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Bettie Page has died and she made the front page of the New York Times. To be honest, if you’d just given me her name I would have given you a blank stare. But the minute I saw her picutre, I remembered Bettie, born Betty Mae Page in Tennessee. She was more than just a Playboy pinup. She represented a world that shivered between sexual excitement and repression in the US before the sexual revolution came along.

Now how would I know this? Time for the confession to come out: when I was a young teenager in the mid-1960s, Bettie was at her Playboy best. I grew up in a conservative home in the middle of the US where religion and ladylike behaviour went together. Like so many of my girlfriends, I made pocket money babysitting at night. One of my families lived close by and the father worked with my father.

One night when the kids had long been asleep and I’d finished the Coke and potato chips the parents had left for me – things we never had at our house – I decided to look for the vacuum to clean up the mess I’d made. It was in the parents’ bedroom closet.

So was a huge pile, perhaps a metre high, of Playboy magazines, shoved to the back of the closet. Hard to imagine this straightlaced church-going couple looking at these! I had barely heard of Hugh Hefner and his bunnies.

I sat down and began to work my way through them and for the next year, while I went through the pile and leraned about sex, what adult women looked like and more, I loved babysitting.

Bettie was one of my favourites. Cheesecake poses, an astonishing body, those black bangs on her forehead (fringe to you, maybe)! And she came from a world of cornpoke and country music and truck drivers that had all the appeal of the alien and forbidden. In my family, people like that were a bit lower class.

And then I stopped babysitting, discovered that boys and sex in Iowa weren’t very closely related to Mr Hefner’s version of it (my first kiss, I told a friend, was like rubbing lips with a camel – a real letdown), nor did any of my friends or I grow into Bettie bodies. We were saved by the sexual revolution which gave us another perspective on women, our bodies, our sex lives, our potential. We spent evenings in our university dormitory reading The Joy of Sex, the original version which feminists hadn’t yet pounced on, aloud to each other. Then we started reading feminist literature and discovered yet more about ourselves.

But I still have a soft spot for Bettie, who offered me the sex ed class no one else thought I needed, until a Catholic nun gave us one session in biology. Guess which one was more interesting, the nun or Bettie?

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