Burt Reynolds changed the look

In the Stone Age, it was assumed that heterosexual men were so genetically overheated that Mother Nature cabled them to see images of naked women. Women, for their part, were her empathic creations: nurturers, nursery mothers, their libidinal thermostats permanently fixed to the cold.

If a piece of human flesh suddenly appeared, a woman's gaze had to rest somewhere north of the buckle of the belt. What a woman was considered the most desirous of a man – in ancient times before Tinder and creepy sexting – was to look at her eyes with relief.

Burt Reynolds changed all that with a central crease on his hairy chest. And there is no doubt that the actor, who died Thursday at the age of 82, has carved out a prominent place in the entertainment business with a long career that has started in the early days of television. on the series "Gunsmoke" and later as the main character of the crime drama "Dan August"; credited for his role in the 1972 film "Deliverance"; and an Oscar nomination for his turn in Paul Thomas Anderson's "Boogie Nights" in 1997, it is with his 1972 striptease for Cosmopolitan that he influences the true cultural change.

It seems unimaginable now that Reynolds was making a radical break with Hollywood taboos on male nudity, let alone frontal, by agreeing to appear in a mainstream publication now that every Jason Segel actor to Daniel Radcliffe has shown us his stupidity. Yet, by agreeing to the proposal of Cosmo's editor, Helen Gurley Brown (who offered him the role of Johnny Carson as presenter of the show "Tonight"), he became the first man to to focus. in a new era in the publishing of women's magazines, but also an updated understanding of what women desire.

Brown herself says it. "As time, you know, men loved to watch naked women," she told James Landers, author of a book about the first 100 years of Cosmopolitan magazine. "Well, no one was talking about it, but women liked to look in naked men." I did. "

Reynolds was not Brown's first choice; Paul Newman had already rejected it. And what's interesting to watch, is how things could have happened if Newman had chosen to present his undressed body and not Reynolds – Newman's lean body, precursor of the glorified hairless male and Reynolds' main parties, swingers, as well as shaggy and mustachioed gay clone.

Three decades later, in 2002, designer Tom Ford winked at Cosmo's first place when creating a black and white Yves Saint Laurent ad campaign featuring the champion's Martial arts Samuel de Cubber.

"I wanted to show a man who represents a natural and relaxed image of male beauty," Ford said at the time. The lineage of this provocative pictogram can be traced directly to Burt Reynolds, his forearm leaning timidly on his genitals while he posed the Odalisque style on a fur rug. Similarly, in a sense, all conscious nudes can break into a bathroom mirror.

The ease with which men now feel to show what they do, and the hope that women are able to see it well, have a distinct point of origin and it is Burt Reynolds. "I did not know there was going to be a hustle and bustle about it," the still-humorous actor told host Steve Harvey in his final. TV interview last March.