Seeing through the crap ...
Bettie Page, the 1950s pinup girl whose natural looks and risque fetish poses triggered a cult following four decades after she turned her back on modeling, has died. She was 85.Page died late yesterday in a Los Angeles hospital after suffering a heart attack more than a week ago, her agent Mark Roesler said in a statement. “She captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality,” said Roesler. “She is the embodiment of beauty.”
The busty “Dark Angel” from Tennessee was one of the most- photographed women of her era, striking a chord with men’s camera clubs and sparking outrage in Congress for her nude snapshots. Page’s image, complete with black hair bangs and naughty smile, appeared on magazine covers, playing cards, wallpaper and comic books in the 1990s, inspiring retrospective tributes from celebrities such as Madonna, Demi Moore and Uma Thurman.
The college-educated beauty queen who disappeared from the public eye after 1957 was unaware of her renewed popularity until “ Entertainment Tonight” broadcast a television segment about her almost 40 years later. She had disowned her glamour lifestyle after becoming a born-again Christian in 1959, and later battled mental illness in Florida and California.
“Bettie Page is the last great icon of the 1950s,” James Swanson, co-author of “Bettie Page: The Life of a Pinup Legend,” said in a 1996 interview with NBC’s Real Life program. “Like James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, she brought something modern to the era. She’s like the girl next door, the greatest American pin-up and that’s why she’s eternal.” (You really should read the whole story) Boink
I am a card-carrying, red-blooded, all American male and I love looking at beautiful women, but when we do that to excess - we deprive far too many young women the opportunity to adjust, grow and excel based on other - less transitory metrics - intelligence, character and ability. They become caricatures - comic book images of their actual selves. I think that in turn, deprives us all - especially men - of something that diminishes us all. Namely, depth. The superficial becomes our reality. We lose sight of true value. We love what we have rather than who. Greed replaces love. Money takes the place of ethics.
Yes eventually you have to talk to them and beauty from the inside is infinately more important.
Althoug those retro cone shaped ta-tas don't necissarily preclude inner beauty.
Posted by: Jim | 12/13/2008 at 05:58 AM