When Kim Kardashian wore Marilyn Monroe’s dress to the Met Gala, huffy types suffered a “collective fit of the vapours”, says Julie Burchill in The Spectator. You’d have thought someone had “wiped their nose” – or worse – on the Stars and Stripes in front of the White House. And of course, Monroe is a monumental cultural figure. But if I had to choose between the two as a “role model” for young women, “I’d choose Kim”. Why? Because in a man’s world, the best way for women to be is “tough, not tender”.
“Both women were shamed for their nakedness, but the tough one toughed it out.” Marilyn never got over selling herself to pay the rent and “putting out to get roles”; Kim parlayed a leaked sex tape into a “billion-dollar empire”. The Kardashian clan is a “functioning matriarchy”, where men come and go and the females have the final say. “Marilyn was used by men until the end, the last years of her life becoming a two-Kennedy car-crash.” And unlike poor Marilyn, Kim – “whose bum was once her raison d’être” – is likely to live to a ripe old age. As she shows, the wages of sin can be rather rewarding, so long as one holds “one’s head high, sticks one’s bottom out and does not rely overmuch on the kindness of strangers”.