...I'm interested in your honest opinions on this.
After viewing
The Notorious Bettie Page last night, I went googling and found this interview. I was struck by the suggestion (in the film) that Bettie Page was molested by her father as a child, and gang raped as a young adult. I wondered about this and whether the filmmaker was also suggesting this played a role in Bettie's participation in bondage modeling (a rather new and taboo issue in the 50's).
Excerpt from interview w/Susie Bright(SB) and Mary Harron(MH) regarding Bettie Page:SB: You point a finger, without drawing a thick line, at her history of sexual abuse, incest, -- and her survival of sexual assault, a gang rape. How do you think women recover, sexually, from situations like that?
MH: The abuse by her father was the most damaging, because she was still a child. She was a traumatized person, but she did have an active sex life. Billy Neal, her first husband, told me they had a great sex life and I believe him-- it was clearly the motor in their relationship. Sexually abuse, or rape, is an awful trauma but it doesn't mean you will never enjoy sex-- although it may mean you become more sexually-identified, as the careers of countless porn stars will attest.
Many men who've seen the film complain that Bettie doesn't react much to the sexual abuse: she doesn't show more rage or grief. But most men have no idea how much sexual shit women go through, how many of their female friends, relatives, and co-workers have been raped or abused in some way. They don't know about it because the women don't talk about it, and just get on with their lives, as Bettie did.
SB: My own personal interpretation of Page's "naivete," and her various personalities as model, missionary, etc., is that she was genuinely crazy, and coping the best way anyone does when they are suffering from mental demons.
But if she had been homely and crazy, or even just plain, what would have happened then? So often it seems that sexual allure is both the salvation and damnation of people who need to be seen more deeply than the surface....
MH: If she had been homely, her mental problems would have been spotted earlier. The people I talked to who knew her in the Fifties all talked about how sweet, friendly, unassuming she was-- but at the same time, no one seemed to know her intimately.
Even her first husband, Billy Neal, found her a mystery. That suggests to me that she had sealed herself off: there was something blank and inaccessible about her. She was always late, often hours late, which implies that she would just space out.
Someone can be mentally ill, but if they are young and beautiful and their life is going well, people don't notice because at that point the cracks are almost imperceptible. I think it's significant that Bettie's breakdowns happened in her middle age.
There were a lot of things going wrong for her by then. Her fourth marriage had collapsed, and with it her hopes of happy family life. There were the demons from the past, her father's abuse and the gang rape. You can't discount the traumatic effects of aging. By now she was a middle-aged woman, and she had spent her whole adult life as a beauty. Her identity, her finances, her social life, her sense of herself: everything depended on that, and it was gone.
taken from:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/susie-bright/interview-the-bettie-pag_b_20492.html ********************************************************************
Ok, again, just seeking honest opinions here. How much of a role do you feel sexual assault, incest, rape, etc.(whether one remembers it or not) have on women working in the porn industry? Mental illness? How much and why? If not, why?
I've always been rather fascinated by this issue. I think stats are helpful, but most of the one's I've found are from the religious right. I don't trust them for information.
And yes, I'm aware that there are porn performers like Nina Hartley that say they were never raped or assaulted, they just dig what they do. This isn't about them. I'm interested in women like Bettie Page (or even J.Jameson who realized late in her career she was assaulted at a young age).
Oh, and I am sorry for creating yet another thread on this topic. I realize some of you may be burnt out on this topic, considering all the threads recently on the issue of porn.
Thanks in advance!
:hi: