Over a subway grate a white dress floats up. Holding it down with both hands, she laughs into the camera. The scene is from The Seven Year Itch (1955). More than half a century on, this image of Marilyn Monroe is still reproduced worldwide, still working as the single picture that stands for twentieth-century sexual appeal. A single bodily image coming to represent the sexual sensibility of an age across time and borders: that is the sex symbol.

A sex symbol is a person widely recognised in mass media as an embodiment of sexual appeal. The term took hold in the Hollywood golden age of the twentieth century and has since been applied, across film, music, modelling and sport, to figures who represent the sexual aesthetic of their time. This article covers the rise of the term, the classical Hollywood period, the diversification from the 1960s, the Japanese context, and the male sex symbol.

The term

The English expression settled into popular print in 1950s America, where photo magazines such as Life and Look used it repeatedly of Marilyn Monroe, and it became standard vocabulary for the Hollywood star system. Earlier, from the 1920s to the 1940s, narrower terms were used: the vamp (the destroying seductress) and the sex kitten (the young, charming sexual presence).

As the word symbol indicates, the force of the term lies in the way a particular person’s body, gesture, voice and style sum up the shape of an age’s desire. A person who is merely the object of some sexual preference is not called a sex symbol; the title arises only when the person’s image functions as a reference point for the sexual sensibility of society as a whole.

Classical Hollywood (1920s–1950s)

The silent era’s figures were the “flapper” generation: Clara Bow, the “It Girl”, along with Jean Harlow and Mae West. In step with women’s suffrage, bobbed hair and short skirts in the 1920s, the film industry produced and circulated an image of the sexually active modern woman.

The talkie era of the 1930s and 1940s, under the strict regulation of the Hays Code (the Production Code, adopted 1930 and enforced from 1934), refined a staging of the “mature woman” through suggestion and symbol. Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner and Veronica Lake carried Hollywood in roles charged with sexual implication. In the 1950s, Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962), Brigitte Bardot, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren and Gina Lollobrigida circulated worldwide as symbols of an age in which postwar prosperity and Cold War tension stood together. Monroe’s early death (1962) above all became the starting point for the mythologising of the sex symbol in later twentieth-century mass culture.

The 1960s–1970s turn

The sexual revolution of the later 1960s, the abolition of the Hays Code (1968), and the rise of second-wave feminism made the image of the sex symbol more various and more complicated. Raquel Welch, Jane Fonda and Farrah Fawcett appeared as symbols of a new era, while a feminist discourse that criticised the very consumption of women as symbols accumulated in parallel.

From the 1970s, the British and American men’s magazines Playboy and Penthouse accelerated icon production by rotating their candidate symbols monthly, with national editions running in parallel in France and Italy. The lifespan of an icon shortened, and the symbol shifted from a single presence representing an age to a consumer good renewed each year and month.

Diversification from the 1980s

From the 1980s the bearers of the symbol spread to models, singers, athletes and television personalities. Madonna, Cindy Crawford, Sharon Stone, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Pamela Anderson each functioned as symbols against different industries and different aesthetics. With the spread of the internet from the 1990s and of social media in the 2000s, the routes of generation and circulation expanded dramatically, shifting from a single national star system to a multilayered icon culture in which the global and the local coexist.

The Japanese context

Japan has expressed the equivalent concept in vocabulary specific to each age: the prewar “queens of the silver screen” (Tanaka Kinuyo, Hara Setsuko), the postwar “sun-tribe women”, the “queens of pink film”, and the “charismatic actresses” of the dawn of the AV industry (Kuroki Kaori, Iijima Ai, Aoi Sora). From the 1980s the English loan “sex symbol” settled into Japanese and is now standard for describing female stars across gravure modelling, AV, music and fashion. The lineages of the gravure idol and the AV actress formed a distinctively Japanese sex-symbol culture, in which weekly-magazine gravure, photo books, AV and television variety interlock to reproduce symbols on many levels.

The male sex symbol

The male sex symbol, though named less often than the female, has run continuously: Rudolph Valentino (1920s), Marlon Brando and James Dean (1950s), Sean Connery (1960s), Robert Redford (1970s), Brad Pitt (1990s) and David Beckham (2000s) each functioned as a symbol of male appeal in their time. As gender norms shifted, the space in which the male body could be openly discussed as an object of sexual attention widened, and the present tendency is for male and female sex symbols to be put into words on equal terms.

See also

• Sexual revolution
• History of American pornography
• Postwar sexual culture
• Pink film