YOUNG ACTRESSES ARE EXPOSING MORE SKIN IN MEN'S MAGAZINES TO SHED THEIR GOOD-GIRL IMAGES. WHAT'S WRONG WITH THESE PICTURES?

BY JANET WEEKS AND TED JOHNSON
Lips glistening, belly buttons yawning between skimpy strips of Lycra, the bikini girls beckon from the newsstands. Month after month, they are there, the always taut, always tan women of men's magazines. Same pose (cleavage forward, thumbs hooked through tiny pants). Same pouty stare ("I hate you. I want you"). Some wear white bikinis. Some wear black. Some are models. Some are singers. But more often, they are young actresses flashing their flesh in a move to sex up an image and raise their profile in the entertainment industry.
     Charmed's Alyssa Milano. Time of Your Life's Jennifer Love Hewitt. Dawson's Creek's Michelle Williams. Sabrina, the Teenage Witch's Melissa Joan Hart. All have traded in their TV good-girl charm for bad-girl posturing in Maxim or Stuff. Mind you, these are not men's magazines like Playboy or Penthouse, which monthly run full-frontal nude pictorials. Rather, these newer publications, with their emphasis on the latest electronic gadgets and edgy advice on sex and relationships, offer tantalizing - and slightly less explicit - photos of young actresses, often from television. Hands hide certain body parts. Or shadows do the job. Or on one Details cover, an actress's flowing hair. As the number of these magazines increases, the competition to capture America's sweethearts in bikinis only grows. And as this new generation of girls-next-door blithely strips to get ahead in a competitive business, questions are raised about the impact on careers and society. How far is too far? How young is too young?
     Jessica Biel is the latest - and perhaps most shocking - example of an actress trading on her sexuality in hopes of a career boost. Biel who plays a minister's daughter on the wholesome WB family drama 7th Heaven, was just 17 (she turned 18 earlier this month) when she posed topless - left arm and hand strategically positioned - for the March cover of Gear. Inside, she is pictured squatting in only red high heels and panties, splayed on a bed in just a thong, and sitting nearly naked on a sink. Remember the big stink when a then 17-year-old Britney Spears, once a Mouseketeer, posed last year in a bra and hot pants for a Rolling Stone cover? Biel's photos make that spread look like something out of Highlights for Children. Biel told Gear's reporter that she hoped the racy pictures (her 7th Heaven dad, Stephen Collins, called them "child pornography") would get her fired from the Aaron Spelling-produced show. Fat chance. "Mr. Spelling believes she will honor the balance of her contract," says Spelling's attorney, Bert Fields. (Spelling filed a $100 million lawsuit against Gear for listing him in the staff box as a senior editor. Spelling, who has no connection to the magazine, was concerned that some might believe he was involved with publishing sexy photos of an underage actress who is also his employee. Responds Gear's editor and publisher, Bob Guccione Jr., who once featured Linda Tripp in the masthead as Washington D.C. Account Manager, "We've listed Monica Lewinsky as an intern. It is clearly, obviously, a satire.")
     From a business standpoint, Biel's risque risk certainly hasn't hurt her standing. She recently signed to star opposite Freddie Prinze Jr. in the Warner Bros. feature film "Summer Catch." Through her publicist (who was hired after the Gearpiece had been set up), Biel declined TV GUIDE's request for an interview relating to this subject. So did Melissa Joan Hart, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Michelle Williams and Charmed's Shannen Doherty. However, Biel's movie deal explains everything, anyway. "A lot more people know who she is," says a Los Angeles publicist. "You look at the end result."
     Others are skeptical about the value of taking it all off. "I can't figure out why young actresses need to show their breasts just to show that they are mature," says respected casting director Mike Fenton. "I don't think they have to expose their skin. I just think they need exposure." Melissa Joan Hart posed provocatively for Maxim and the soon-to-be-defunct Bikini last fall to help publicize her feature film "Drive Me Crazy." Despite generating a lot of talk - and angering Archie Comics, which owns the Sabrina franchise - the sexy spreads did nothing for the film. It flopped.
     Still many sympathize with the problem of typecasting. Sitcom girls have a tough time losing their image once a show is out of production. Alicia Witt, who played brainy teen daughter Zoey for the four-season run of Cybill, says her character's lack of sizzle became a problem when she moved on after the series to other film and TV roles. "It's just amazing how producers or the public in general will perceive someone in the media as being exactly like the last job they did," says Witt, 24. "While I was on Cybill, a lot of people perceived me as more reserved and prim and sort of refined or something. I was going up for a feature film project, and they said I was too conservative for the role."
     Witt recently gave herself a makeover, vamping it up in a leopard print bra for the cover of Stuff. "I wanted to show off that side of me," says Witt. "The more sexual side of me isn't something I've gotten to discuss very often in interviews or [to] display." She also filmed her first love scene, playing an ambitious young movie executive in the Feb. 27 episode of HBO's The Sopranos. "I try to do things that will challenge whatever the last thing was that I did. In this last year, I've done a lot more that is sexy." The Stuff shoot itself was something of a hoot she says. "It was all about what sexy outfits they could put me in." The result: Remember the movie producers who found her too conservative? "My representative sent them the Stuff cover. The producers said they didn't think I was patrician enough. That's a true story."
     Career maneuvering aside, the trend toward younger women wearing less and less for the cameras worries some who think the images are harmful to adolescent female fans. National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland says the photos send a message that baring all is the road to power. "But unless you are Britney Spears, in an area of entertainment where the payoff is big, there is a downside to being too sexual too early," Ireland says. For the average, non-show business girl, sex at an early age "carries the risk," says Ireland, of damaging "how you're viewed by your peers. There's also the risk of getting a sexually transmitted disease. And then there's the emotional impact of having sex too young." As a negative bonus, these photos also give girls unrealistic ideas about what a woman's body should look like. "The body types that are sexy [by the standards of men's magazines] are bodies that only three percent of American women have," Ireland says. "So 97 percent of women look at these pictures and see what they don't have." Women's magazines are guilty of promoting the same hard-to-attain body types, a point Witt makes: "I don't understand why there's a sexy girl on the cover of [both] Stuff and Cosmo. Men get eye candy; women get fodder for anorexia."
     Madison Michele, 28-year-old host of VH1's Back-to-Back Videos, appeared in a white bikini for Gear's November issue, a move she hopes will help her segue from introducing music clips to acting. The cover is now included in her press kit. "It's a great public relations vehicle. It's as simple as that," says Michele, a former Wonderbra model. On a two-page spread inside, Michele is topless and lying face down on a floor. "You can't take a job like that and expect to wear a cardigan," she says. She judges the cover a success: After Gear, Elle magazine came calling to use her in a fashion layout. "One thing leads to another," Michele says.
     That chain reaction is what publicist David Lust sees as the real value of appearing in ublications like Maxim or Details. He sets up such stories not so his clients can get other acting jobs, but so they can get the attention of other magazine editors. He recently helped client Jennifer Sky of the new syndicated show Cleopatra 2525 get in the pages of birth Stuff and Gear. He's hoping that other magazines that normally pass on publicizing someone with less than a household name will take notice. "I believe this will help her. For someone who is relatively unknown, this puts them on the map." The better known the actress, the less likely she'll pose. Joe Donnelly found that out during his tenure as Bikini's editor-in-chief. "Cameron Diaz is not now clamoring to be on the cover" of a men's magazine, Donnelly says. "As magazines try and position themselves in the marketplace, so do actors. The covers you do contribute to your positioning."
     Or it can make a successful star stuck in a series rut seem awfully desperate. One source close to Jessica Biel says that she was advised on other ways to get off the show but chose to "blatantly use her sexuality in an attempt to anger and embarrass" Aaron Spelling. The lesson for Biel, the source says, is not that sex is power but that it's OK to humiliate your boss to further your career: "That's an ugly lesson regardless of whether she's in Hollywood or working at the local mall. Sure, there will be some guys who want to hire her now. But at what price to her soul?"
     And at what price to her fan base? 7th Heaven is WB's most popular show, and its biggest audience by far is teenage girls. Says one former fan who posted a message on a Jessica Biel Web site: "Girls can be beautiful without showing everything they have; what more could Jessica want than to have a career on a wonderful program?"