“Two Girls Standing Up for Each Other”: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Paris Hilton, and the Power of Strategic Persona

Women have always weaponized their personas as a survival strategy in cultures that underestimate them. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Paris Hilton aren’t just about blondes playing dumb; they’re about women using caricature to gain power in systems designed to deny it.

Lorelei Lee is underestimated precisely because she seems unserious. But that’s the genius: she performs naivety as a shield. When she writes, “There is nothing so wonderful as two girls when they stand up for each other” (ch. 1), she reveals exactly what the world wants women to forget: solidarity is a superpower. And performance can be the key to survival.

Many critics read Lorelei’s character as shallow, but the text tells a different story. The phrase “stand up for each other” flips the stereotype of catty female rivalry. Sedgwick (and later Anita Loos) shows women playing their roles strategically while maintaining deep loyalty beneath the performance. Lorelei isn’t naïve; she’s perceptive enough to play the caricature and still fight for her friend.

This is where Paris Hilton becomes the perfect modern parallel. For years, Hilton curated the “dumb blonde” persona to distract from the fact that she was quietly monopolizing reality TV, beauty branding, and early influencer culture. Only decades later did she reveal the persona was deliberate. Lorelei and Paris belong to the same lineage of women who exploit sexist assumptions for gain.

But the performance itself is only half the story. The other half is friendship. In a society that expects women to compete, the act of “standing up for each other” becomes rebellious. The novel insists that women do not naturally hate each other; they are taught to pretend to. And when they refuse that training, even through the mask of a persona, they threaten the entire system.

And beneath the glitter, the gossip, the performance, is the radical truth: women have always been smarter than the script written for them.