and exchanges back and forth. The lesson is to have discretion in what is posted. Think about how public your information is and just what you admit to. Think about who, in a moment of anger, could take what you wrote and send it to eveyone in their contact list. Think twice about semi-nude pics of yourself.

It's not rocket science but some of those teens featured on that particular Frontline episode act like it is based on the actions they have taken online, the sheer amount of time they spend online and the fact that they admit that they wouldn't know what to do without a computer in front of them.

This first generation to grow up totally immersed in the online world will likely have some hurdles to overcome but they will also be shrewd in a world where the internet is the norm, not just a passing fad.

How about everyone else? What do your online activities consist of? Do you have a LinkedIn profile? How about Facebook or MySpace? Xanga? If you're a Minnesotan do you MnSpeak?