In Male Fans Made Bettie Page a Star, but Female Fans Made Her an Icon
despite a childhood in Nashville, Tennessee rife with neglect, sexual abuse by her father, and extreme poverty—she managed to graduate at the top of her high school class, earn a college degree, and forge her own career…Heterosexual men tend to love Page for obvious reasons, but for many women, Page symbolizes self-confidence, unapologetic sexuality, and bold authenticity.
She offers an alternative to the narrow and often unattainable ideal of beauty that the dominant culture imposes on women,…They find her unconventional beauty appealing, but it’s mostly her attitude: It’s fun, accessible, and completely open, and there’s a sense that anyone can do this.
via Betty Page in Bondage Vol. 5 — Vintage Fetish Zines, Photography & Art
from her biography:
“The only bondage posing I ever did was for Irving Klaw and his sister Paula. Usually every other Saturday he had a session for four or five hours with four or five models and a couple of extra photographers, and in order to get paid you had to do an hour of bondage. And that was the only reason I did it. I never had any inkling along that line. I don’t really disapprove of it; I think you can do your own thing as long as you’re not hurting anybody else — that’s been my philosophy ever since I was a little girl.”
“I was never one who was squeamish about nudity. I don’t believe in being promiscuous about it, but several times I thought of going to a nudist colony.”
“Being in the nude isn’t a disgrace unless you’re being promiscuous about it. After all, when God created Adam and Eve, they were stark naked. And in the Garden of Eden, God was probably naked as a jaybird too!”
“I don’t know what they mean by an icon. I never thought of myself as being that. It seems strange to me. I was just modeling, thinking of as many different poses as possible. I made more money modeling than being a secretary. I had a lot of free time. You could go back to work after an absence of a few months. I couldn’t do that as a secretary.”
The later Betty Page, 6 Startling Things I Didn’t Know about Bettie Page
Bettie did Bondage – in the 1950s – and lots of it!
for Bettie Page, with all her smiley, joyous sexual freedom, to suggest that sex was simply a normal natural part of life, was quite simply revolutionary
Here is a classic account of how Betty worked during a bondage shoot from this link
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