ABSTRACT
Gloria Steinem's posthumous account of Marilyn Monroe assumes a gravity entirely absent from Simone de Beauvoir's profile of the then twenty-five-year-old Brigitte Bardot, or that the latter piece exudes an enthusiasm about sexual honesty which now seems somewhat dated. In many ways, these two readings of the sex goddess represent the furthest poles of feminist response. Where the woman star has been accused or pandering to male desire and betraying her own sex, the central figure in the demonology has undoubtedly been Monroe. In 1986 Gloria Steinern enlarged upon her earlier article in an illustrated collaboration with George Barris, who had photographed Monroe during the last two months of her life for an uncompleted biography. De Beauvoir's attempt to justify Bardot's paedo-philiac appeal to American men, in terms of a New World sexual egalitarianism which somehow leads them to respect their female contemporaries, is one of the oddest pieces of a logic: in an argument not distinguished by its rigour.
