I have to admit, I’ve never been on board the big Marilyn Monroe bandwagon. It’s not that I hate her; it’s just that after so many years of seeing troubled, drug-addicted celebrities die young, I don’t think she was all that special.

Hold your stones, girls.

There’s a lot to be said about this woman – a lot that’s undoubtedly as fascinating as she was beautiful. What most people find the most striking, of course, is her untimely death, and the tragedy that surrounded her in life. I really believe that if she had not died near the height of her popularity—if she had grown old—she would not be placed on a pedestal the way she is now. The fact that she was deeply troubled to the point of dying of a drug overdose doesn’t attest to her suitability as an inspirational role model.

I see women posting pictures of her on social media all the time, yet this was a woman who got her early roles based (to some degree) more on her sexuality than her talent. Am I slut-shaming? No. There’s a difference between accepting a woman’s behaviour and glorifying it, and I’m not about to glorify a woman for doing things she likely would not have done if she had not been in such deep emotional pain.

I know you’re probably mad at me. But have you read her biography? I can quite honestly say that if she were someone I knew in person, I would not want to be her friend. Sure, she sounded very sweet, but so are a lot of people. The truth is, according to this biography, she was unpredictable and unhappy, and not even the long-term therapy she received was enough to help her.

I’m not saying I don’t care about the problems she went through. I care deeply. I think her problems are the problems of many women, and it’s depressing. But we need to help these women, not idolize them. Marilyn’s therapist should not have crossed the professional boundaries with her that he did (having her interact socially with his family), inhibiting his ability to heal her. And yes, I believe she really did need people to love her – for more than just her body and ability to make a ton of money.

Marilyn was a sex icon, and it served her well in her career, but terribly in her personal life. That pedestal the public put her on really was hard to come down from, and the abuse she allegedly endured in her childhood didn’t appear to help her self-image in the least.

Are other tragic female celebrities who suffered sudden, premature deaths destined to be that legendary? I highly doubt girls everywhere will one day be putting up posters of Brittany Murphy and Anna Nicole Smith in their bedrooms, quoting them, or trying to look like them.

So what sets Marilyn apart? I honestly don’t know. Maybe it’s that she’s from a long-lost era of glamour that we desperately want to recapture in our own lives. Maybe she stood apart as the first celebrity to be so overtly sexual in an age of innocence. For me, those are not good enough reasons to raise her above the rest of the troubled stars.

Instead of glorifying her, adoring her, worshipping her, let’s instead view her story as a cautionary tale of how it can all go terribly wrong.