Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 154

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Popular Culture Review
Jean Baker, entrapped by celebrity status with all of the addictive, seductive, and
mesmerizing issues which surround such a life. A synthetic symbol of beauty
that, ironically, commits suicide at 36 years old, and becomes a sexual icon
imprinted on the national consciousness as the standard for beauty (Oates, radio
interview).
Norma Jean Baker’s life being made into a product, called “Marilyn
Monroe,” epitomizes the transformation in sexual ideology that has taken place
in Western secular culture over the last half of the twentieth century. Granted,
much of Hollywood thought of Marilyn Monroe as a tramp (Oates), but the
wheels of mass media’s power to transform a human being into an unrealistic,
profitable product were set in motion. Not until 1999, would a book be
published that so succinctly documents the power and profit behind the
manipulation of humans into products, most typically women. Jean Kilboume’s
Deadly Persuasion: Why women and girls must fight the addictive power o f
advertising, draws on the last twenty years of the toxic sexual environment
which has put women and girls at such risk of sexual exploitation.
In the wake of this era of sexual exploitation, feminists would decry
what Shulamith Firestone called a “state of mock worship,” where she explains,
“Gallantry has been commonly defined as ‘excessive attention to women
without serious purpose,’ but the purpose is very serious: through a false
flattery, to keep women from awareness of their lower-class condition”
(Firestone 1993, 448). Firestone points out the political uses of romanticism
over the centuries that has imposed limitations on women and kept sexual
oppression going strong. Unrealistic images of women and men completely
entangled in sexual overtones to the point that touching in any way becomes a
form of eroticism have become the definition of the self in Western culture
(1993, 45