...
By Anna Rahmanan
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
On the 64th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, an auction of objects connected to her life offered another chance to admire the world’s most famous blonde and to consider how thoroughly America still confuses a woman’s beauty as evidence against her seriousness.
The sale from the estate of Anna Strasberg includes Monroe’s annotated script changes for The Misfits, a letter from Joe DiMaggio and a Jon Whitcomb painting created for a Cosmopolitan cover. The assortment captures the old split in her reputation: Monroe the working actor, studying and revising her craft, and Marilyn the collectible image.
America has learned to applaud the woman who turns beauty into currency: Margot Robbie stepping out from behind the face on the poster to build the machinery around it, Beyoncé turning the stage into a kingdom, Sydney Sweeney alchemizing scrutiny into currency, Kamala Harris carrying power beneath the weight of endless appraisal. Yet the old spell persists because this is America, where culture never tires of congratulating itself on progress while resisting it at every turn.
Read More on News
The more beautiful the woman, the more eagerly the audience searches for the catch. We mistake vanity for judgment, calculation for talent, charm for authority, convinced our cynicism is simply discernment. We celebrate the woman who masters the mirror, then distrust her for understanding exactly what it reflects—and exactly who is looking.
And so America keeps retaking the Marilyn Monroe test and failing. Can the general populace admire a beautiful woman without shrinking her to beauty or mistaking the light around her for proof that there is nothing else to see? The answer is apparently no.
...
The Blonde (and Female) Trap
Monroe understood the bargain Hollywood had offered her: it would reward her for being desirable, but resist her the moment she tried to convert desirability into authority. In 1955, after fighting 20th Century Fox over pay and creative control, she formed Marilyn Monroe Productions and studied at the Actors Studio. The studio had profited from the “dumb blonde” persona, then treated her attempt to become a serious actor and independent producer as a kind of rebellion.
The same bargain still shadows women in entertainment: Margot Robbie can be the face on the Barbie poster while the public overlooks the fact that her company helped produce the film. Sydney Sweeney’s appearance can become a political symbol or advertising controversy until the debate about her body crowds out discussion of her work. Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez are praised for mastering image and spectacle, then criticized of depending on those things whenever their business judgment or artistic control becomes harder to dismiss.
...
Scarlett Johansson, Megan Fox, Pamela Anderson and Taylor Swift have all encountered versions of the same suspicion: beauty may be accepted as a source of fame, but rarely as the foundation from which a woman can claim power. The moment she moves from image to owner, producer, strategist or executive, the qualities that made her valuable are recast as reasons not to take her seriously.
Beauty is presented as agency until a woman exercises too much agency.
The Left Has Its Own Version
The left deserves particular scrutiny because it claims to usually recognize this trap.
Progressive culture speaks fluently about objectification, double standards and the policing of women’s bodies, yet it can reproduce the same habits when the woman is politically inconvenient, commercially successful in the wrong way or unwilling to perform the approved version of empowerment.
...
The contradiction is especially visible around female Democrats.
Kamala Harris faced attacks based on her clothes, laugh, relationships and appearance, along with more legitimate scrutiny of her record. A study of the discussion around politicians found that women were more often described by their bodies, clothing and families than male counterparts.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has seen her lipstick, hoops and clothes treated as evidence alternately of authenticity, vanity, hypocrisy or ambition. Michelle Obama recently recalled that public attention often favored her clothes and body over her Princeton education, Harvard law degree and professional career. Hillary Clinton’s hair and pantsuits became recurring political subjects. Stacey Abrams, Ilhan Omar and Jasmine Crockett have encountered racialized and gendered judgments that male politicians rarely face in equivalent form.
Related Story
How the Ted Lasso Trap Keeps Women on the Sideline
There is a reasonable objection: public figures deliberately use image, and examining that image is not automatically sexist. Monroe cultivated Marilyn the same way that Robbie marketed Barbie. AOC turned red lipstick into a recognizable political signature. Candidates and celebrities cannot demand the rewards of visual branding while declaring every discussion of presentation illegitimate.
...
But does appearance add to the assessment, or replace it? Is beauty treated as one form of communication, or as proof that the woman must be shallow, manipulated or undeserving?
Monroe’s belongings will keep selling because the image remains irresistible. The harder question is whether America can ever admire the image without using it to erase the woman who made it. Until beauty stops functioning as evidence against intelligence, ambition and authority, the Marilyn Monroe test will remain less a measure of women than of the culture looking at them.
The Beauty Tax
Perhaps the contradiction is inevitable because beauty is one of the few forms of power women have long been encouraged to cultivate openly. Political power, economic power and institutional authority arrived much later—and often only after a fight. The trouble begins when beauty stops being the destination and becomes the vehicle.
...
That is why the Marilyn Monroe test keeps resurfacing in new forms. Every generation produces another woman whose appearance becomes the story while her ambition is treated as the twist: Monroe, Anderson, Beyoncé, Swift, Sweeney, Harris.
Perhaps the Marilyn Monroe test was never really about Marilyn Monroe, but about whether America can look at a woman who understands the value of her own image without assuming that image is all she has to offer. Sixty-four years after her death, we still buy the photograph first. The person behind it remains a harder sell.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines