Pretty Woman into Gold Digger: Deconstructing the Sexual Politics

A woman being trashed by words is not a novel thing. The past few decades have archived literature that tells the story of how some women met their fate of being the subject of gossip or ended up being cautionary tales. This paper outlines how women fell from being the admired 'pretty woman' to monstrous figures and perceived as a predator and labeled as 'gold diggers', or 'la belle dame sans merci' the study is done qualitatively through texts such as Gold Digger; The Outrageous Life and Times of Peggy Hopkins Joyce by Constance Rosenblum (2000), Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (1925), "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" by John Keats (1819). The paper unfolds the sexual politics of males and females in terms of materialism and beauty by employing the Theory of Deviance propounded by Howard Becker in his book The Outsider in 1963 and the concept of Naomi Wolf in The Beauty Myth in 1990, providing the arguments on the politics of both genders on how the mentioned labels are inscribed.