there were hundreds of tough smart sexy women in Hollywood – actresses like Barbra Stanwyck or Katherine Hepburn. Jean Harlow was no pushover, and Jane Russell was notably sexy and tough, nevermind Mae West. Marilyn wasn’t the first dumb blonde but she pretty much set the agenda: completely vapid, just there to look nice, arm candy, simpering her way through a gruesome “Happy Birthday Mr President”: whatever the men wanted. At a fifties party she’d be sitting at the side eyes wide open in reverence as boorish pipe-smoking men furrowed their brows over the great problems of the day, like Existentialism, or how-do-we-live-with-The-Bomb. “You’re a playwright / professor / scientist! Gee that’s so interesting! You must be so clever! I wish I knew half as much as you!” Because Marilyn didn’t have a clue outside of pleasing men, she fed the assumption that it was a condition of all women to be so pathetically accommodating, ignoring the history of women using their charms with wit and intelligence and not a little Machiavellian cunning.
Smart sexy women didn’t just feature in pre-Marilyn Hollywood, of course. They go all the way back in history, past Cleopatra. If Chris Knight is right in his “Blood Relations” book, the origins of culture are to be found in an age when the women in a group would synchronise their menstrual cycles so there was no chance of the men straying off when their partners were sexually unavailable, and so no escape from the “no meat, no sex” imperative. They then took it a stage further with the help of some crafty subterfuge – red dyes and such like. The men, sadly outmanoeuvred, tried to fight back with a bit of their own subterfuge and set up mysterious male coming-of-age rituals, and religions populated by gods who decreed that women were the inferior sex. Whatever the truth in all these speculations, it seems clear enough that when it comes to sex, men are the buyers and women are the sellers. Women, that is, have the power. “You want some, darlin’, it’s gonna cost you.”
Considering that prostitution and pornography aren’t going away any time soon, it seems to me an altogether healthy development that women are at least beginning to take control of the sex industry, and it’s a shame this isn’t something that many feminists celebrate. And that’s why Jordan is an improvement on Marilyn. She’s undoubtedly not as “nice”, but she’s honest about it, and she’s in control. Having inserted large quantities of silicone in her breasts, she earns an excellent living by flashing them about for the benefit of men who’ll pay money for the privilege of looking at them. Maybe it’s sad, but if it is it’s the men who are sad, not Jordan. That’s the way it is.
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