When Being Looked At Was Her Only Power
On Pin-Up Girls, Cheesecake Photography & the Price of Being Seen
Before she was a household name, Marilyn Monroe was a pin-up girl.
A girl with ambition in her bones and no safety net under her feet.
She wasn’t trying to be a sex symbol. She was trying to survive.
Pin-up photography (or what they called cheesecake shots) was how she paid the bills.
Bathing suits. Tight sweaters. A flash of thigh and a winsome smile.
A sanitized flirtation for mass consumption. Something safe enough for soldiers to hang in their lockers during WWII, but just risqué enough to thrill.
The term “cheesecake” was the feminine counterpart to “beefcake” — light, sexy, and never too serious.
For a young woman without protection, without a family name, and without connections, her body became her ticket in.
At first, the jobs were awkward like posing with a turkey by a haystack.
A toothpaste ad required her to be in a bathing suit. And she wondered why.
She didn’t yet know how sex sold or that she was being sold.
But she learned fast. She asked for critiques. Studied every contact sheet.
Each pose was a language she mastered silently.
When a shampoo brand demanded a blonde, she complied.
She sat in salons for hours while her brown curls were straightened, bleached, and refined.
She watched how the camera wanted her and then gave it what it asked for.
“Girls ask me all the time how they can be like Marilyn Monroe,” Emmeline Snively said the agent who discovered her. “And I tell them, if they showed one tenth of the hard work and courage that that girl had, they’d be on their way. But there will never be another like her.”
But beneath all that there was always a tug-of-war between visibility and objectification.
Yes, the cheesecake era made her famous.
It gave the world its first poster girl of soft-core glamour.
But it also narrowed her in the public eye reduced her to hips, lips, and lashes.
She tried to reclaim it.
She demanded better scripts, studied acting, and eventually co-founded her own production company.
But the world (and Hollywood) often refused to see her beyond the myth they built.
When she first moved to a dorm as she began her career, her room mate says she came with over 200 books, enough to start a library. Yet, she was made to play ‘dumb blonde’ for majority of her career because that’s how people wanted to see her.
And since that was the only role for which the world was willing to see her, she settled for it.
Like so many women do.
Sometimes, we all play roles that are smaller than what we really are. Should we continue to do that? Or strive to be accepted for who we truly are.
Source - Based on excerpts and readings of Icon: The Life, Times, and Films of Marilyn Monroe Volume 1 1926 to 1956.
I really appreciate this piece as it opens such an important door into how many women have had to trade being seen for being accepted. But I also think there was something deeply powerful in the way Marilyn embodied archetypes. She wasn’t just looked at — she knew how to be seen, and she wielded that skill like a spell. She wasn’t naive or passive. She studied, transformed, and created her persona. She moved through this world with the Lover and the Muse and the Trickster archetypes all alive in her. And while her life was undeniably shaped by systems of exploitation, I also believe she shaped them right back. There’s something mythic in that.