Does beauty belong to a person or to the people around them?
"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"--the eye belonging to men who have set the beauty standard for all of us, women particularly. How awful it is that a woman can only be beautiful if she fits certain standards. Even the women we would all collectively agree are beautiful, could still feel ugly or undesirable because someone would go out of their way to make them feel that way. And for that, what a scam beauty is. Beauty is a currency, something you have and give away to other people. But does it really belong to you if at any moment it could feel as if you were robbed of it? What does someone who is considered beautiful have if that beauty goes away? Stardom to the point of the public no longer perceiving people as people, is a larger issue that came with the rise of Hollywood. In the same way that just about everything and anything can and has been turned into a product to be sold to the public, the same continues to happen with real people. Like many other celebrities and even regular people like us, keeping up with a public image may have been too much for Monroe.
Marilyn Monroe is one of the most memorable starlets to ever grace the silver screen. You can find her image on just about anything, just about anywhere! But what of the woman behind the fame and glamour? We hardly ever remember her. Just the image of Marilyn, and the idea of her as a sex symbol and beauty icon. She is representative of a consumeristic view towards beauty and the double standards pushed on women. Women are always taught that our appeal comes from youthfulness and beauty, and that after a certain age, we are no longer desirable. Whereas for men, they "get better with age" and don't have to fuss so much about how they look. We tend to fixate on beauty rather than personality or ability, and for Marilyn, this way of thinking has taken the woman she was and reduced her to a commodity.
We've immortalized her in only this way, and that was the idea behind her turning into a vampire. The mythology behind vampirism, sucking the life out of the living, and immortality are a lot like regular people and the media frenzy created around celebrities and Hollywood. People, media, and even artists capitalize off the image of Marilyn whether they use her likeness for their art and claim it as theirs or discuss her as if she were only starlet and not a person before the fame and during when she herself had tried to veer away from the dumb-blonde-bombshell portrayal. In my research of her work history, at one point she had been suspended from her filming contract because she refused to take another ditzy hot blonde role; she wanted to try new avenues. But she wasn't able to find other work beyond that because everyone wanted that Marilyn, and only expected that Marilyn. But the thing about Marilyn--she was a creation by the actress herself, her team, and her management. Norma Jeane Mortenson was only Marilyn Monroe to the public and nothing more. Ironically, beauty will get you far, but only so far before people only let you be nothing more than that and then criticize you for being nothing more.
In a society where a woman's currency is beauty, what happens when perceptions of beauty change?
Deciding where to put this would be difficult because without my explanation, I don't think anyone would see this as anything other than "Oh, she's a vampire," which I think proves my point of her image being so prominent and, in a way, tiresome. Really, it could be displayed anywhere in the same way that you could find some sort of merchandise with her face anywhere.
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