The Blonde

When someone mentions the quintessential blonde bombshell, thoughts immediately gravitate towards Marilyn Monroe, however, there were others who preceded her and were in their own time a cultural phenomenon. Notably among these are Jean Harlow and Mae West but in contrast to Monroe, neither was ever really depicted as being vacuous. Quite to the contrary, they were smart women who epitomized a sexual freedom that many who lived in the prison of moderation only yearned for. It was not until the early 1950s that the blonde suddenly was being born with some prenatal deformity that excluded her from having a brain. Before Monroe, there was Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, but at least in her case, her character was attempting to attain some degree of intellect and culture. Monroe was somewhat of a cruel experiment in which a movie star was built from the ground up without any sense of self-worth. It is sad to consider the fact that the sole purpose of her existence was to provoke erections. Even more disturbingly is that Monroe was engineered by the studio system to essentially be a child with all the sexual apparati necessary for male sexual gratification.

As somehow a response to this creature of befuddlement, Hitchcock and many film noir directors shot back with his own trademark blonde, a woman of cunning who was cold on the outside but ardent within. She was the lady of propriety to the outside world but a “lady of the street” in the bedroom. Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, Veronica Lake, they all did their part in creating this entirely new addition to the infamy that Monroe had given to that golden mop. Gone were the days of Shirley Temple. The blonde was now either the secretly evil and conspiring seductress, or the Eve too ignorant to have any comprehension of either good or evil. The stereotype had taken up permanent residence in our American culture. The benevolent all-around happy, well-adjusted blonde had no median to take refuge in.

Sadly, the mass media has not pulled back from this image for blondes. Even sadder, women yearn to change their natural hair color to fulfill this fabricated role, as if it is license for them to engage in activities that darker hair does not permit. As if sexual inventiveness and freedom is exclusive to that bright and shining yellow. If our fascination with a yellow-orange hunk of gas has not dissipated in thousands of year, there is little chance for the blonde to return back to earth among the mortals.