The Notorious Whore Stigma

I went to see The Notorious Bettie Page on Monday night. I know it has gotten some pretty mixed reviews, but I really liked it (and not just for the shoes – although they were pretty good). A lot of reviews I have read seem to see the film as an amiable bit of fluff – and probably not delving deeply into the motivations of Ms Page….

I felt it was a pretty accurate reflection of everything I had read about Bettie’s life, and she has – since being told by God not to pose anymore – been pretty reclusive and very unwilling, it seems, to give detailed analysis of her motivations or actions. I really liked the fact that the film reflected the fact that she was so body positive and to a remarkable extent, didn’t take on much of the shame and stigma associated with nudity, porn or BDSM. Her sense of ‘lets have fun with this’ that is so present in every image taken of her is very explicit in the film also. So joyful. However, the aspect of the film which spoke to me most profoundly was the way she was perceived by others – the fact that she had done things that put her in the category of sexual/ abandoned/ slut, and the limits that this put on Bettie occupying other territories. While she seemed rather stilted as an actor, there is one scene where she is at an audition – probably wasn’t brilliant, but one of the men involved with casting said to her something like, “such a pleasure to meet the notorious Bettie Page” (obviously, giving the film it’s title), this line gave me a horrible sinking feeling, as I imagine it would for other sex workers and those working in other adult industries, as it was a clear indicator, that with her history of nude/ pin up/ fetish modelling, she would be kept out of ‘respectable’ entertainment due to her notoriety.

I was 19 when I first started working in brothels in Adelaide, and within a few months, I was in court to get a number of charges of ‘being on premises’ dealt with together and avoid a conviction…. Getting up in the Magistrates Court, in front of all those people, being identified as a sex worker in such a public way, against my will – as opposed to all those times I’ve chosen outness as a political tool – that feeling still stays with me. The shaming involved in these practices are designed to make you feel like a bad, bad grrrl. However, the irony is that we live in a society that wants to stop sex work, yet sex work convictions, and the naming and shaming of much of our cultural practices – whether it’s the NSW practice of forcing home based sex workers to post DAs on their front gates alerting the neighbours of the nature of their businesses in order to obtain planning approval, the ACT and NT practice of a registration system for individual sex workers, or the criminalisation of WA and SA sex work, reduces sex workers options outside of sex work. While many sex workers may not wish to leave the sex industry (myself included), liberation is about multiple choices, and in order to eradicate the whore stigma, we need to break down the categories of madonna and whore, and stop making sex workers into a special class of people.