| Chapter Introduction: | Introduction |
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how the screen images of the sex goddess are not only controlling but are also affecting their spectators.
West's “masquerade” is her self-ironic ability as an actress to reveal to her audience, through verbal and dramatic irony, her own immense agency and empowerment that she enjoyed in her persona as a sex goddess, as she simultaneously conceals her ironic performance to her to onscreen “suckers.” She turns back onto her audience their own expectations, and their cultural notions of a sex goddess as a “bad” or “fallen” woman, or, as in the traditional feminist valuation, as “abject,” as she occupies instead a position of empowerment. In this conscious turning back of her audiences’ expectations, and through her powers of seduction, West effectively deflects her own objectification and objectifies her audience instead. Through her performance of the sex goddess persona, West reveals gaps in entrenched cultural notions about what “good” or “bad” feminine sexuality should be, while simultaneously undermining such notions.
Unlike the cinematic construct of the femme fatale, who it has been argued represents a true projection of male castration anxiety and, therefore, must die at the end of the film for the anxiety she embodies, the sex goddess almost always triumphs in the end in getting what she wants, whether it be a husband (Blonde Crazy), diamonds (Gentlemen), or just persuading all the men around her to see things from her particular feminine perspective (The Misfits). While Robertson believes West both recognized and exploited an awareness of “her complicity in her own sexual objectification,” her comment here can be extended to other familiar feminist views of the sex goddess as “abject” (59). In opposition to this idea, this work will argue that, while the image of the sex goddess may be perceived in the popular imagination as a woman who is sexually objectified by Hollywood and American culture, instead of accepting some sense of objectification, the actress performing the role of the sex goddess very consciously uses her awareness of her own sexual attractiveness (which is not the same as sexual objectification) as a great source of pleasure, for both herself and her audience, as well as a source of power. Instead of objectification, I will argue for the position