Bettie Page 1923 - 2008

I missed this sad news which occurred earlier in the week but the amazing Bettie Page passed away at age 85. Page was the original pin-up girl and in a time of sexual repression, particularly amongst females, she challenged the dominant cultural ideologies and America’s idea of conventional sex and/or sexiness. If you want to know more about Page I recommend Mary Harron’s film The Notorious Bettie Page which is a superb retelling of Page’s early life and America’s political climate. You can pick it up from most mainstream DVD rental stores. Otherwise the following obituary, which appeared in the UK Telegraph, is a fitting tribute to a true sexual icon.

Bettie Page: Look how far we haven't come...

Bettie Page, the playful Fifties centrefold who died on Thursday at the age of 85, showed women how to be daring beauties. But is today's generation taking her legacy for granted?

By Hannah Betts
Bettie Page, the Fifties centrefold who died on Thursday at the age of 85, made a career out of reducing men to rubble. But with her all-American physique, Cleopatran tresses, and blithe insouciance about being immortalised in states of undress, she also had an extraordinary effect on her own sex. The "Miss Pin-up Girl of the World", who rose to fame after she posed in 1955 in Hugh Hefner's newly launched Playboy magazine and became one most photographed women of the last century, she achieved that rare feat of being an object of masculine lust no less admired by women.

Her role in the sexual revolution may have been in a minor key compared with the advent of feminism or the contraceptive pill. However, her jaunty up-and-at-'em approach to matters erotic sanctioned the idea that sex was a normal – or, at times, divertingly abnormal – part of the female repertoire.

There was something genuinely radical about her embodiment of a certain joie de vivre. Page herself once observed that: "Young women say I helped them come out of their shells." By her own acknowledgment, she was the girl next door who got the girl next door thinking.

Interesting, then – suggestive, one might say – that the week that marked her passing witnessed a flourishing of 21st-century cheesecakery.

Tonight, the latest Miss World will be crowned from a phalanx of leering lovelies in Johannesburg. The world's most widely-watched annual TV show is expected to attract the biggest turnout in its 58-year history.

Meanwhile, closer to home, more than 400 London undergraduates are undergoing remarkably homogenous metamorphoses in the quest to find "Miss University London", a beauty contest for a post-feminist age open to students at colleges in the capital. Dubbed by organisers "the ultimate contest of off-campus brains and beauty", the winner will be presented with her sash and tiara at a grand final in February, protests permitting.

A Cambridge undergraduate has also provoked outrage by posing, Page 3-style, for her student rag, while even those who might be considered old enough to know better, notably that most quotidian of sex symbols Jennifer Aniston, has been jumping on the bandwagon by shedding her kit for GQ.

Such behaviour invariably provokes consternation, the Stepford Wife poses of the Miss University London contestants being especially troublesome. Many will shake their heads and interpret this deluge as further evidence of the corrupting influence of people like Page.

And, yet, the continuing popularity of "The Queen of Curves" may reveal some of the nuances behind what motivates today's women to make spectacles of themselves in this most apparently retrogressive of manners.

Ariel Levy, American author of the Female Chauvinist Pigs, an influential book on 'raunch culture', critiques the conflation between exhibitionism and liberation by asking "why young women today are embracing raunchy aspects of our culture that would likely have caused their feminist foremothers to vomit".

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd lamented feminism's usurpation by narcissism when she said: "When Gloria Steinem wrote that 'all women are Bunnies,' she did not mean it as a compliment; it was a feminist call to arms. Decades later, it's just an aesthetic fact… all women can look like inflatable dolls."

Those of us wont to complain that we have been let down by the younger generation's body-brandishing superficiality ignore the disservice that we older, more ideological types did them by making them believe that feminism and the playful expression of sexuality were somehow incompatible. In fact, as every schoolgirl ought, yet all-too frequently fails to know, such self-expression was one of the movement's most fundamental gifts.

French feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray infamously revelled in their fur coats and their jouissance. Meanwhile, if the "dungaree feminism" of the Anglo-American tradition gave rise to innumerable august achievements, its most perverse was a generation of post-feminists content to repackage rebellion as the opportunity to dress up and strip off.

Celebrated modern-day burlesque artist Dita Von Teese, whose own brand of voluptuosity is straight from the school of Page, today told the Telegraph: "With the passing of Bettie, we have lost yet another great 20th century icon. She dared to be different all those decades ago, combining an erotic fetishism and pin-up playfulness with a little wink of the eye. She certainly inspired me, and will be remembered by the world as a daring beauty and style icon for ever."

Page's biography may not offer much by way of liberation, encompassing, as it did, parental abuse, an inability to profit from her own image, and a descent into mental illness. However, her iconography enjoyed a life beyond such squalor.

Images of Page will continue to hold a resonance, whether pouncing in leopard-skin, flashing her magnificent bosom, or, yes, even gagged and bound. Sex, as Page's many incarnations taught Middle America, is curious, complicated and, above all, fun – not least when untrammelled by dogma.