While you’re reading this you might want to listen to ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ by Barrett Strong. Totally your call though.
My favourite film is Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I think that despite coming the Hollywood studio system, which likes money more than women, it is, intentionally or not, a film which loves women, and thinks money is a joke. It stars Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee, your classic “gold digger”, who will slow dance with the oldest, most lecherous man on the boat if he looks like he’s got some money. Always there to roll her eyes is her best friend and closest confidante Dorothy (Jane Russell), who, to Lorelei’s frustration, doesn’t care about money and is only interested in sex. They are endlessly supportive and affectionate towards one another, and even the film’s very last scene, a double wedding, focuses more the bond between the two friends than the two truly unconvincing heterosexual romantic partnerships which the scene technically solidifies.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is said to be the film which established Monroe as a “dumb blonde”, which I personally find strange because Lorelei is not dumb- she knows exactly what she’s doing. When accused of being stupid by her fiancé’s snobby father, she responds, “I can be smart when it’s important- but most men don’t like it”. Lorelei’s voracious materialism and dumb blonde act are quite clearly part of a survival strategy, and nowhere is this clearer than in the iconic number ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’, which she performs late in the movie after she and Dorothy have been left penniless and alone in France by a man whom they had trusted to support them.
Here is a link to a video of the number, which cannot be embedded.
It is interesting to compare this song and performance with Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ and its video. In lovely full-on pastiche mode Madonna borrows the pink gown, the staging and the army of rich suitors from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but the similarities between the two numbers prove to be extremely superficial. ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’ isn’t only about diamonds, it’s about how risky it is to be a woman in a society in which forces women to depend economically on men. The speaker in the lyric loves diamonds because, unlike a kiss, a man’s affection, and your beauty, diamonds are tangible and valuable, and they last forever. She worries about paying rent and being able to afford food, and she knows that when she gets old and unattractive men will stop helping her. The diamonds are not loved for what they are- expensive and beautiful objects, paradigmatic of wealth and power- but what they can do- ensure that you can keep on living when men abandon you. I find the song anxious, morbid and sadly pragmatic.
‘Material Girl’ is different. It bounces with confidence. Madonna’s lyrics speak of an uncomplicated joy in money for its own sake which I think is totally missing from the lyrics of ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’. Being able to get money from men, and reject those who can’t offer money, is a happy victory in the battle of the sexes- very 80s, I think- not a matter of life and death. Madonna smiles as she takes money from the male dancers’ pockets and pulls rings off their fingers, and they don’t mind. The video also misses one of the really interesting parts of the Monroe performance- the verses she sings to a crowd of younger women. In a film which is so preoccupied with female friendship and mutual support between women, Lorelai sings conspiratorially to these other women:
He’s your guy when stocks are high,
But beware when they start to descend
It’s then that those louses go back to their spouses
Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.
She teaches these eager young girls survival skills to use in their future dealings with unscrupulous married men. While Madonna speaks from a very individualistic perspective- “I am a material girl”- Lorelai Lee speaks in generalities- “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”- and shares her hard-earned knowledge with the girls on stage, and the women in the cinema. Men come off very badly in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, from lecherous diamond dealer Piggy to credulous wet blanket Mr Esmond, and the real driving force behind the film is the unshakable friendship between the two female leads, who help each other to survive in a hostile world.
How to Marry a Millionaire, another Monroe comedy from 1953, has a comparable premise- three low-waged but respectable gals team up to rent a huge apartment, and use it to try and snare a millionaire each. The film, however, is almost unwatchable, as the bond between its female characters collapses and its focus ultimately shifts to the men they are trying to marry. The disappointment I felt watching How to Marry a Millionaire helped me to realise how extraordinary Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is. The former comes off as an uninteresting product of capitalist Hollywood, and its reverence for money and marriage is humourless and straightforward, whereas the latter treats Lorelai’s obsession with money as a result of her being young woman with no education living on her wits in 1953, and her desire to marry as a ruse.
The spirit of Lorelei Lee is alive and well in modern pop music, and freedom from male control is mostly framed in terms of having access to money; in place of marrying a millionaire, the goal is to become one. In ‘Irreplaceable’, it seems that Beyoncé is able to gleefully dismiss her unfaithful boyfriend largely because she is not dependent on him financially. In the video, she’s chucking him and his scruffy boxes of unimportant stuff out of her enormous mansion. How was he untrue? “Rolling her around in a car that I bought you”. What is the final indignity for the ex-boyfriend? The car is hers, and he has to leave in a taxi. Her attitude is a mix of the Madonna attitude and the Lorelei Lee attitude- money is both desirable for its own sake, because it makes you beautiful and buys you nice things, and expedient, because it allows you to choose which men you involve yourself with. This is the case with a number of Beyoncé-penned songs, from ‘Independent Women’ to ‘Countdown’.
In the documentary the ever-humble Beyoncé has made about her own life and how brilliant it is, she says:
“You know, equality is a myth, and for some reason, everyone accepts the fact that women don’t make as much money as men do…I truly believe that women should be financially independent from their men. And let’s face it, money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what’s sexy. And men define what’s feminine. It’s ridiculous.”
I read this in an interview Beyoncé did with GQ. The interview is about how Beyoncé is independent, in control of her career and culturally powerful, and the photos accompanying the interview are pretty demeaning. Hadley Freeman in The Guardian childishly criticises Bey herself for letting the side down, talking about equality in her pants, but the way I see it the interview and the photos are not dissonant, they are a perfect fit. Beyoncé braves being laughed at by a male-dominated cultural world to tell us what she has learned during her long career- that men are powerful because they own money and businesses, and our cultural standards were created by men- and her point is proven by the sexual photographs she had to be in to earn the space in a men’s magazine. As wealthy, as in control as she is, Beyoncé can’t have the career she wants without using her body as a selling point, and this is not something to criticise her for but something we can learn from.
Under capitalism and patriarchy it is super obvious that your survival and fulfilment as a woman should be tangled up with money, and that taking money and power from men, by being a rich man’s wife or an audacious female capitalist millionaire, should be seen as the best mode of liberation from gendered poverty. In this interesting article, Emma-Rose Cornwall writes about finding out that most of her possessions are uninsurable, essentially valueless. Most advertising aimed at women sells things that are used to make a woman’s body more desirable -valuable, even- but which themselves have no resale value. Mascara might make you look more like you should, but a used tube of mascara cannot be sold for money. Cosmetics, gym memberships, jewellery and clothes add value to a female body by making it more acceptable to men and sexist culture, but these, unless they are extremely expensive like Lorelei’s diamonds, are not assets in the same way as a car or a house. Instead, your body becomes the asset, in which you invest and from which you expect a return. This is obviously a risky place to store your wealth. I am not suggesting, of course, that women don’t own houses and cars- they obviously do. But they also make up the majority of low-paid and unpaid workers, are often in more precarious or part-time employment because of caring responsibilities, still often depend on a male breadwinner and nonetheless invest vastly more than men of what they do earn in the aforementioned physical acceptability-boosting items.
Instead of shying away from this stubborn facet of gender inequality, culture aimed at women appears to have embraced it. I am thinking particularly of Sex and the City and Carrie Bradshaw, a woman who seems to only buy shoes, lunch and cigarettes. In one episode Carrie has a crisis, realising that she doesn’t have enough money for a down-payment to save her flat but has spent tens of thousands of dollars on clothes and shoes, things which she can’t easily resell. Over one of their expensive power-lunches she jokes to her friends, “I have spent $40,000 on shoes, and I have no place to live. I will literally be the old woman who lived in her shoes!” The women of Sex and the City were surely intended to be a model of modern, independent women, and they terrify me, with their extreme post-feminism, their smiling complicity with lucrative, embarrassing product placement deals and their Chinese mail-order babies. They talk about sex a lot, but it’s all in the spirit of sifting through all the different types of men, looking for Mr Perfect. If that is what emancipation looks like…yeesh, I don’t want it.
I think pop culture by women could move away from Carrie Bradshaw-style liberation and slowly disentangle independence from money, success from proximity to the board room, and salvation from marriage, by focusing on community, friendship and inter-reliance between women. Recent TV shows written by women such as The Mindy Project, Girls and New Girl, while they are definitely not the angry, radical and totally unmarketable sitcoms I dream of watching, do feature female characters who have affectionate and interesting relationships with one another, and who enjoy things other than men- things like nudity, delivering babies, being a primary school teacher, writing novelty songs, getting married as a drunk joke, and so on. Also an honourable mention to Ann Perkins and Leslie Knope of Parks and Recreation, who are obviously soulmates.
The warm, delighted feeling I feel when I watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes comes from watching Dorothy and Lorelei being a team. If I were a writer, I would write a beautiful sitcom about being a team, in which you don’t have to be rich if you don’t want to, and there are better ways of not needing men than being able to buy your own car. The point would not be total independence, like being able to survive without any help, which is not necessarily a desirable goal, but a good kind of interdependence, in which the well-being of the team is more important than the material success of the individual. As individuals we obviously can’t ignore money, and shouldn’t ignore economic inequality, and as women it is hard to ignore the imperative to use our money to make our bodies more desirable; but our culture could leave these things in the background instead of using wealth and beauty as the ultimate measures of a woman’s independence and success. And that…is what I want.
