"I'm not bad,
I'm just drawn that way." The Venus,
the Sex Goddess, the Bombshell. "Gilda, are you decent?"
"Me?" She's a knockout beauty,
who leaves a trail of drooling men (and at least 5% of women)
in her wake. Here is how you know you're dealing with a
woman of divine sensuality: The bombshell is the embodiment of
our society's ideal of womanhood, emphasis on the body. "Magnificent view."
"It is, isn't it?" She is all curves, even in eras where waifish
beauty is more stylish. She's a sensualist, who cares about enjoying life
and living it to the fullest. "Life's short.
And I wanna live while I'm alive." She's also a materialist who
loves anything that's beautiful— and expensive. "Diamonds are a girl's best friend." Another thing she takes
pleasure in is being looked at. A Venus lives by the male gaze, and men's attention gives her power
in a male-dominated society. "Well, on the way into town,
I'll give you a lesson in geography." "I think I've already had one."
The bombshell is somehow treated as both above the rest of us, like a goddess taken human form— "Ain't you never seen a naked
chick ridin' a clam before?" and below, like a wild
animal or a simple child. "You have the body of a woman
and the emotions of a child!" In her purest form, like the Greek goddess Aphrodite
(or Venus to the Romans), this woman embodies arguably
the most important values of life: beauty and love. "There are three things I like
most: love, love, and love." But she can also be a mirror of how little respect society
often shows these values— "You should be in the bra business.
You're a work of art." or how they can become twisted
by jealousy and materialism. "But in Vegas, for a girl like Ginger,
love costs money." In the bombshell's darkest iterations, her sexuality is a weapon which
might end up destroying her.
Here's our take on why there's so much more to
the bombshell than her sexuality and what she deserves
to get out of life, beyond being adored. "Are you watching Gloria
in my sunglasses?" "Is she moving in slow motion,
or is my brain doing that?" If you're new here,
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the description below to upgrade your wardrobe now. Love goddesses date back to prehistory, but the bombshell was born in
sound cinema as Jean Harlow. "Would you be shocked if I put
on something more comfortable?" Her 1933 film Bombshell gave
birth to the bombshell label, implicitly comparing her beauty
to a weapon of mass destruction. "Right here in front of us,
I see the beautiful Lola Burns. The bombshell herself, folks." Harlow popularized the
blonde bombshell look in Platinum Blonde, and gave us a heartless
vixen twist on the trope with another eye-catching
hair color in Red-Headed Woman. Through the actress'
persona onscreen and off, all the qualities of
a bombshell coalesced: she's a head-turner who disarms men
with her weaponized sexuality, she enjoys pleasure and wealth,
and isn't known for her brains— "I was reading a book the other day."
"Reading a book?" Her turbulent life is
full of a series of men, and there's a good chance
that she's going to die young. "She died of life. She gave it all to everyone else,
and there wasn't enough left for her." In the 50s, Marilyn Monroe
represented postwar bounty, a goddess come to life somehow both embodying and
satirizing her era's materialism. "Don't you know that a man being
rich is like a girl being pretty? You might not marry a girl
just because she's pretty, but my goodness,
doesn't it help?" In the same era, Elizabeth Taylor was the definitive
brunette bombshell to Marilyn's blonde, representing haughty
self-possession and glamour. "I do not intend to join
that long list of queens who have quivered happily at
being summoned by Lord Antony." "I am the queen of Egypt, and I choose to remain
on Egyptian soil." In A Place in the Sun, her aspirational beauty and
the American dream she embodies are so irresistible to
Montgomery Clift's George Eastman that he ends up plotting to kill
his poor, pregnant girlfriend in order to pursue a life with
Liz Taylor's Angela Vickers. "Every time you leave
me for a minute, it's like goodbye. I like to believe it means
you can't live without me." In the 60s, Europe had their own iconic
brunette and blonde bombshells: Italian Sophia Loren and
French Brigitte Bardot. In this era of increasing freedom, the bombshell became a symbol
of sexual emancipation. [In French] "Wouldn't
you be a good wife?" "I like to have fun too much." Bombshells on film channel the
love goddesses of ancient myth, and cinema excels at making their
appeal feel majestic and surreal. [In French] "You are the
first woman of creation." Just as Aphrodite was
born from sea foam, the sex goddess onscreen is
often associated with water. This becomes a symbol of how this impossibly alluring
woman can't be possessed, and will slip through your fingers
like running water if you try. As Anita Ekberg blends into the
falling water of the Trevi Fountain in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita,
Marcello Mastroianni's protagonist, like the camera, feels as though he
can't quite touch her. The onscreen Venus is ultimately just
a fantastic illusion made of light, a projection of the male gaze. "When it's hot like this,
you know what I do? I keep my undies in the icebox!" In her groundbreaking essay
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Laura Mulvey argued that
cinema hinges on the male gaze— the way the camera becomes a man,
and looks at women as a man would. The bombshell feels purpose-built
to yield pleasure to the male eye (sometimes literally, like when teen boys create their dream
woman from a computer in Weird Science). "What would you little
maniacs like to do first?" Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt opens with a male gaze that leers
at Bardot's naked body, while she asks the protagonist
if he likes every part of it. [In French] "All of it? My mouth? My eyes?
My nose? And my ears?" "Yes, everything."
And the bombshell often
appears in slow-motion, as a purely visual delight
separated from sound, because we don't need to hear her
speak to understand her character. Often, the bombshell takes
pleasure in the male gaze, and feels empowered by
the hold she has over men. "So take a good look, daddy. 'Cause you're gonna be seeing an
awful lot of this around the house." She performs the bombshell persona, knowing full well how to use her
effect on people to her advantage. "How do you sleep?
With pajamas...or nightgown?" "Neither. I sleep only in two drops
of French perfume." Because bombshells
wield their sexuality, they represent one route
to female empowerment. Mae West made her career from being
a sexually empowered woman before such things were allowed. "Is that a gun in your pocket,
or are you just glad to see me?" The bombshell is also painted as
animalistic in her sexuality— a literal sex kitten. Yet other versions of the bombshell,
despite their sexual potency, often project a childlike innocence. Laurence Olivier remarked that
Marilyn Monroe's talent lay in bringing that innocence
to all the innuendo in her films. "Look at that face," he said on the set of
The Prince and the Showgirl. "She could be five years old." "Well, maybe just a sip,
maybe just a teeny...woo!" The goddess Aphrodite personified
the appeal of beauty, but also its pitfalls. She was wildly jealous,
vain, fickle, and louche. "There's also jealous love, and
unrequited love, and tragic love. And when you strip away all the tinsel, it's really just about hormones,
isn't it?" Similarly, the bombshell embodies the
contradictions of womanhood in society: she is a goddess and an animal,
a seductress and a naif. She is put on a pedestal for her beauty, yet vilified for her
promiscuity and materialism. "God forbid I exude
confidence and enjoy sex." For all that bombshells are revered
and exalted in our culture— [In Italian] "Is that the Swedish woman? Oh, man, I better not see her or
I'll have to kill my wife tonight!" Sooner or later, they're also
degraded and insulted. Megan Fox was vilified in the press
both for being too sexy and for trying to break out of the bombshell box by expressing any agency
or individuality. After Jennifer's Body bombed,
New York Times profiler Lynn Hirschberg put the film's underperformance
squarely on Fox's sexy shoulders, writing, "Not surprisingly, and despite the heavily publicized
64-second lesbian makeout scene, men did not buy many tickets. Neither did women,
who tend to prefer movies that feature more approachable,
less vixenish actresses, like Sandra Bullock
or Jennifer Aniston." "You don't know how hard it is
being a woman looking the way I do." The bombshell is defined by her beauty,
so her looks are her destiny. Since our culture values beauty, you'd think bombshells onscreen
would lead a blessed life. On the contrary, the stories we tell about
sexually appealing women usually need to see them punished because of our society's oddly
puritanical ideas about sex. "Goodbye, baby." Harlow's sexually opportunistic vixen
in Red-Headed Woman may get away with her antics because
that movie is pre-Code. "Listen, I'm on my way up to
the boss's house with his mail." "Maybe I'll get a chance to
stay and take dictation." "What'll that get ya?" "Don't be dumb!
His wife's in Cleveland!" But from the 30s on, the restrictive Hays Code required that
sexually liberated women had to be cautionary tales who,
by the end of the movie, were either married or dead. Consequently, filmmakers would
often let us enjoy watching a doomed sex
goddess character, but pair her with a frumpier,
often darker-haired woman, who gets to live because
she's not too sexual. In Niagara, when frigid honeymooners
Ray and Polly Cutler encounter Marilyn Monroe's vivacious
character, Rose, at Niagara Falls, Ray is bewitched by her, especially compared to
his unexciting wife. "Why don't you ever
get a dress like that?" Monroe captures our attention and
sympathy as a sexually provocative woman trapped in a violent marriage, but she's still dead by
the end of the picture. We can see the tragic bombshell versus
safe frump dyad continue to play out in much later stories. Even a romcom like Love Actually pits a vivacious Venus
against poor Emma Thompson— "I'll just be hanging around the
mistletoe, hoping to be kissed." and literally has the homewrecker
dress up as a devil. (Mia isn't dead by the
end of that movie, but her future with the company can't be great after trying
to sleep with her boss.) "When it comes to me,
you can have everything." The way the bombshell is punished usually depends on whether she's
an innocent or a manipulator. This is a manifestation of the Madonna/whore complex:
a beautiful woman can either be in control
of her sexuality (which is evil) or the passive victim
of her own beauty. The evil bombshell uses her sexuality
as a weapon to get what she wants. "I'll give you something
you've been obsessing about ever since our parents got married." Superhero movies have even given
us the supervillain bombshell. This character starts
the movie an unsexy nerd, but then something happens, and she simultaneously
becomes hot and evil. "Life's a bitch,
now so am I." Thus her sexuality and her supervillainy
are inextricably linked— bringing about her downfall. "Mistletoe can be deadly
if you eat it." "But a kiss can be even
deadlier if you mean it." The innocent sex goddess,
on the other hand, often gets killed to
motivate a male character, in a version of the Women
in Refrigerators trope— "Was she such a woman, your wife?"
"She was the sun." or to illustrate the
depravity of her world. "She said people try to be good
but they're really sick and rotten." Adriana on The Sopranos is
a perfect example of the bombshell-as-beautiful victim. Adriana is portrayed
as a classic Venus— she draws attention
for her knockout looks, "God, don't transfer me now."
"Adriana La Cerva." enjoys the material comforts her boyfriend Christopher's
mafioso lifestyle provides, "Anybody around here love
the word 'Jimmy Choo shoes'?" "Oh, my god.
They're gorgeous!" and isn't known for her smarts. "They said all they wanted
was some information, and they would leave us alone." Ultimately, though,
she's a Venus in the truest sense: she's defined by her loving heart. "I love you very much. My only dream is that we
have a happy life together." Thus, the murder of this audience
favorite after she's manipulated by the FBI was a
powerful emotional tool to make us feel just how irredeemable
Tony and his circle were. Adriana's beauty, inside
and out, is destroyed, symbolizing the corrupting
nature of Tony's world. She was so beloved by viewers
and creative staff alike that the writers felt actually showing
her death onscreen would be too brutal
even for The Sopranos. "I've written some of the most
horrifically violent scenes on that show but,
after the fact, I realized that I didn't want
to see Adrianna get killed." While evil bombshells may be punished
for their seductive transgressions, onscreen beauties in general are
punished not so much for what they do, but for the animal urges
they bring out in men, simply by existing. And the women who play
bombshells are subject to their own punishments as well. After Joe Dimaggio watched
Marilyn Monroe film the famous subway grate scene
in the Seven Year Itch, he allegedly beat her for
being so sexually provocative. Tippi Hedren was bullied and isolated
on set by Alfred Hitchcock because he was obsessed with her beauty. "It was the end of Marnie and,
um, it was just very disappointing and disturbing and, um, a situation that I
couldn't live with." And Megan Fox felt she couldn't fully
join the Me Too Movement because she would be seen as an
unsympathetic victim. Women are still being shamed if
they attempt to monetize their beauty. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a paramedic that was supplementing
her income with an OnlyFans account was slutshamed and doxxed
by the New York Post. To this day, we act like a woman who
poses for sexy photos gives up a part of her intelligence,
her agency, and her soul. So what if Aphrodite comes
down from her pedestal? Contemporary film and
TV have been finding hidden depths and
nuance in bombshells. Joan on Mad Men at first
intentionally lives her life as a Marilyn Monroe-esque
bombshell. But she gradually realizes that being solely what men
want her to be is limiting. When Monroe dies,
Joan is devastated because Joan knows the emptiness
she must have felt. "You're not like her. Physically, a little,
don't tell me that makes you sad." "This world destroyed her." And after landing the husband
she always wanted isn't the fairytale
she hoped it would be "You're not a good man", she eventually finds
her personal satisfaction by stepping out of the Monroe archetype and asserting her brains
and independence. "But when I talked to Ken,
I realized it would be easy to turn this into an
actual production company." Poison Ivy,
in most of her depictions, fits the evil seductress trope to a T. Her main superpower
is the ability to control men
with lust-inducing pheromones. But on the series Harley Quinn,
she is more defined by her environmental activism
and her anxiety about letting people in. "Do you remember how you diagnosed me?" "Sure. A classic misanthrope
with abandonment issues who befriends plants
to avoid human intimacy." Through her friendship,
and eventual coupling with Harley, we get to see an explicitly
queer Ivy who -- rather than exploiting the patriarchy
to her advantage -- actively fights against it in the male-dominated world
of supervillainy. "Ivy, if you could just --
you know -- move, so I could kill your friend." "Absolutely,
over my dead body." "Ugh, female friendships!" On New Girl,
Megan Fox's character Reagan actively subverts and deconstructs
the actress' Bombshell persona. Reagan is initially presented
as a sexually intimidating creature of mystery. "I've got no chance with Reagan. She's hot and she's cool
and she's bisexual." But as the loftmates get to know her, they see that her unattainable
hot girl facade is a smokescreen she puts on to keep
people at a distance. When in an actual relationship,
Reagan chokes. "Yeah, I'm not good at this.
Obviously. So... what would you say,
Jess, if you were me?" Rather than pitting a Bombshell
against a sexless woman in competition for a man, shows like Harley Quinn and New Girl
let the sex goddess find friendship and love
with other women. "I mean, of course I went for you. I go nuts for big boobs.
I'm a real melon-felon." Reagan and Jess date the same man,
which in previous Bombshell stories would be a huge source of conflict -- the adorkable girl next door
and the Vamp would be expected to fight over the mediocre male. But these two
very different women get along, and Jess even helps Reagan
out of her emotional isolation. "God, I'm crazy about him!"
"Yes! I knew it." Likewise, when Jennifer Lopez's
knockout Ramona makes her big pole dancing
entrance in Hustlers, we watch this less
from her patrons' eyes than from those of her
female protégé-to-be, Destiny. Hustlers unpacks the Bombshell mindset
as a facet of the American Dream, and explores why,
in a world where a woman has limited economic options, the Male Gaze may
be her biggest asset. "This whole country,
is a strip club. You've got people tossing the money,
and people doing the dance."
This is also an example
of how more nuanced Bombshells of color have emerged with the rise of sex positivity
and intersectional feminism. In classic Hollywood, Bombshell status was usually kept
from women of color, who were often sexualized
but not deified for that sexuality. Margarita Carmen Cansino didn't become a star until her name
was anglicized to Rita Hayworth and she had undergone
painful electrolysis sessions to make her hairline look less "characteristically-Latina". Black bombshells like
Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, and Eartha Kitt all
faced serious professional hurdles that kept Marilyn Monroe
levels of superstardom out of reach. And hispanic bombshells were often
characterized as "uncontrollable," feeding into the
Spicy Latina stereotype. "She sounds enchanting. Enchanting? Bewildering!
Bewitching! Intoxicating! Devastating!" The Bombshell represents
beauty and sexuality, two things our society
connects highly with youth. For the bombshell
who doesn't die young in the prime of her beauty, the alternative is
(in viewers' eyes) almost worse: she gets old. As Elizabeth Day
writes in The Guardian, "we do not expect
our sex symbols to age." Yet --in life,
and in fiction-- the story goes on
long after youth passes. "It used to be
if someone needed to see me in reception,
they were delivering flowers." That's why stories
that expand on the Bombshell, beyond her surface pleasures,
are so important. "All people ever see is
Marilyn Monroe. As soon as they realize
I'm not her, they run." The love goddesses of myth
were complex, fallible, recognizably human characters. There's no reason why
modern storytelling should be any less nuanced
than what was carved in marble thousands of years ago. We need stories
where the body isn't destiny. Where pretty people are asexual,
where older women still get some, and where everyone can access
their inner love goddess. "When I'm good, I'm very good.
But when I'm bad, I'm better."
