Modernist Blondes

Before I read Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the 1953 Howard Hawks film had already influenced my existence as a young girl in the form of a Marilyn Monroe VHS box set. It wasn’t the glitz and glamour that attracted me (though it helped) but the gleeful mischief of two women putting one over on a world of men. A femme fatale without anything too fatal. At its core, there was an idea of using one’s feminine wiles for good, if not for society then at least for oneself— and maybe a girlfriend or two. By twenty, reading the novel helped contextualize my own mischief within a lineage of women. Perhaps getting a man to buy you gifts wasn’t feminist vigilantism, but it was indeed fun. At that age, there are so few opportunities to test one’s power and charm. It taught me the valuable lesson that laughter at the expense of powerful men was not so expensive after all