Bombshells like Marilyn Monroe are back in style.(The Orange County Register)

On those who dismissed her as a bubble-headed bimbo, Marilyn Monroe has enacted a posthumous revenge. The role Monroe typified in life and on screen, the bombshell, is back in style. Witness the curvy, coquettish women on the covers of Maxim and other magazines. The return of "va-va-voom" as a compliment. Or the new wave of women's self-help books, such as "The Bombshell Manual of Style," that define fulfillment as a pedicure.

Monroe would be 75 today, and had she lived, "she'd still have it," says Laren Stover, author of the bombshell manual. Dead, she's bigger than ever.

"I don't know whether it's revisionist history, or when you die a lot of things are overlooked," says Pamela Ezell, an assistant professor at Chapman University who studies the depiction of women in media. "But she's more of an icon in death than in life."

And Monroe is an icon today in a way even she would find surprising: a feminist one.

In the decade after Monroe's death in 1962, the backlash against the objectified airhead _ as pundits considered her _ was palpable. Monroe represented an antiquated stereotype, a woman used and abused by men. Our image of her now, though, "is that she knew she was a commodity _ and she knew how to market herself," Ezell says.

Monroe was in control of her sexuality, and though one may argue that the bargain was Faustian, at least she knew the terms.

"A sex symbol becomes a thing. I just hate being a thing," she once said. "But if I'm going to be a symbol of something, I'd rather have it sex than some other things we've got symbols of."