Sex Symbol

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by -Deborah M. Mix

The "sex symbol" in twentieth-century American culture is, for the most part, a product of the movies, which over the decades has offered a dizzying variety of male and female images to American audiences: the Vamp, the Red-Hot-Mama, the Golddigger, the Exotic Other, the Girl (and Guy) Next Door, the Femme Fatale, the Strong, Silent Type, the Sex Bomb, the Sex Kitten, the Latin Lover, the Matinee Idol, the Punk, and the Hunk, among many others. Before films became popular entertainment in the 1910s, attractive models having particular standards of "desirability" were only beginning to be seen in the new mass culture, as with the Gibson Girl and Gibson Guy images found in mass-circulation magazines. But once Americans were able to attend films, it was possible for millions to see the same kinds of women and men being held up as models of beauty and sensuality on the silver screen. Over the years, practically the only thread of commonality to be found throughout the various manifestations of the movie sex symbol have been racial and ethnic--the Hollywood sex symbol is almost always white, almost always of northern or western European heritage, and almost always American, though "exotic" examples from Asian, Latino, and African cultures have had their place in film as well as print media. Indeed, two of the earliest sex symbols, Theda Bara and Rudolph Valentino, did not fit these stereotypes. In general, what defines a person as a "sex symbol" has little or nothing to do with who that person is off the movie or television screen. Instead, sex-symbol status places the emphasis on the "symbol," on the performer's ability to fit into a role that offers, either overtly or covertly, a model for and release of sexual tension. These roles have shaped the development of women's and men's sexual consciousness and confidence during the twentieth century.

One of the earliest sex symbols was Theda Bara (born Theodosia Goodman) who appeared as a vampire woman in the 1915 film A Fool There Was. In contrast to the prevailing and desexualized image of wholesome European-American womanhood embodied by Mary Pickford, Bara's Vamp embodied a dark, exotic, and foreign sensuality, a kind of open sexuality not permitted to white American women until much later in the century--though it is precisely this kind of sexuality that was appropriated by some of the black blues divas of the 1920s such as Bessie Smith, Sippie Wallace, and Ma Rainey. In later films, such as The Vixen and The She-Devil, Bara's Vamp would entrap men with her sexual wiles, only to be punished in the end for transgressing gender roles. Though Bara's career in film was short-lived, the figure of the Vamp as an important sex symbol has marked American film ever since.

As Americans moved into the 1920s, when the androgynous flapper look was in vogue, Mae West, with her unfashionably zaftig figure and unapologetic bawdiness, offered the Red-Hot-Mama as a counterpoint to the more popular ingenue or girl-next-door image of stars like Clara Bow. Known for her humorous quips and innuendo ("Come up and see me some time"; "What're you doin', honey? Makin' love or takin' inventory?"); for styling one of her characters as "Lady Lou, one of the finest women who ever walked the streets"; and even for being jailed in 1926 for obscenity, Mae West both exuded sexuality and contained it through humor, offering a sexual gratification that she never got a chance to deliver, though she played the Red-Hot-Mama role well into her 80s. Sexual transgressiveness has also been a part of Mae West's camp appeal to gay men, especially with her role in the 1970 film adaptation of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge, a romp in polymorphous sexuality.

In the 1930s, Hollywood crafted the Golddigger in the person of Jean Harlow. Harlow's platinum-blonde hair and wisecracking persona set her in the tradition of Mae West, but her brassy, open sensuality seemed disconcerting from the mouth of a sweet-looking young woman who was "out to make a killing" in more ways than one. "Would you be shocked if I changed into something more comfortable?" she asked in Hell's Angels (1930). The Hays Production Code, which set rules for the depiction of sexuality in the movies in the 1930s, is often seen in part as a response to Harlow's unabashed sensuality.

The other major sex symbol archetype of the 1930s was Swedish actress Greta Garbo, the Exotic Other. Garbo's passions seemed to stem not from erotic desire, but from some unspeakable internal suffering, and the interest in Garbo seemed to stem mainly from the fact that she was foreign, different, and could, therefore, be made to symbolize whatever the viewer desired. Always carefully made up and glamorous, Garbo exuded a melancholy persona that seemed designed to draw viewers in to her personal torment, creating a sense of intimacy between actor and audience. When, in Grand Hotel (1932), she uttered her famous line about wanting to be left alone, audiences responded to her faintly mysterious Swedish accent and swooned over her noble, classy, and discreet suffering. Male characters wanted her, but she always wanted the wrong men, almost never achieving on-screen bliss. Her allure for American audiences was so great that, when she left the acting world in 1941, her disappearance excited years of cultish obsession. Don McPherson and Louise Brody fueled this myth in their profile of Garbo, claiming that she "remained an enigmatic and unreachable phenomenon. ... She seems to wish she were invisible: it is not so much a face as a shadow of one, suggested by isolated glimpses and memories, inscrutable and austere."