“Making fun of sex”: textual and sexual gaps in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Anita Loos’s famous novel belongs in the feminist modernist canon as a humorous yet pointed critique of the persistent double standard surrounding female sexuality in 1920s America. An inventive narrative technique built around gaps and silences allows Loos to tell a story of sex work without explicit mention of sexual situations while hinting at her protagonist Lorelei Lee’s using her wits as well as her body to defy conventions and acquire financial security. Lorelei works smartly within a limiting system to maximize profit and self-interest while performing outward legitimacy and propriety, and Loos’s novel enacts this double bind through revealing textual erasures that expose the moral hypocrisy of the men who purport to support and “educate” Lorelei. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes affirms the power of humor to enhance feminist themes and modernist techniques.