From the vintage femdom in the last post, we jump forward 70 or so years to some classic femdom, with the late great Bettie Page. I was never personally a great fan of her bondage shots, as they always tend to the ‘loose clothesline draped vaguely over limbs’ school of bondage. But occasionally I’ll come across an image like this one which reminds me why she become such an iconic fetish figure.
Found on the Suicide Blonde tumblr site.
I agree with you completely. Most of Page’s seductress images are of little value to me.
But put her in black kid opera-length gloves brandishing a whip, and it’s truly vintage FemDom.
-saratoga
Of course the ironic thing is that by all accounts, she wasn’t kinky at all. It was purely a modeling job as far as she was concerned, albeit an unusual one that she approached with a refreshingly open mind.
I’m sure there are lots of models who fit that profile today, but I always think it kind of odd that someone so famous for early bdsm porn had no real emotional or lifestyle interest in it.
So true. I believe I read of her death recently. Perhaps not. But I do know she left the modeling field and pursued some totally different, vanilla career, wishing to leave her famous ’50s image behind. And evidently did so successfully.
-saratoga
She died a couple of years ago, around the end of 2008.
Sadly, her vanilla career after modeling wasn’t all the successful or happy. She had a number of failed marriages, was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent several years in a state mental hospital. She was broke and living in a group home when heard about the revival in interest in her early work.
Wikipedia as usual has a bunch of background:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bettie_Page
I’m just happy that she lived to enjoy the revival of interest and the royalties and security that came along with it. Too many (Ed Wood, Philip K Dick, etc.) die before their work gets reevaluated by later generations.