I am going to go into full on berserker age.
NO, fuck you. At the time Betty Page was around, the shit she was doing was transgressive, and shocking and dirty, and if you’d been around there you would have hated her fucking guts because you’re a whorephobic, slut shaming, classist piece of shit, who thinks female sexuality should be nothing but a stylized, tasteful, elegant non-corporeal thing.
The thing is, Betty Page’s stuff was the hardcore gangbang bukkake scene of its time, that was as raw and primal and dirty as it got (without getting really really illegal). She was in fact MORE marginalized than the pornstars of today, considering that porn was in fact illegal back then, and was involved in a massive obscenity trial. She lived on the margins of society, and now you have her on your “Oh so cute” fridge magnets as a nice, tasteful, non-threatening image of sex.
As the dirty, trashy slut you fear so much, as a sex worker in this day and age, Betty Page doesn’t fucking belong to you, burlesque sure as shit doesn’t belong to you (I’ve heard burlesque teachers going “it’s so much more about creativity than raunchiness, it’s not like we’re dirty strippers! EW” needless to say I had to interject “I was a stripper” and make her very VERY uncomfortable) if you’re one of the classy sanitized sexuality past romanticizing fuckwaffles, I fucking hate you. You owe your performance art that you claim to love SO much to dirty, trashy, declasse bitches like me, so you can suck my left one.
You would not have been a pinup girl, you would have been horrified by the loose morals of the women who posed for that sort of thing.
You would have thought burlesque was tawdry trash.
Only now with the veil of respectability do you claim these outsiders as your icons, only when you can safely ignore the treatment women of “loose morals” always suffer at the hands of people like you
I wouldn’t put much faith in any burlesque teacher that says things like that, and I’ve known some. Burlesque is stripping, who ever says it’s not raunchy has definitely not looked into the past and history of burlesque. Looking at most any legend has a colorful past. Not only that they are open about it. Burlesque is the grand dad of modren stripping but it’s really all in the same, many big name burlesque names are also open about also being strippers ( Dita, Jo Boobs etc).
The history of burlesque is the history of strippers, claiming that the burlesque tradition doesn’t have its modern form in stripping is disingenuous and fucked. Burlesque dancers are reenactors
Thoughts From The Peacock Angel 