4.9
August 1, 2012

Spare me your inspirational how-to-live-life Marilyn Monroe quote.

Marilyn Monroe? She didn’t deserve our sexist projections then, though she fulfilled them. She doesn’t deserve our feminist projections now. She deserves to be seen for the full, sad, remarkable human being that she was, now.

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Source: google.com via Wendy on Pinterest

 

We all love to love Marilyn, including me.

But every time I see someone “pin” or share a quote of hers about how to live life…well, I’ve read about her life, and she was (as many of us are, and that’s okay) miserable. She was used. She was alone, and often lonely.

Source: imgfave.com via Daria on Pinterest

 

Yes, she was lovely, full-hearted, and full of life. Yes, there’s nothing wrong with suffering and depression and misery. We all go through our inner torments. But was she some icon of feminism? Hardly.

 

Eleanor Roosevelt, on the other hand…y’all should be quoting her a little more often.

~

PS: one of your favorite quotes by Marilyn? Not by Marilyn:

“I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”

~

The above inspired by the rude, but accurate, below:

 

 

On the other hand:

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Regarding the second slide above. ? Theism—hero-worship of any kind—is bad for us. It lets us off the hook: if they’re perfect, we’re just lowly neurotics and can’t help serve or save this world. News alert: no one is perfect. It’s up to us to help. Stop tearing people down after building them up. They were never so great or so evil. Fan-culture and mob hate are the same thing: two extreme ends of our putting folks up on pedestals. Read about the Buddhist notion of theism on elephantjournal.com ??? PS: Hemingway was an asshole. He was also amazing. He killed himself after a decade-plus of being followed by the FBI, which created understandable paranoia. Plus: “…Over the course of his life he had weathered malaria, dysentery, skin cancer, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, and these maladies had taken their toll. Additionally, he had suffered six serious, essentially untreated concussions (two within back-to-back years), which left him with headaches, mental fogginess, ringing in his ears, and very likely a traumatic brain injury. Several years before his suicide, he was almost killed in two separate plane crashes, in two days, which ruptured his liver, spleen, and kidneys, sprained several limbs, dislocated his shoulder, crushed vertebra, left first degrees burns over much of his body, and cracked his skull, giving him one of the aforementioned concussions (this one so severe that cerebral fluid seeped out of his ear). He was in constant pain afterwards, which he dealt with by drinking even more heavily than he usually did. Hemingway had untreated hemochromatosis, which creates an overload of iron in the blood, causing painful damage to joints and organs, cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, diabetes, and depression. (Hemochromatosis runs in families, which may partly explain why suicide ran in Hemingway’s; his grandfather, father, brother, sister, and granddaughter all killed themselves.) Contd below

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And they just keep on coming. My prior post: Regarding the second slide above. ? Theism—hero-worship of any kind—is bad for us. It lets us off the hook: if they’re perfect, we’re just lowly neurotics and can’t help serve or save this world. News alert: no one is perfect. It’s up to us to help. Stop tearing people down after building them up. They were never so great or so evil. Fan-culture and mob hate are the same thing: two extreme ends of our putting folks up on pedestals. Read about the Buddhist notion of theism on elephantjournal.com ??? PS: Hemingway was an asshole. He was also amazing. He killed himself after a decade-plus of being followed by the FBI, which created understandable paranoia. Plus: “…Over the course of his life he had weathered malaria, dysentery, skin cancer, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol, and these maladies had taken their toll. Additionally, he had suffered six serious, essentially untreated concussions (two within back-to-back years), which left him with headaches, mental fogginess, ringing in his ears, and very likely a traumatic brain injury. Several years before his suicide, he was almost killed in two separate plane crashes, in two days, which ruptured his liver, spleen, and kidneys, sprained several limbs, dislocated his shoulder, crushed vertebra, left first degrees burns over much of his body, and cracked his skull, giving him one of the aforementioned concussions (this one so severe that cerebral fluid seeped out of his ear). He was in constant pain afterwards, which he dealt with by drinking even more heavily than he usually did. Hemingway had untreated hemochromatosis, which creates an overload of iron in the blood, causing painful damage to joints and organs, cirrhosis of the liver, heart disease, diabetes, and depression. (Hemochromatosis runs in families, which may partly explain why suicide ran in Hemingway’s; his grandfather, father, brother, sister, and granddaughter all killed themselves.) Contd below

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