At a young age, every girl finds role models whom they look up to on how to dress, how to act, and admire while encountering their early lives as females. In their preteen years, many girls discover the 1950's icon, Marilyn Monroe. At first she seems pretty influential, with her quotes about being feminine and loving your body. She seems relatable too, being one of the most beautiful women of the time period but also being curvy in an era where being curvy completely absurd. When I was younger, I looked up to Marilyn Monroe a lot. She was beautiful, said relatable things about boys, life, and body types. But as I grew older and more educated, I realized my early infatuation with Marilyn Monroe was ludicrous. I was given very little information about who this woman really was and I was infuriated with who I, at a mere age of fifteen, was once modeling to be like. I was modeling her because of her iconic quotes, but what I learned later on was what an incompetent, dumb, and revealing human being Marilyn Monroe was, certainly no one a young female should be idolizing. While Marilyn Monroe is great for girls to admire because of these two mere facts, she is in fact the worst role model for any young girl to have.
Marilyn Monroe has been known for her body type. She is voluptuous, curvy in areas where it seems absurd now to be curvy in. She has wide hips, a broad chest, a big butt and thick thighs. Her body type and what she says about it is what makes young girls love her so much, but this as a whole is a misconception. First of all, Marilyn Monroe, standing at five feet five and a half inches tall, weighed a mere 130 pounds. This now, as it was back in the 1950's, is not a hefty weight. Just because she was curvy in some certain areas doesn't categorize her as overweight, especially since she was about thirty pounds away from being so.
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Another thing that Marilyn Monroe is notoriously known for is her adulterous acts. She was married and divorced by the age of twenty, which is as it was back then not a very impressive. On top of this, she had many affairs with married men. The most well-known with John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States. She easily could have destroyed the seemingly perfect marriage between Jackie O and Kennedy because of her apparent interest in married men. Her sleaziness isn't something commonly talked about when girls start learning about Marilyn Monroe, but it definitely should be.
Marilyn Monroe stared in many movies, which is one of her claims to fame. Some of the movies that Monroe stared in are "The Seven Year Itch" and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." Some would assume that someone who starred in such great movies of the time period must be a great actress. Wrong. In each of her roles, Monroe plays a ditzy blonde who wears tight revealing clothing, is very promiscuous and is only there to accompany the leading male role. First, this isn't good for the mind of any young blonde girl, who may think it is acceptable that in order to be pretty, they also have to be a bimbo. Girls should have higher ambitions, such as getting into ivy-league schools, being an accomplished worker, a great mom and a loving wife, not an incompetent actress who can barely play a small role as a dumb blonde.
As if playing a ditzy character in all of her movies wasn't bad enough, how she got those roles is even worse. She wasn't talented what-so-ever, which can be told by her petty acting jobs as dim-witted characters, but many movie agencies have claimed that Monroe sent naked pictures of herself in order to make herself look presentable for the roles she was auditioning for. First of all, this is absolutely absurd. Anyone who has self-respect for themselves and half of a brain would know how atrocious this is. No girls should think that in order to get what you want, you should get naked for it. Have a little confident in the abilities that you have, not what's underneath your clothes.
If you couldn't tell just by reading these four small facts about how incompetent of a role model Miss Marilyn Monroe is, I would hope people would re-evaluate some of their decisions and realize how atrocious Monroe's behavior really is. In a world where females look up to other females for inspiration, Marilyn Monroe certainly shouldn't be considered one of them. Females should be driven, smart and confident. Not promiscuous, dimwitted, and untalented. There are plenty of driven girls out there, some as young as fifteen. It's time we start finding some new faces out there to become role models that will influence the girls of this time era in better ways than silly quotes that probably weren't even said by Marilyn Monroe.
