What is it About Bettie Page?
Bettie Page just died at the age of 85, and I never really knew too much about her (after all, who did?) but something about her always caught my imagination.
One of the most interesting things about her was that, at least in recent years, women seemed to like her as much as (if not more than) men did. What was it about Bettie Page that appealed to women when so many modern day erotic models seem so repulsive?
Is it that her retro sexuality is tame and unthreatening compared to the women seen in modern images? Is it that her body, natural and unravished by plastic surgery, reminds us more of our own bodies than those of iconic women now? Do we admire her for her courage to model for photographs that were unacceptable at the time? Do we just like to see a sexy woman with black hair when it’s common knowledge that gentlemen prefer blondes?
Bettie Page once remarked that young women told her that she helped them come out of their shells. Her legacy seems important because she unifies people with diverging views on sexuality. Hailed by feminists, Hugh Hefner, and many people in between, she may hold the key to healing a sexual schism that exists in erotica today. If we can answer the question why we like Bettie Page, perhaps we can learn to differentiate between pornography that degrades and pornography that inspires.
What I see in Bettie Page is a woman, not a girl, with her own mind and desires. She became famous when she was around 28 and remained popular until she was about 34 when she decided to stop modeling for photographs but was still widely popular. Unapologetic and unashamed of who she was, she said “I was just myself. I didn’t know any other way to be, or any other way to live.”
She seems a far cry from the “barely legal” models of today who often don’t have the emotional maturity to fully appreciate what they’re doing. Apparently, the average age of first orgasm for women is 18 (here) and so the young girls you often see in porn are, in a way, sexual infants. Once I asked a friend of mine who was a stripper how old the girls were at her club, and she said that there weren’t any over about 27. Bettie Page didn’t really get started until she was 28!
In this perfection-oriented photoshop world, we can synthesize “ideal” women with perfect skin, hair, eyes, and breasts. But these synthesized women have no minds and no desires – they seem as soulless as androids. The young women in porn almost come across the same way – they look beautiful and perfect, but their desire seems fake and overdone as if they don’t know what real sex is like. To me, pornography becomes degrading when the desires of the women acting in it are obviously unimportant to the eroticism of it.
Bettie Page always seemed to be herself regardless of what pictures she was in. Whether she was posing on a beach, modeling with a whip in hand, or being spanked by a severe looking woman, she always seemed innocent and unashamed. Her pictures were an expression of some sort of inner essence she exuded which inspired women to express their own natures, instead of an embodiment of an impossible ideal that can only serve to highlight the supposed flaws of the real.
Filed under: porn | 1 Comment
Tags: Bettie Page, erotica, feminism, porn
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I think that’s a pretty broad (heh) definition of degrading for porn. The desires of the actors should not have to be linked to the erotic value. Some people get turned on by watching naked chicks popping balloons. I think those people are probably in the minority and I doubt the women in those films give two shits about balloon popping. I doubt they desire the balloons the same way their audience does… but I don’t think you can call that degrading. And the audience doesn’t need to care about the feelings of the actors, and in some regards, the entire point is to NOT care, or to go AGAINST the “desires” of the pictured individuals. But I put “desires” in quotes because everything you see in non-amateur porn is fiction, fake, not real. So how can we guess at or make value assessments based on desire when the reality is that people are being paid to act in particular ways?
For me, porn boils down to a turn on, or a turn off. Degradation does not factor in to it. Sometimes watching people be “degraded” (quotes again b/c its fake) is the entire point for someone. The way I see it, if you are over 18, mentally competent, consenting, signing contracts, and being paid, then whatever you agree to do is completely acceptable. And that’s the point because viewers want to be able to be stimulated by their fetishes, even the horrible ones, without having to worry about the well-being of the people involved. If you had to it wouldn’t be fantasy, and that’s what the vast majority of porn is.