Bettie Page died last Thursday.  She was known primarily as a sexy pinup girl with a BDSM flavor.  In later years she battled mental illness and became a born-again Christian, but didn't seem to go into reactionary denial.  So far as I have read, she never thought what she did was all that bad.

Today it would be unusual to start one's porn career at 30 unless you wanted to be queen of the MILFs.  Or GILFs. Or had extensive plastic surgery and lucky genes.

The porn industry was different then, of course.  It was more underground because almost all of it was illegal.  That someone would get naked for pictures was a big enough deal in and of itself, given the legal and social status of such people, that a "nudie picture" was titillating all on its own.   Someone getting semi-naked for pictures, snapping a whip, was just so amazing, the way the person looked almost didn't matter.  Kind of like a pig singing, it's not amazing how well the pig sings, but that the pig sings at all.

That she was already beautiful and willing to pose for nude shots made her an incredible find.  That she was beautiful and willing to do BDSM pictures made it super incredible.

Nowadays, there are a lot of people willing to have naked pictures of themselves out there for money, or even for free.  So viewers are more "discriminating.  And now that plastic surgery and the youth image are so prevalent in the media, that expectation is applied to porn actresses, so they must be uncommonly youthful looking, as well as not fat anywhere at all, with large breasts and/or a big rounded ass. 

There's a certain "highest common denominator" effect, too.  Joe might not be turned off if a woman has unshaved pubic hair, but George might think it's "gross" and want less, or none.  Unless and until pubic nudity is offensive to more viewers, the pubic hair will be minimal or nonexistent.

Dave might not be turned off if a woman has a visible tiny roll on her stomach.  Bill is upset by it.  So no visible tiny roll.

Lenny might not care if the a woman has imperfect skin.  For Dan, a blemish is a deal-breaker.  So no facial blemishes, and makeup to cover anything that might be there.

Saggy breasts — they don't bother X, Y, and Z, but A, B and C are repelled.  Since X, Y and Z are not repelled by non-saggy breasts, we get non-saggy breasts.

And so on.

Warning, links in the following paragraphs are not safe for work and may be triggering for some.  You do not have to visit these links to follow the discussion.

Here's a link to pictures of women in vintage girly mags:

http://www.vintagegirlymags.blogspot.com/

Some have a bit of fat on them.  They are conventionally attractive but normal young women.  None have the perky antigravity 16-year-old breast shape, whether small or large.  The closest would probably be "Space Girl."  Note how they hold their shoulders way back to keep the breasts "up" and "perky," but if they were to lean forward, that shape would disappear.  Instead they look like normal young woman breasts.

The reason these young women look the way they do is that the girly mag readers liked large breasts or buttocks.  Large breasts don't stay perky for long. 

Also, large breasts and buttocks tend to go along with larger everything else.  Women in porn today typically do not have larger everything else.  They are more likely to have had surgery to make the breasts or buttocks bigger.  An average porn actress will have larger breasts and/or buttocks than the norm for her body type.

I don't think most of the young women in the vintage girly mags, without plastic surgery, would be able to do porn today that isn't specialty porn, where your "standard porn body" either isn't the main attraction, or the "standard porn body" has or lacks a feature you need to have missing or present.  Examples are plumpers, "flat tops," hairy women and so on.

The porn that focuses on exaggerated features can be, uh, surprising.  I don't remember where I saw it, but there was an ad for a text/image service for your cell phone showing images of women whose butts were so preposterously large, they would not have needed a bustle to wear a Victorian skirt.  I recall an SF story where a shapeshifting visitor from the future freaked out a Victorian-era
male by being so proportioned.  The women pictured in this ad would qualify.  I have no idea if they were natural, plastic surgery enhanced, or photoshopped.

What's the average person's first reaction to this picture of our porn goddess Bettie?  She has black, abundant, untrimmed pubic hair.

http://classicxxxpornos.com/wp/wp-content/gallery/bettie-page-pictures/bettiepage04.jpg

Here is an example of how porn, even fairly sedate porn such as one finds in Playboy magazine, affects one's view of the female body.  For a woman in her 30s, with black hair, that's a fairly average amount of pubic hair.  Remember she's on the small side, so that amount of hair will be a bit more, er, concentrated.  This picture would probably be of commercial interest today only to "hairy women" porn sellers.  Too much for a garden-variety porn shoot.