{"id":44341,"date":"2012-01-25T12:45:03","date_gmt":"2012-01-25T17:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=44341"},"modified":"2013-08-19T20:40:01","modified_gmt":"2013-08-20T01:40:01","slug":"the-marilyn-meme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/01\/25\/the-marilyn-meme\/","title":{"rendered":"The Marilyn Meme"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Shameless<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Marilyn Monroe is often held up as the antidote to the idea that only thin can be beautiful. \u201cMarilyn was a size 10\/12\/14,\u201d goes a common refrain (though sizing basically means nothing these days, so what does that even prove?). There have been a couple Marilyn Monroe memes floating around Facebook in the past couple months, and both are troubling. The focus is on Marilyn\u2019s curves, and how her swimsuit clad body is different from what movie stars look like today (oh, the tyranny of the \u201cBest Beach Bodies!\u201d issue). What\u2019s supposed to be an empowering message to women \u2013 you don\u2019t have to be a\u00a0Victoria\u2019s Secret<\/a>\u00a0model to be beautiful \u2013 is completely undermined by two much older memes: divide and conquer and the male gaze.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the first photo, Marilyn is compared to another woman in a bikini, who is much thinner. The text reads: \u201cThis [pointing to Monroe] is more attractive than this [pointing to the other woman].\u201d While I can totally get behind the title \u201cfuck society,\u201d and add \u201cand its stupid expectations\u201d for good measure, there\u2019s nothing anti-establishment about what\u2019s being done here.\u00a0<\/a>This is a common tactic, in which women are pitted against each other, so that we lose sight of the real problem: namely, society. If women are fighting amongst ourselves about who is more \u201cbeautiful,\u201d if we compare ourselves to other women endlessly, we don\u2019t have time to notice that we\u2019re trapped in a hamster-wheel of low self-esteem. Society hopes that you\u2019ll buy things, to try and make yourself feel better. In the meantime, it\u2019s hoped that we as women won\u2019t critically examine what beauty is, what\u2019s being sold to us, and most importantly, who profits from all this. Fuck Society, sure, because society tells you that if you\u2019re not extremely thin, you\u2019re worthless. However, extremely thin women? They\u2019re still people. Further, bodies are just bodies. They have no intrinsic worth, no moral value, other than what we assign them. The thought behind this comparison photo is to turn the dominant paradigm on its head, but what it really does is reinforce that for one woman to be good, another must be bad. And that kind of thinking isn\u2019t going to get us anywhere.<\/p>\n

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The second is the same photo of Marilyn, this time alone in the Motivational Poster style. The text reads: \u201cPROOF: That you can be adored by thousands of men, even when your thighs touch.\u201d From the start this would seem like a better message. No comparison photo, no pitting women against each other. For some reason, though, this photo troubles and angers me more than the first one does. Because here\u2019s the thing: you are worth more than what men think of you. Marilyn Monroe was, to put it mildly, very sad, very often. She was a sex symbol, and thus, stopped existing as human being, a regular girl. Almost everything that fucked up Marilyn\u2019s later life had to do with being \u201cadored\u201d by men. Men used her, or deified her (and that\u2019s a hard come-down for those dudes when they found a human being in their bed the morning after). Political brothers purportedly passed her around like a toy. Conventional wisdom, political conspiracy aside, has it that Monroe killed herself. Being \u201cadored by thousands of men\u201d didn\u2019t stop her demons from consuming her. It angers me to no end that, again, in the name of self-esteem we\u2019re going to make a poster girl (literally) out of a woman who was notoriously down on herself.<\/p>\n

I want very much for us to stop thinking that there is only one body type that is acceptable. I would prefer the focus be on health, rather than appearance. The Monroe Meme seems about the furthest thing from healthy. This is a woman who abused alcohol and sleeping pills later in her life, this is a woman who (probably) died due to depression. But, hey, as long as someone thinks she looks good, I guess that\u2019s what matters.<\/p>\n

Heather Cromarty\u00a0has written for\u00a0The Walrus Blog,<\/a>\u00a0and writes about books and bookish miscellany at\u00a0In The Midst of Life, We Are in Debt, Etc<\/a>. Follow her on Twitter:\u00a0@la_panique<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at Shameless. Marilyn Monroe is often held up as the antidote to the idea that only thin can be beautiful. \u201cMarilyn was a size 10\/12\/14,\u201d goes a common refrain (though sizing basically means nothing these days, so what does that even prove?). There have been a couple Marilyn Monroe memes floating around Facebook […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,244,55,2103,120],"class_list":["post-44341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-fat","tag-gender","tag-gender-bodies","tag-sex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44341"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44347,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44341\/revisions\/44347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}