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

theorists, such as Maureen Turim and Mary Ann Doane, have often reiterated much of Mulvey's view that the excessively feminine woman is but a “fetishized” or “hyper-polished object”; she exists only as “a reassuring object of flawless beauty” for the male viewer (Turim 103).

Since to date there exists no tradition within feminist film theory, or film studies in general, of a critical academic study of the sex goddess in film or, for that matter, the blonde sex goddess in film, it is not possible to give a precise critical overview of the treatment of this topic. Therefore, it is necessary to select from critical articles and texts which discuss images of excessively or hyper-feminine women that fit within the typology this work will cover. Within feminist film theory in general however, one can trace a theoretical trend that reflects feminist attitudes toward such hyper-feminine women, or sex goddesses; attitudes that this discussion will attempt to overturn.

One can trace a more general historical development of feminist film theorists’ critical perspectives of the sex goddess through several critical articles on Howard Hawks’ 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which features perhaps the most famous sex goddess, Marilyn Monroe. In particular, in her article “Gentlemen Consume Blondes,” Maureen Turim takes up Mulvey's view of images of excessive femininity when she first discusses Howard Hawks’ 1953 musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, in which Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell appear as best friend showgirls. Extending Mulvey's view of the excessively feminine woman as “hyper-polished object,” Turim demonstrates how the image of sex goddess represents an “increasing reification of consumerist values” where the actresses, through their performance as self-conscious spectacle, are consciously exposing and exploiting a “precious commodity, the sexually cultivated self-aware female body” (103). As Patricia Erens later notes in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, and quite usefully for my purpose here, this “commodification” of the feminine both “determines and is determined by pre-existing notions of femininity in the culture” (xxiii). While Turim stresses the negative connotations of this “commodification” of the feminine, Erens instead implies a way of reading through the image of the hyper-feminine body to show how it corresponds with,