The Sex Goddess in American Film, 1930–1965: Jean Harlow, Mae Wes ...

being consumed by them, this work will complicate previous notions of the sex goddess in film, while also recouping her image as one that, more often than not, can be read as empowering.

A few later feminists have, in fact, taken up a more empowering perspective on the sex goddess. For instance, in their article “Pre-Text and Text in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca seek to reclaim a sense of pleasure for feminist viewers in the images of the sex goddess, to read through the dominant male culture in an effort to understand and recoup such images and films for the feminist viewer. Arbuthnot and Seneca believe that, in Gentlemen, Monroe and Russell demonstrate a “resistance to objectification by men” and a “connection with each other,” and it is this resistance that accounts, in part, for what the authors find empowering in the actresses’ images for feminist viewers (112–113). Arbuthnot's and Seneca's (re)reading of a classical Hollywood film against the grain of a more traditional feminist perspective of female objectification adds an invaluable contribution to feminist perspectives because of their attempt to recoup the image of the sex goddess as an empowering one.

It seems less believable, however, that, in their roles as showgirls, Monroe and Russell entirely “resist male [or for that matter, female] objectification.” In Gentlemen, Monroe and Russell in fact exploit the idea of “male objectification” for their own purposes by using the hyper or, as it is often referred to in feminist film theorist terms, excessively feminine, display of their bodies and costuming for their own empowerment. They do so in very conscious ways as a method of gaining power (both romantic and economic) over men, and thus they are, in a sense, “objectifying” the men both onscreen and off, as they also control their male spectators. Therefore, part of the pleasure Arbuthnot and Seneca seek to understand in the film, through the onscreen friendship of Monroe and Russell, is inherently tied to, and heavily invested with, the same kind of attraction and desire for such a display or spectacle of an excessive femininity—one which is meant to exploit the idea of male objectification—and it occurs for the very