This was the start of her career, and where her child stardom began. Starring along side her was porn star Marilyn Chambers.

"The Romantic child was imagined to inhabit a realm separate from adults, as evidenced by the child’s obliviousness to such adult concerns as sex and commerce. Images of children provided a means for audiences to recapture their own prelapsarian past. In this sense, child stars were imagined to serve a disciplinary function. Rather than the child’s being corrupted by the male gaze, men’s spectatorial pleasure in little girls was understood to have a transformative effect, conferring, if only temporarily, the child’s innocence onto the adult spectator"

‘Children’s sexuality is either ignored or exploited,’ he told Newsweek, ‘both of which are wrong’ (Kroll, 1978)

Framed within liberationist discourse, Shields’ eroticised image invited audiences to contemplate sexualised images of childhood without the stigma of perversion. At the same time, however, feminist responses to her image helped to shape the terms of a new debate about children, sexuality, and visual culture, laying the foundation for the artistic and commercial examinations of Knowing children in the decades that followed

"Women over 40 have already done a lot of things and their lives are so complex. They've done so much, and it's their time. I found myself in that position," Shields said. "There was so much white space in regards to hair care, specifically for women over 40 but not in the geriatric realm or the medicinal realm.”

'Malle made an intelligent use of Shields’s child-woman image. In Shields’s case, her precocious sexual knowledge, along with her action-oriented performance, worked against traditional, sensationalistic preconceptions about prostitutes.'