I am who I am because of millions of women who have gone before me. It’s taken a long time but I am comfortable, emphatically comfortable and happy to be a woman. I’m a certain type of woman as well. I’m a historian, or at least part of me is, Ican’t help but look back on the hundreds of women and say yes, without Hildegarde of Bergen I wouldn’t be here, without Simone De Beauvoir I wouldn’t be here.
More importantly today, without Bettie Page I wouldn’t be here. Not on this internet, not with my past, not having been comfortable in my very open sexuality, in my very open submissive streak or hell even my lesbian tendancies.
A woman who most feminists will probably tell you set womens rights back years died today. A woman who was the forerunner of the sexual revolution, who brought d/s into the mainstream and who was never ashamed of her sexuality, died today.
We women who speak with our bodies are standing up for equality of the sexes, equality of the senses and one of… I can’t help it…one of us there is a kinship but I cannot hope to explain it… one of us left the planet today.
Perhaps it is too arrogant to claim kinship. Far better to say a woman I admired died, but that isn’t what I feel, isn’t what I feel I mean.
She had a good heart, and there’s few enough folk like that.
Please tell me you didn’t know she died of a heart attack before you wrote that.
You aren’t the only one in that odd form of mourning right now.
Bettie Page had two eras of her career, the second kickstarted by (of all things) Dave Stevens’ The Rocketeer, in which she ‘played’ the love interest. The number of alt-cultures her career’s fusion of burlesque, pin-up, pulp, and art makes her a forerunner too is remarkable.
And I would say that it had to be Bettie, that she was not simply an interchangeable, replaceable face.
Course I didn’t, and I wasn’t talking physically anyway.