American actress, model, movie star Marilyn Monroe Standups, Lifesize Cardboards, Cutouts : Marilyn Monroe Blown Up Dress Standup, Norma Jeane Red Dress, Marilyn Monroe Beach, Marilyn Monroe Nightgown, Marilyn Monroe Swimwear Cardboard Cutouts

Stars are important to us because they act out aspects of life that matter to us, and though we may tend to think of the things that matter to us as immutable and enduring, they are nonetheless only ever encountered in a culturally and historically specific context. The fifties hardly invented sexuality as a talking pint, but it was a period characterized by a particular, widely disseminated, and intensely popularized discourse on sexuality. Monroe's image, and Monroe herself to the extent that she identified herself with it, both expressed and were in turn overwhelmingly determined by that discourse.

She was charismatic, a center of attraction, who seemed to embody what was taken to be a central feature of human existence at that time.

In stressing the importance of sexuality in Marilyn Monroe's image, it might seem that I am just another commentator doing to Monroe what was done to her throughout her life, treating her solely in terms of sex. Perhaps that is a danger, but I hope that I am not just reproducing this attitude toward Monroe but also trying to understand it and historicize it. Monroe may have been a wit, a subtle and profound actress, an intelligent and serious woman. I have no desire to dispute these qualities and it is important to recognize and recover them against the grain of her image. But my purpose is to understand the grain itself, and there can be no question that this is overwhelmingly and relentlessly constructed in terms of sexuality. Monroe's sexuality is a message that ran all the way from what the media made of her in pin ups and movies to how her image became a reference point for sexuality in the coinage of everyday speech.

She started her career as a pin-up girl, and one can find no type of image more singlemindedly sexual than that. Pin-ups constituted a constant and vital aspect of her image right up to her death, and the pin-up style also indelibly marked other aspects of her image, such as her public appearances and promotions for her films. The roles she was given, the way she was filmed, and the reviews she got do little to counteract this emphasis.

There is no question that Monroe did a lot with these roles, but it is nearly always against the grain of the way they were written, and the way they were filmed too. She is constantly knitted into the fabric of the film through point-of-view shots located in male characters—even in the later films, and virtually always in the earlier ones, she is set up an an object of the male sexual gaze. Frequently too she is placed within the frame of the camera in such a way as to stand out in silhouette, a side-on tits and arse positioning found equally in the early Monkey Business and As Young As You Feel and the prestige production, The Prince and the Showgirl.

It is not surprising that Monroe became virtually a household word for sex. What is equally clear is that sex was seen as perhaps the most important thing in fifties America. Certain publishing events suggest this—the two Kinsey reports (on men in 1948; on women in 1953), the first issues of Confidential in 1951 and Playboy in 1953, both to gain very rapidly in circulation; best-selling novels such as From Here to Eternity (1951), A House Is Not a Home (1953), Not As a Stranger (1955), Peyton Place (1956), Strangers When We Meet (1953), A Summer Place (1958), The Chapman Report (1960), Return to Peyton Place (1961), not to mention the thrillers of Mickey Spillane.




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