Misogynies by Joan Smith

Author:Joan Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908906199
Publisher: Saqi

GENTLEMEN PREFER DEAD BLONDES

Here comes Marilyn, the misogynist’s monster mate: those wiggling hips, that imprisoned waist, the jutting, inescapable breasts. What is she other than a woman made for sex? Yet not even a woman; the simple, naïve mind of a child has been transplanted into the body of a full-grown woman. Sex with her would be like eating ice-cream, Norman Mailer wrote.1 He was wrong; more like taking sweets from a child in the park. Marilyn is the victim who will not, cannot, answer back, and sex with her is a paedophiliac dream; do what you like and she won’t tell. How could she run to Mummy when she knows, deep inside, that she led you on, she made you do it?

Oh yes she did, and it’s a paradox that killed her. The lonely, ignored child who never knew a stable home grew into a woman with a lust, a burning desire—but for power, not for sex. She pursued it in the only way she knew, single-mindedly exploiting her sole asset like a foolhardy miner who dares to work a deeper seam than his safety-minded colleagues, never divining that the success she sought contained within it her inevitable destruction. For the power that Norma Jeane Mortensen coveted was only the power to be a victim; the sexual exhibitionism which seemed to enslave men in reality made victims not of them but of herself.

And to what lengths was she willing to go, in pursuit of that momentary high when she could bask in the adulation of her fans and admirers, blanking out the knowledge of what they really wanted to do to—not with, never with—the animated doll called Marilyn Monroe. Many an aspiring starlet changed the colour of her hair or fixed her teeth; Norma Jeane ruthlessly re-created herself as the West’s most enduring sex symbol. Look at her in 1945, in a photograph by André de Dienes:2 a gauche nineteen-year-old whose idea of sexiness is to knot her blouse below her unremarkable breasts and thrust her hips provocatively to one side, her knicker elastic defiantly visible above the waistband of her stiff new jeans. Her springy brown hair is artlessly scraped back from her face, and the shiny red lipstick she has applied accentuates her strong white teeth. The metamorphosis into Marilyn Monroe, movie star, seems a leap far beyond this pert but unknowing girl, yet she managed it. She bleached her hair, and straightened it; she had work done on those large teeth; she underwent plastic surgery to shorten her nose and firm up her chin; she wore her clothes a size too small; she even doctored her shoes, cutting a bit off one heel so she would walk with a perpetual wiggle. Told that her smile wasn’t right (it’s the most natural thing about her in that 1945 picture), she made a conscious effort to do it a different way.

Her dedication to maintaining the right image knew no bounds. The film of Some Like It Hot, which she made in 1958 with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, was set, nominally, in 1929.

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