Amerika

Bettie Mae Page was born April 22, 1923, in Nashville. She was the oldest girl among Roy and Edna Page’s six children. Her father, an auto mechanic, “molested all three of his daughters,” Page said in the interview.

“All I ever wanted was a mother who paid attention to me,” Page recalled. “She didn’t want girls. She thought we were trouble. When I started menstruating at 13, I thought I was dying because she never taught me anything about that.”

{ snip }

But by 1948 she had divorced a violent husband and fled to New York City, where she enrolled in acting classes.

{ snip }

“I want to be remembered as the woman who changed people’s perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form.”

{ snip }

Page, whose later life was marked by depression, violent mood swings and several years in a state mental institution…[her] saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s…

LA Times

Revolutionaries: did they really want a revolution, or were they just acting out of control because they were nuts?

For every ugly truth — daughter molested, ends up unable to find nice men because she’s crazy and a neo-prostitute — we invent some plausible but unsatisfying lie like that she’s a “sexual revolutionary.” Then, because the lie is unsatisfying, we spend our lives in neurotic denial while ever more strongly asserting the lie.

Humanity: it’s impossible to forget they’re a half-step removed from monkeys, isn’t it?