James Bond Movies Never Deserved Their Bond Girls
Gyrators gonna gyrate, I guess.

Ursula Andress in Dr. No, 1962.
James Bond is irresistible to women. This is something we all know to be true.
And this is why, over the course of 1964âs Goldfinger, Sean Conneryâs Bond has three sexual partners: Pussy Galore (Honor Blackman), a lesbian pilot who âsuccumbsâ after he violently pins her to the ground in an isolated barn; Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton), who is charmed by Bondâs prying questions about her sex life; and some woman in a tub (Nadja Regin), whom Bond uses as a human shield. In the 1969 movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service, where Bond (George Lazenby this time) meets and marries Tracy (Diana Rigg), he has sex with two other female characters for no real reason, and through the trysts, he reveals his identity to a would-be mass murderer. Roger Moore reached his 007 per-mission high with four sex partners in his last Bond film, 1985âs A View to a Kill.
But it all changed with GoldenEye a decade later. Or rather, it sort of changed with GoldenEye. Miss Moneypenny (Samantha Bond), longtime enthusiastic recipient and slinger of double entendres, tells Pierce Brosnanâs Bond quite early in the movie, âThis sort of behavior could qualify as sexual harassment.â Itâs a joke, and itâs funny, and she then one-ups his innuendo and the audience moves on. It was the birth of Ironic Bond.

Carey Lowell as Pam Bouvier in Licence to Kill 1989.
Ironic Bond has his roots in the two movies that precede Pierce Brosnanâs Bond residency: âWhat to do with the womenâ is a problem the films noticeably wrestled with starting with 1987âs The Living Daylights, the first with Timothy Dalton as Bond, which comes just after the preposterously sex-filled A View to a Kill. In The Living Daylights, Bondâs main âgirlâ is a cello virtuoso, and at the end of the film, he attends her cello performance, which has nothing to do with his mission, signaling to the audience that she is a human being with needs outside his own. Daltonâs second film has two main Bond girls, and one is a former Army pilot who yells at him when he tries to diminish her vital contribution to Bondâs continuing heartbeat (âIf it wasnât for me, your ass wouldâve been nailed to the wall!â she rightfully shouts). Itâs clear that this character, Pam Bouvier (Carey Lowell), is a âliberated woman.â In 1989, USA Today called her a âtough, brainy pilot â who still looks good in a bathing suitâ and noted that âBouvier, unlike previous âBond girls,â saves 007âs hide more than a few times.â
And the Different Bond Girl Assertion is still with us: Vanity Fair claimed that the latest Bond movie, Spectre, offers a ânew take on the Bond woman,â and director Sam Mendes told the magazine, â[T]heyâve lived lives before meeting Bond, and theyâre not simply adjuncts.â It is both an undeserved compliment for his own film and an oversimplification of the 23 that precede it: The very first Bond girl, Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress), murdered her rapist before the action of the film starts, for example, and runs a successful shell-selling business. The improbably named Octopussy (Maud Adams) in the eponymous 1983 film is the feared and respected head of a women-only smuggling operation. Over the course of 24 films, Bond romances 16 spies, all of whom have had prior adventures much like Bond himself. Two of those lusty spies were also trained ballerinas.
The Vanity Fair interviewer doesnât press Mendes on his claim though, much like the USA Today writer didnât question how different Pam Bouvier was from her predecessors in 1989, despite the fact that at the time, Bondâs life had been saved by a woman in no less than nine previous movies.

Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) after telling Bond she won't sleep with him and before sleeping with him in Spectre.
Thus, you might not be surprised to learn that in fact, both women Bond sleeps with in Spectre yield to his sexual advances quickly and ludicrously: Lucia (Monica Bellucci) slaps him during an argument and then he shoves her against a mirror and they kiss, a moment that elicited laughter when I saw it in the theater; Dr. Swann (LĂ©a Seydoux) saves Bond during a vicious fight with an assassin, and then asks, âWhat do we do now?â The film then cuts to a vigorous makeout, which also drew laughter. You might also be unfazed to learn that during the opening credits, a woman is seemingly penetrated by a stylized octopus in a moment that bears a not-insignificant resemblance to the clip a boy showed me in 2008 after I said to him, âWhat is hentai?â

Judi Dench in GoldenEye, 1995.
Daniel Craigâs most recent Bond, like Pierce Brosnanâs Bond before him, is Ironic Bond. He leans into the absurdity of his sexual encounters, with a wink to take the edge off. By the time GoldenEye came out in 1995, that angry vagina in the room was gaping so widely that M, reimagined as a woman played by Judi Dench, had to acknowledge it: âI think youâre a sexist, misogynist dinosaur,â she tells Bond after he inexplicably is able to seduce a twitchy psychologist in a professional setting. âA relic of the Cold War, whose boyish charms, though wasted on me, obviously appealed to that young woman I sent out to evaluate you.â Previous male iterations of M had chastised him for letting his penis jeopardize his work, but this M, a woman, confronts his misogyny explicitly. And, by anticipating the audienceâs critique, GoldenEye thinks it has solved the problem, and moves on.
The attitude has more or less stuck: In Casino Royale, Craigâs first Bond film in 2006, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), in a monologue demonstrating that she is Bondâs intellectual equal, tells him, âYou think of women as disposable pleasures rather than meaningful pursuits,â as if the acknowledgment that his behavior is wrong absolves the film of responsibility. Her criticism distances the audience and the filmmakers from Bondâs attitude, and itâs a false, inadequate distance that reveals itself in the word âpursuitsâ â women, of course, are meaningful and exist outside of being sexually pursued. Vesperâs critical monologue notwithstanding, Bondâs treatment of women continues, and the audience understands that his relationship with Vesper is different because, as he tells her, sheâs different from other girls â a signal to any woman with sense to turn in the opposite direction and flee, hurling used sanitary napkins over her shoulder. Casino Royale, however, deems his gesture deeply romantic.
The lack of self-reflection does not extend to all unsavory aspects of the character â during Craigâs tenure, the franchise has deftly balanced âJames Bond is a human beingâ with âJames Bond is a cold-hearted murderer.â In Casino Royale, Craig sits fully clothed in a shower next to a shaken Vesper just after heâs killed a man in front of her. He puts his arm around her, and he gently sucks the sin off her fingers. This was the installment in the franchise where we had to collectively acknowledge the corrosive nature of Bondâs horrific job. Craigâs performance spotlights the characterâs contradictions, eliciting our discomfort with his savagery. And yet, he insists on Bondâs troubled humanity.

An unnamed woman (Stephanie Sigman), whom Bond almost sleeps with but then doesn't in Spectre.
But our discomfort with the female characters is not solved through an insistence on their humanity â it is solved with a shrug. Craigâs Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace, Skyfall and Spectre all make the audience cringe at the violence; there is no such equivalent compunction over his treatment of women. When his actions in Casino Royale lead to a womanâs death, M notes that he doesnât get emotionally attached; when his actions in Quantum of Solace lead to a womanâs death, he is more angry at M for criticizing his tactics than anything else; when his actions in Skyfall lead to a womanâs death, he seems shaken but unrepentant.
When he kills a man in these past four films, we see the horror of Bond, but when a woman dies because of him, we see an unfortunate casualty â a sad accident in a vicious world, an error rather than an immoral act. The deaths of men show us something broken in Bond, while the deaths of women show us something broken in the world: No individual takes particular responsibility for womenâs peril, not until Spectre, when the villain, a stand-in for the cruel world, claims responsibility, and thereby absolves Bond. Other characters consistently question the morality of Bondâs murders, but they only question the utility of his womanizing and its attendant risk. Killing is a wrong thing he chooses to do, but treating women as objects is at worst a character flaw. The murders in these films are by and large no longer glamorous, but seducing beautiful women in exotic locales and leaving them as soon as it suits him, that is still mysterious and appealing.
At least in Spectre, the women donât die, which is what Mendes should have said: While the director believes itâs remarkable that âtheyâve lived lives before meeting Bond,â what actually sets them apart is that theyâll live lives after meeting Bond. They are certainly only there to teach Bond something or to have orifices, thus, contrary to Mendesâ claim, they are certainly adjuncts, albeit adjuncts who talk back. But they always have, starting with Honey Ryderâs annoyance at Bondâs interference with her shell-harvesting. The difference is that weâre now uncomfortable enough with blatant contempt for women to disavow it, but not uncomfortable enough to actually change. You can call Spectreâs women âa new takeâ if you want to, but itâll just seem like you werenât listening to the other Bond girls.