Leonardo DiCaprio taught us about sexual relations - good and bad

We are first introduced to Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of Romeo + Juliet on Verona beach at sunset. The camera settles on the legs of our hero, before panning upwards to reveal him brooding in translucent golden sunlight, smoking and composing love poetry. He is wearing a suit that seems incongruously adult; blond strands of hair hang over his baby blue eyes, as Thom Yorke listlessly sings “I want to be someone else or I’ll explode.” 

 

I don’t need to re-watch the film to describe that moment. It is etched into my consciousness, as it is for so many women who were born in the mid-eighties. Lurhmann’s film is often celebrated as a triumphant Shakespeare adaptation, but rarely is it acknowledged as the culturally significant moment it really is: the moment Leonardo DiCaprio was introduced to the world as a Hollywood heartthrob, a moment that would define the sexuality of millions of women everywhere. As a former teen fan of DiCaprio, Roxanne (now 32), told me; “The shot of him smoking in Romeo + Juliet with the sun behind him was our generation's James Dean on a motorbike or Elvis in uniform.”

 

 

 

In those films, DiCaprio exhibited untamed masculinity alongside safety and unconditional love. The fact that the relationships the film depicted were short-lived made them seem fragile and urgent. Those qualities allowed girls to go absolutely crazy with desire for him. He belonged to us but he was unattainable, he was dangerous but safe; protective but vulnerable. 

 

I spoke to a lot of women about the effect DiCaprio had on them. “I LOVED him,” was the most common response. 28-year-old Elle says, “We've grown up with him. He made his progression into adult roles seemingly alongside our sexual development.” Anyone who found the hype surrounding his overdue Oscar win excessive doesn’t understand that many women of my age feel a personal connection to DiCaprio. He has helped shape us. He feels familiar.

 

If DiCaprio was so important to teenage girls, it’s useful to ask whether his influence was positive or negative. As Karyn Fulcher of the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health & Society puts it, “Adolescence is a period of fairly intense learning about sexuality and relationships, and the feelings that might seem insignificant to adults are an important part of that learning process. Crushes and first romantic and/or sexual relationships help young people discover who they find attractive, learn how to communicate well with potential partners, and figure out what they want out of sexual or romantic relationships in the future.” 

 

In some ways, DiCaprio was a helpful presence in our teenage lives. Girls are usually encouraged to compete with each other for male attention, but in DiCaprio we united over our nascent sexual feelings. The fact that we would never meet him meant that we could never seriously fight over him, in sharp contrast to our relationships with our male classmates, which often divided us. His presence gave us a relatively harmless way of dealing with a time of extreme change and allowed us to own our sexual feelings and explore them independently.

 

DiCaprio’s strikingly Aryan looks ensured that our standards of beauty were definitively white. 28-year-old Sarah says, “as I got a bit older, I realised that – bar a brief, passing interest – boys who look like [Leo] are generally not interested in girls that look like me. I'm brown, with brown eyes and frizzy hair and they were the perfect Aryan boys. That was a pretty harsh lesson to learn, especially when your parents and other adults tell you you're pretty and you think you're alright. No one explains how white supremacy works in this respect.” 

 

It would be ludicrous to argue that DiCaprio singlehandedly created our notions of attractiveness and romance – his success in those years largely depended on the fact that those tropes were already in place. But it would also be remiss to suggest that his presence didn’t consolidate those tropes for women of my age, given the unique part he played in our sexual development. Would women like Sarah have learned such a brutal lesson about the inherent racism of beauty standards without the overwhelming presence of an Aryan pin-up in her life?

 

Society does many disservices to adolescent girls, and one of them is to consistently dismiss their feelings as frivolous. Our crushes had an unrealistic intensity that seems embarrassing now, but they were important nevertheless. Leonardo DiCaprio is a figure that helped millions of girls explore big questions about love and sex at a time when they were extremely impressionable, and that makes him one of the most important cultural icons of the late 20th and early 21st century. The girls who loved him may have grown into women who have binned the scrapbooks and taken the posters down, but perhaps Kate Winslet’s promise at the end of Titanic rings true: we’ll never quite let go.