Do Bond Girls Matter?

Back when I was a kid, a new Bond flick was a big deal. But this was for a specific reason: not that many new movies came out every year.

Now that I'm all grown up, the release of one of the thousands of movies that come out a year can barely elicit a yawn. People certainly aren't seeing Bond flicks--not even the Daniel Craig reboot--at anywhere near the percentages at which we used to go ogle Roger Moore (yes, I'm old but not Sean Connery old!)

So I'm puzzled about the big deal the media was making about Bond Girls this week. I realize that this is the release of Quantum of Solace and the media is just responding to their press releases. But the media doesn't have to run the stories the publicists tell them to run. Why is everyone so Bond-Girlish?

Part of it is that all the stories are written by men. But even then, why are Bond Girls special? As far as I'm concerned, even in the depths of my seventies child hood, Bond flicks were about the overall experience, and the girls were just eye candy, the way Girls are eye candy in every action flick.

And that goes double now, in this Bond-degraded era. But obviously, there's something I'm missing. What do you think? Do Bond Girls matter in a way that regular eye candy doesn't?