Remembering Bettie Page
An interesting interview with Bettie Page
Bettie Page’s humility has always gotten the best of her. Figuring that at age thirty-four her modeling days were over, she graciously stepped down, dropped out, found God and enrolled in Bible school. Unaware of her overwhelming — and ever-growing — impact on collective American sexuality over the years, she lived simply and quietly, as always. Although some of Page’s more obsessed fans have recently brought the extent of her popularity to her attention (hence all the mystery about her whereabouts), she doesn’t pretend to understand it, nor has she exploited it.
I have mixed feelings about this interview. Obviously Bette was from a different time. Her ideas are a mix of great timeless insights and strongly conservative ideals.
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 never looked down my nose at it.
There is something so nonchalant about her, and perhaps somewhat endearing.
I’m thinking of one particular picture where you’ve apparently tied and gagged a young woman with a particularly scared expression on her face in the back of a car. Have you ever felt that pictures like that could be detrimental to the way women are perceived and treated or is that purely fantasy, completely separate from reality? I don’t think it’s degrading to women… or disrespectful to women. Those pictures weren’t hurting anybody. It’s just something that someone likes to have, pictures of somebody tied up in the trunk of a car [laughs].
However, while she seems to be mostly non-judgmental of others, she isn’t exactly trying to share her sexuality as openly as today’s generation has been known to do.
Well, I just don’t think you should have sex poses and you certainly shouldn’t have anybody else in the pictures, certainly not a male with a female. I think what’s in Hustler magazine and even some in Playboy now is on the dirty side. And it shouldn’t be allowed to go through the mail and be on the newsstands where kids and young people can be looking at that stuff.
So, for me, it leaves a disconnect. It’s slightly disturbing (thought now a big surprise) to think about how this icon of sexuality wasn’t really the kind of person I might have thought of from her pictures. There was something so natural about her poses, yet her intentions were so far from what I would imagine. We all have our reasons for putting ourselves out in front of others and sexuality really can’t be narrowed down to a few pictures, yet, it often is. How well do we draw people in with our image (literally)? It’s as if we want to be captured in the most perfect immortal expression of whatever-it-is-we-think-other-people-wan-to-hear, but we can’t really control how our true thoughts are conveyed, how they might be so utterly different from what others perceive for years and years to come, or how something that doesn’t really exist can become idolized. If it can help some people open up and be happier with their own selves, then it’s great, but what’s missing is a connection to reality outside of our own selves.
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