Pet Peeve of the Day: The Cult of Marilyn

I don't mean to pick on Marilyn Monroe (I'm not the idiot Elizabeth Hurley is; "I've always thought Marilyn Monroe looked fabulous, but I'd kill myself if I was that fat"). Marilyn Monroe was a beautiful woman. I mean, look at her:

Babe.

My pet peeve is with this sudden obsession with her so-called largeness.

A couple of friends of mine recently posted this photo on various forms of social media:

 

And while this doesn't single out Marilyn Monroe, the general body nostalgia it points to is equally irritating to me. Because both are rather ill founded.

Don't get me wrong - we have some really unrealistic bodies being overly represented in mainstream media. Keira Knightly is smaller than Marilyn Monroe. But are you going to tell me Marilyn had an attainable figure? She has no where near the curves that, say, Christina Hendricks does.

What I find problematic is this illusion that media's obsession with slim, unattainable bodies is a recent problem. Marilyn Monroe was a size 8 (according to the faultless truth-keeper that is snopes.com). And, as Snopes points out, a size 8 today is much larger than a size 8 in the 50s and 60s.

And while Marilyn was more of a Catherine Zeta-Jones sized celebrity in her own time, she shared the silver screen with the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Princess Grace, Veronica Lake, Brigitte Bardot. Those were some tiny women. So yeah, you can point to Nicole Ritchie and Kirsten Dunst the same way you can point to Marilyn and Jayne Mansfield. Either way, you're not getting the full picture.

So let's stop pretending the media has actually gotten worse, and just admit that the media has always chosen the most beautiful women to grace their screens and magazine covers, women whose beauty was their job, a job which they had to attend to with such an obsessive level of detail that so-called "average women" with other jobs they have to attend to can't be expected to compete.