It’s often said that celebrities are America’s royalty, and nowhere is that more obvious in the way we treat their bodies as public property. In the days of absolute monarchs, as historian Helen Castor puts it, “privacy was relative and political life didn’t stop at the bedroom door.” Back then, the populace had a stake in the royal reproduction process. So do we moderns consider celeb’s baby bumps and hook-ups of national interest.
All this to say that Megan Fox, the ingenue whose two movie roles of note (in “Transformers” and “Jennifer’s Body”) are dwarfed by manic fascination with her diet, clothes, and dating habits, is turning out to be the Marie Antoinette of the moment.
In an interview in the April issue of Britain’s Harper’s Bazaar, the starlet confesses that she’s slept with only two men in her life, her “childhood sweetheart and Brian,” referring in the second case to “Beverly Hills 90210” actor Brian Austin Green, whom she lives with. “I can never have sex with someone I don’t love, ever,” she adds.
This quaint admission is causing a big stir on the web wires today–and why not? It forces a momentary revision of our assumptions about sex and celebrity: the notion that if we had it all–the looks, the fame, the money–we’d immediately cash in our chips for sexual gratification. In making us think twice, Fox has done more for sexual self-respect in this country than 50 Brittanies claiming to be virgins or good little Christian girls

We have to believe Fox–even if she is, as the U.K.’s Daily Mail newspaper ventured, the dumbest celebrity ever, she can’t be so naive as to think that any extraneous lovers, if they exist, wouldn’t come out of the web’s wormy woodwork by nightfall to dispute her claim.
As fascinating as her admission is, I found the most compelling truths in Fox’s chat with Harper’s about fame and the physical self. Describing the “costume” she wore for her first on-screen sex scene, in the upcoming “Jonah Fox”–“underwear and silicone covers that you wear over your breasts”–she says, “My body parts are all I have left now that are only mine–the world owns everything else.”
She overstates here, of course; as anyone with a web connection knows, the public can view and comment on most of those parts, too. But we get the point, and appreciate a starlet who shoots from the hip, even as she bares it.