honored. Her acting must be imitative, not creative; rigidly conforming, not self-generated and self- renewing. The actress is the puppet of flesh, blood, and paint who acts as if she is the female
acting. Monroe, the consummate sexual doll, is empowered to act
but afraid to act, perhaps because no amount of acting, however
inspired, can convince the actor herself that her ideal female life is
not a dreadful form of dying. She grinned, she posed, she pretended, she had affairs with famous and powerful men. A friend of hers claimed that she had so many illegal abortions wrongly performed that her reproductive organs were severely injured. She died alone, possibly acting on her own behalf for the first time.
Death, one imagines, numbs pain that barbiturates and alcohol
cannot touch.
Monroe’s premature death raised one haunting question for the
men who were, in their own fantasy, her lovers, for the men who
had masturbated over those pictures of exquisite female compliance: was it possible, could it be, that she hadn’t liked It all along— It—the It they had been doing to her, how many millions
of times? Had those smiles been masks covering despair or rage? If
so, how endangered they had been to be deceived, so fragile and
exposed in their masturbatory delight, as if she could leap out from
those photos of what was now a corpse and take the revenge they
knew she deserved. There arose the male imperative that Monroe
must not be a suicide. Norman Mailer, savior of masculine privilege and pride on many fronts, took up the challenge by theorizing that Monroe may have been killed by the FBI, or CIA, or whoever
killed the Kennedys, because she had been mistress to one or both.
Conspiracy was a cheerful and comforting thought to those who
had wanted to slam into her until she expired, female death and
female ecstasy being synonymous in the world of male metaphor.
But they did not want her dead yet, not really dead, not while the
illusion of her open invitation was so absolutely compelling. In
fact, her lovers in both flesh and fantasy had fucked her to death,
and her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer:
no, M arilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.
People—as we are always reminded by counterfeit egalitarians—
have always died too young, too soon, too isolated, too full of insupportable anguish. But only women die one by one, whether famous or obscure, rich or poor, isolated, choked to death by the
lies tangled in their throats. Only women die one by one, attempt
ing until the last minute to embody an ideal imposed upon them by
men who want to use them up. O nly women die one by one, smiling up to the last minute, smile of the siren, smile of the coy girl, smile of the madwoman. O nly women die one by one, polished
to perfection or unkempt behind locked doors too desperately
ashamed to cry out. O nly women die one by one, still believing
that if only they had been perfect— perfect wife, mother, or
whore— they would not have come to hate life so much, to find it
so strangely difficult and em pty, themselves so hopelessly confused
and despairing. Women die, mourning not the loss of their own
lives, but their own inexcusable inability to achieve perfection as
men define it for them. Women desperately try to embody a male-
defined feminine ideal because survival depends on it. The ideal,
by definition, turns a woman into a function, deprives her of any
individuality that is self-serving or self-created, not useful to the
