50s pin-up queen and all around icon Bettie Page died Thursday in Los Angeles at the age of 85. She was hospitalized over the weekend with pneumonia and from the tone of reports being released even then, it seemed as if this was inevitable.

Bettie was more than just a girl who posed naked in magazines. She, almost unintentionally, was at the forefront of a cultural revolution. Bettie Page wasn’t trying to change the world, she just loved taking pictures. She changed the world anyway. Her pictures were a huge part of the sexual liberation movement in the 50s, embodying the decade’s repressed libido. Her pictures were an inspiration to the art world, and have spawned decades worth of aspiring pin-up models and artists struggling to accomplish what she seemed to do so effortlessly.

Bettie was 27 and recently divorced when she started her improbable modeling career in New York City. For many her pictures were erotica, but later on especially, they soon came to be regarded as high art. Though she faded into obscurity in the 60s after converting to Christianity, putting her clothes on, and becoming a missionary, Betties’ popularity only grew. By the 80s she had a huge cult following. In a 1993 interview with Robin Leach Page admitted she was penniless and had no idea anyone was even interested in her. That soon changed. These days you’ll find her picture everywhere from the shelves of Hot Topic, to tattoos inked onto the skin of black-haired women. Bettie Page’s final years were lived as a very, very rich woman.

She’ll continue to be admired by women everywhere for the liberated way in which she happily displayed her body. Bettie, even after her conversion to Christianity, was never ashamed of her nudity or the work she’d done. That always came through in her pictures, and in a time when women were locked at home in the kitchen, relegated to having babies and serving their men dinner, the notion of a woman so freed and comfortable with her own body was almost certainly, a shock to the system.

In an era where models and porn stars stand for nothing but empty gratification, take a minute today and remember Bettie Page. Here was one model who, though perhaps almost unintentionally, actually stood for something. Ladies stop vomiting and crash dieting to achieve the personal skeletal body. Instead take a look at Bettie Page. Now that’s sexy.