A true movie star if there ever was one, Marilyn Monroe was a larger than life figure who embodied, literally, a wide-open sexuality that revolutionized puritanical America, its films, its entertainment industry, its cultural icons, its politics, its sexual mores and practices. Even with three husbands in her column, whether Marilyn herself ever participated in this revolution remains to be seen, but the long-lasting effects of her image, her movies, her photos, her charisma, are still felt today. She came of age as an actress in an extremely repressed post-war America that had long since lost its innocence on the battlefields of Europe and the atolls of the Pacific. After so much violence and killing, there was no possible way that the millions of returning soldiers could live in the pre-war innocence of their childhoods. They had seen too much, killed to many, been wounded, lost friends and colleagues, opend up concentration camps. They were jaded, cynical, tired. The image of the blond bombshell, i.e., Jean Harlow et al., had been around for awhile, but a sexually repressed America had always shoved these images to the margins of culture by designating all such women and images as sinful, dirty, or bad. Marilyn came along and changed all of that, bringing sexuality into the mainstream of the American conversation, eventually changing the way America looked at itself and the way it discussed sex. The reception of a novel such as “Peyton Place” is proof of that. These changes in American post-war culture were not brought on by Marilyn, but Marilyn and others certainly nudged Americans to question such important issues such as equal rights for all, racial or sexual. Questions of economic equality would have to wait decades. We are known by our repressions, and the interest of pop culture in Marilyn as an icon of sexual desire suggests that social repressions only last so long before older generations are swept away and younger generations re-evaluate what is going on and how they will deal with it. Some of Marilyn’s movies are important, if not unforgettable, but the revolutionary nature of her presence is what changed how America talked about sex, desire, bodies, and relationships–“The Seven Year Itch” is a prime example of this change. She and her image became an economic venture developed by Hollywood to take advantage of her marketability as a desired object of the male gaze. Regardless of who Marilyn Monroe was as a person, it was her appearance as a sexually desirable woman which still gives life to her iconic image some fifty years after her tragic death. Even actresses such as Elizabeth Taylor or Jane Russell, both of whom were very present in post-war film never achieved the giant iconic status of Marilyn Monroe. Taylor, especially in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” or “Suddenly Last Summer,” was as alluring or desirable as Monroe, and Russell was more blatantly sexual, especially in “The Outlaw,” than Monroe ever was. Yet in a movie such as “Some Like It Hot” where sexual roles are played footloose and fancy free by the entire cast, Monroe’s character oozes a white-hot feminine sexuality that eclipses all other performances in the film. After America makes those films, any of them, they could not put the genie back in the bottle and pretend like sex doesn’t exist, which, of course, was very bad for all three actresses, taking an enormous toll on their private lives and tormented relationships. Today, we live in a very wide-open society that, although it still has many hang-ups and repressions, is finally able to at least discuss sex without blushing, turning away, or giggling too much. Yet, for Marilyn the price was high: no privacy, tormented relationships, possible drug usage, paparazzi everywhere, insomnia, which caused her to be difficult and unpredictable. She was fired from her last film for not appearing on set for the shooting schedule. She died of a drug overdose, possibly suicide, in 1962.