Goldeneye and Nostalgia

I really enjoyed watching this movie because I realized during the opening scenes that this was probably one of the first Bond movies I ever saw; I'm fairly certain I remember watching this movie in my dad's living room, maybe seven years old, watching 007 miraculously free-fall into the pilot-less plane and feeling absolutely entranced. That was the beginning of my James Bond-filled childhood, and to this day, I still feel like I've got one foot firmly in the Pierce Brosnan-Bond camp.
This "camp", however, really made rewatching "Goldeneye" interesting for me:  I've been thinking lately about how little my and (as far as I can tell) society's conception of James Bond the spy matches up to the actual character, as depicted in the books and films. For example, I've always made jokes about how it was probably inappropriate for me to grow up watching these movies, but it hasn't been until we've reviewed them for class that I've realized just how sexist, racist, and imperialist they are. Accordingly, my view of the iconic 007 that I walked into this class with is so different from what I'm seeing: the 007 I grew up with was a standard brave, virtuous hero who always got the girl because that was how things worked. Now that I'm older, James Bond in his many incarnations seems more vindictive, inappropriately breezy, and sometimes even cruel. Likewise, when I talk about these movies with people outside of class, they describe James Bond as the epitome of sexy and cool, the infallible and expert spy with the famous martini request. And yet the movies actually show Roger Moore directing sexual innuendo at much younger women, or James Bond being constantly beaten up, stymied, and somehow being recognized everywhere as an MI6 agent, as that isn't/shouldn't be a secret. Blame it on pop culture, branding, or what have you, I swear the impression doesn't wholly match up the to the product, at least critically.
Still, now that I've expressed this naive point, I think that Pierce Brosnan-the Bond I remember watching most clearly-does fit my impression of Bond the most out of the movies we watched so far. But even though the Brosnan movies might be the least critically objectionable Bond movies, there are still issues: Xenia Onatopp, for example, the effective female assassin, is clearly and obviously sexually aroused by killing, because how else do you depict women besides reducing them to their sexuality? Likewise, in the car race scene in the beginning, Moneypenny tells Bond that she knows he's only driving so recklessly because "you are just trying to show off the size of your...your...ego." Bond brushes this off and later stops the car to joke that he has no problem with "female authority". Scenes like this read like shaking off the past, but also like a brush off of the psychoanalysis that is applied to the Bond films. But just because Bond only sleeps with one woman and cracks a joke about the critical lens doesn't mean the criticism isn't legitimate and that the problems have disappeared.