Letter: Elastic Marilyn

Sir: Regarding correspondence on Marilyn Monroe's legendary proportions (letters, 20 and 24 December), there is something I really must get off my chest.

Both Dr Ashton and Stephen Dorril are missing the point - judging from photographs taken throughout MM's career, she fluctuated between being very slim and quite ample (as in Some Like It Hot). Her charm lay not in whether she was a size 10 or a size 16, but in her beautiful face, her extraordinary sensuousness, and the fact that, big or small, she was always curvaceous, with a very desirable waist-to-hip ratio.

Why do these men find it a matter of importance to squabble about a few inches here and there, when what we should all be doing is celebrating some women's ability to leave men breathless with the sheer force of their confidence in their own beauty and sex appeal, size and age notwithstanding?

PENNY BLOOM

Peterborough, Cambridgeshire