Just days after French screen icon Brigitte Bardot passed away peacefully at the age of 91, I found myself wandering around the Molitor pool, the very place where the bikini she made famous first made its splash in 1946.

At the time Bardot strutted it in “Manina, the Girl in the Bikini” (1952) at the tender age of 17, it was considered shockingly daring.

Though let’s be honest, most men were probably too busy drooling to object.

The real controversy, as it often is with women who demonstrate a propensity for refusing to stay in the box that society builds for them, would come later.

Everyone adored Bardot as long as she squeezed into the narrow window of femininity that men had built for her.

She was the girl next door and the soft-edged starlet.

Until she did the unthinkable and insisted on being a fully free woman.

One who wouldn’t play by the rules of men, society or even the feminist script.

She rejected motherhood even after giving birth, vocally defended women’s reproductive rights that wouldn’t become law in France for another 15 years and refused to define herself by someone else’s expectations of who or what a woman should be or do.

Her insistence on........

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