I never watched too many classic films when I was younger, not really, but my fascination with the classic women of the silver screen begun with Bettie Page. Though, I admit, she didn't star in many films (starring in only one as an actress), something about her, as all of her fans will attest to, is timeless, beautiful and... dare I say it? Incredibly sexy. At 14, I fell in love with her image. I couldn't find very much on her until she started becoming popular at Hot Topic about a year later, and couldn't look at any of her pin-up pictures (aside from the not very racy ones that came on T-shirts) until I was 17, and that was about the same time I discovered a love with classic film stars.
On one visit to my grandmother's house I found one of her books. Classic film stars. I opened the pages and it was like being dropped into a fairy tale. The women inside were so beautiful, so entrancing, that I was not only looking at their pictures, but reading all of the little captions. Something about these women stood out to me as gorgeous, and few of them were 'conventionally' pretty, especially according to today's standards, where women are all trying to fit into a certain mold.
As time went on, my love for these leading ladies grew and they became my style inspirations, and my role models and over time I begun to understand what it was that made them attractive. In a time before cosmetic plastic surgery and the waif look became the 'in' thing, women were sexy not because of how they looked necessarily, but how they held themselves. Women were mysterious, they never revealed their secrets and never and never had a 'wardrobe malfunction', and more so, women were confident. While sure, they were acting more often than not, women were portrayed as confident and many people agree, confidence is often the sexiest thing about a woman.
While they still worried about how their hair looked and if they were pretty enough, and while stars, models and the 'beautiful' people still were plagued mental or emotional disease and stress, the effects, compared to the stars of today, were at the very least less noticeable and at the best, less common, with media influences coming from fewer sources and less of an emphasis being put on being... fill in the blank. Sure, actresses still had to lose weight for roles, or get rid of 'unsightly' skin blemishes, but the women they inspired then weren't beset with unattainable images of women air-brushed away but women who only had good make-up, lighting and camera tricks to hide any 'flaws'. Women who looked sexy because they were sexy, not because they were made to look sexy with a computer.