Betty Page was listed a few months ago on the Internet as well as by the New York Times and other major media as one of the memorable people that died during 2008. The lists also included Paul Newman and Sir Edmund Hillary. Once “notorious”, that being how the movie about her life described her, now she is seen as having accomplished something with her life, which is different than seeing her as someone who made a wreck of her life by violating some of its basic proprieties, and so accomplished nothing but her notoriety, which is usually not taken to be a virtue.

Instead, the photos of her nude, in states of undress, and in various provocative poses, are justified as having what the lawyers might call “redeeming social value”, which is simply a fancy name for saying there is something worthwhile about these photographs that can be mentioned, which is a way of saying that they do more than service the prurient interest, that clearly their main intention. Servicing a prurient interest, of course, can itself be regarded as a moral good but there are few other than prostitutes and sociologists who are willing to proclaim the positive functions of pornography, should there be any, it being a given that positive functions have to be named in order to be thought respectable, which is why sociologists are always transvaluating what they describe rather than merely being neutral when they say things like pneumonia have positive social functions because they cut down on the misery of an extended old age.

Betty Page has been transvaluated. She is now treated as one of those who opened the way to sexual freedom, or as (in the Times) an icon of the appreciation of female beauty and, elsewhere, as a kind of artist who contributed to her photographs by offering up pleasing facial expressions. Oh, how culture can engage in such grand reversals! In the Fifties, she was the antithesis of art, however much her images pleased the young men in the population. Now critics of both sexes treat her as a pioneer and find ways to think of what she did as art.

I have some trouble with this. My confrere Arnold Birenbaum regards Betty Page as earning her new designation because what she did was a forerunner of the transformation of sexuality during the Sixties. She is an avatar of that period whether she knew it or not, a cultural heroine in retrospect, and therefore to be treated with respect as a person of character. She established a new kind of cultural identity and that is what is honored. I, on the other hand, prefer to designate as heroes those who know of what their heroism consisted. These true heroes are people who did not have identities that we now regard as courageous, but had roles they thought of as courageous. That is the case with the heroes of the sexual revolution; they knew they were transgressive figures. Andy Warhol knew what he was doing when he presented sympathetic portraits of drug addicts. His films about them (or the films made by people in his workshops) did not claim the heroism of drug addicts consisted of their struggling against their addictions; it consisted only of the fact that they lived with their addictions. The addicts did not think themselves heroic, but in some narrow sense, the Warhol studio was. Norman Mailer knew what he was doing when he paraded his egotism as well as engaged in frank depictions of sexual life. Madonna knew she was vamping. Hugh Hefner knew that he was testing the limits of what newsstands would accept in openly displayed magazines. But Betty Page, as far as we know, did not. Betty Page was a symptom of change and not an agent of change.

The specter of sexual liberation has been with us so long that any time, not just the Fifties and Sixties, can be regarded as its cultural vehicle, and that includes the sexual revolution of the Twenties, when women bobbed their hair and constrained their breasts, and the Eleventh Century, when ideas of courtly love began to appear in Western Europe. No one knows how far sexual liberation can go or how it will be played out. Everybody becoming bisexual is one possibility; another possibility, proposed as of now only by fanatic and not so fanatical religious communities, is everyone becoming celibate, or at least that being the condition assumed by the most favored within the religion.

A true cultural reversal, on the other hand, means something more specific: the object of horror and calumny becomes a new way of being beautiful within a time frame where people can think back to the time when they thought and felt differently. So women born when their virginity was thought a prize and who moved on to think of themselves, instead, as full sexual creatures in their own right, were engaged in a form of heroism, that of the private life. You do not get awards for that. Goya also engaged in a cultural reversal by discovering the grotesque as somehow beautiful. Racial intermarriage was regarded as perverse within my lifetime. Gay people have not yet turned the corner concerning what was once known as the gay life style, preferring to have their liberation identified with their becoming conventionally middle class as is betokened by marriage and the raising of children. Maybe, in the future, backroom trysts will become acceptable without becoming respectable. And we can even say of Betty Page that she did not so much make pornography respectable as make of it a taste that respectable people can indulge. After all, Victoria’s Secret has boutiques everywhere, which means the spirit behind Frederick’s of Hollywood has triumphed.

Reversals of valuation rather than mere assimilation of old groups to conventional values take place in other kinds of culture. Bombing the Germans was good until it became bad thanks to Vonnegut and others, which is different than the rehabilitation of Germany, which meant that Germans came to share conventional Western values about genocide, even come to the forefront in defense of them, as may be expected of recent converts to respectability. Slavery was bad until early Twentieth Century historians discovered it was not so bad until historians of the second half of the Twentieth Century discovered it was really awful. Sister Kenny was good for a short time until she was seen as provincial and shortsighted, perhaps because a vaccine was on the way to stem the panic that had fueled her movement to treat polio by having patients sleep on cots while wrapped in rough blankets. Nobody, though, has yet found a way to say that Hitler was good, which may mean that he will be on a long time list of villains, Napoleon and LBJ having joined the long time list of those about whom historians are ambivalent. Women's clothing fashions of the Thirties looked elegant until the eye was relieved to see the straight lines and the colors of the fifties and so fashions of the Thirties seemed dowdy and drab until they were revived by museum curators and fashionistas as the basis for museum exhibits and current styles.

Social policy, in general, follows the same rule of culture: transvaluation is always a possibility. You centralize education until you run out of patience with that, and then you decentralize education, and then, fifty years later (now) you recentralize education. There are just so many ways to organize a social program, and so you do what is fresh when enough time has passed so that the revival of the old seems new. If it is good enough for fashion, it is good enough for drug policy. New York State is finally getting around to doing away with the Rockefeller drug laws which sent drug dealers away for a long time for selling relatively small amounts because we came to see (really, not that long after the laws went into place in the Sixties) that they were no deterrent to drug dealing and that they ruined the lives of too many not so bad people. We are back in the rhetoric, though not yet the practice, of rehabilitation. And Hillary, as Secretary of State, admits that there is a drug demand problem in the United States, and not just a drug supply problem that is to be solved, with our assistance, by Columbia and Mexico and Afghanistan and any other place that takes up selling drugs because that is where the money is, though this time a war on drug consumption may not mean draconian criminal penalties because we are getting out of that cycle at the same time as we are going into fighting the drug wars on another front. There are a lot of epicycles in the heavens of social policy.

Maybe there will come a time when sociologists will become regarded as a rare species of intellect, wise enough, for example, to notice not only trends in fashion but social laws that transcend fashion. Bernie Madoff was just a crook like any other crook, only more successful. Principles like the law of unintended consequences always hold, which means that there will, of course, be surprises in what happens when the Obama stimulus package goes to work. Not only will some useless projects get under the radar but there will be projects that have glitches in them. Raising use of public transit will lead to unforeseen problems as well as the obvious ones that include overcrowded trains and overworked signal control systems. More generally, the law (really, the abstract social description) that good social programs are good whether they cost a lot or a little money and that bad social programs are bad also whether they cost a lot or a little money is a more important source of guidance for public policy than the pronouncements of economists about whether one or another program will contribute to long term economic growth.  The utopian prospect that culture will recognize transcendent social propositions and not just unfolding social processes and the pendulum swings having to do with tastes in social policies and transvaluations of culture will probably not occur in my lifetime or any other near future. Yet the expectation that some reversal of that kind is bound to happen because it always does is to my mind some kind of comfort.