Pamela, porn and lost passions
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach tells how the Baywatch star was keen to uncover the perils of online sex
‘We both agreed that love was not enough in a happy marriage. There had to be lust’
Viewers around the world have just begun to watch Disney+’s latest hit series, Pam & Tommy. Apparently, it’s a fictionalised version of events which began with the theft of a videotape made during the 1995 honeymoon of the world’s then most famous sex icon, Pamela Anderson, of Baywatch fame, and a rock drummer with a hell-raising reputation, Mötley Crüe’s Tommy Lee. The tape, which I have to confess I’ve not seen (honestly!), contains intimate scenes and was soon being shown and sold illegally around the world. The couple were horrified and shocked, but unable to control its viral spread.
You might be surprised then to learn that I, a rabbi, have had a close friendship with Pamela. We coauthored a book about love and lust together; so I haven’t decided yet if I’m going to watch this miniseries. But if do, it will be with mixed feelings.
These are not moral concerns about content, but more connected to my own relationship with a woman I first met 20 years after the incident now portrayed by Disney.
Nor do I know how she will be feeling about this renewed exposure. She claims never to have seen the original tape or to know if her children have seen it.
But I do know that the Pamela lighting up the screen will not have more than a passing resemblance to the real Pamela. And moreover, we should all be wary of underestimating powerful women like her.
My introduction to her came in 2016, when my organisation, The World Values Network, gave her an award for public support of Israel at our large annual “Champions of Jewish Values International Awards Gala” in Times Square. It led to a lasting friendship between me and Pamela that developed over conversations about my books on relationship (including ‘kosher sex’) and parenting.
Who would have thought it, but Pamela and I had serious values in common. Yes, she was aware that she was an international sex symbol – but she was also an extremely engaged mother who wanted to raise valuesguided children. She told me her great aspiration for her life was to have a marriage like her parents that had lasted for decades amid the kind of challenges that every marriage faces. She told me she believes in partnering for life, and was disgusted by the kind of sexual exploitation of women that had become de rigueur in the age of internet porn.
Had she contributed to that exploitation, I asked her. No – she was adamant that the cover girl pin-ups she had done for Playboy and her close friend, whom she greatly admired, Hugh Hefner, was art rather than pornography. She hated internet porn and felt it was ruining marriages and relationships.
Our conversations covered the gamut of politics, religion, spirituality and, especially, the inspiration necessary to raise healthy children.
Pamela joined me and my family for Shabbat dinner in New York on multiple occasions, and my wife and children came to greatly respect her warmth, intelligence and commitment to communal service. She was always humourous, humble and self-effacing. Once, while she sat between me and my wife, a friend of mine who is a renowned writer joked: “Rabbi Shmuley is the only man who can sit next to Pamela Anderson and ogle her Rolodex.” Everyone laughed, none more than Pamela.
Our friendship led to a jointly authored opinion piece in 2016 in The Wall Street Journal headlined “Take the Pledge: No More Indulging Porn”, which became a media sensation. Pamela and I were invited on to global media platforms to talk about how porn was slowly conditioning men to view women not as equals but as a means to the fulfilment of their libidinous ends. It was eroding male respect for women.
Many accused her of hypocrisy. You’re condemning porn after your many explicit photo shoots? But she more than held her own as she argued she had every right to espouse her values as pornography became increasingly degenerate.
Particularly interesting was our joint lecture together at the Oxford Union. I opened my speech by saying: “It’s not easy for an author and media personality to appear alongside an international sex symbol to deliver a speech at Oxford. But I have supreme confidence that Pamela will do just fine.”
Showing no hint of nervousness, Pamela was articulate, compelling and won over the large audience, especially women, with her message: that you can be sexy without being exploited, you can be attractive without being degraded, you can be noticed without putting yourself in any position that is subordinate.
Pamela was justifiably on a high after the event. For a woman who had been ogled her entire life, she was being acknowledged for the power and conviction of her ideas.
Many questions came up in our conversations. How did she feel about the publication of her sex tape with her now ex-husband? She was extremely upset, she told me. And she sounded it. She was shocked that someone would steal it. She meant it. There was no hint of irony. She regretted its release till this day.
Why had lasting happiness eluded her in marriage? Well, it did not always elude her. She had happy years and then did not. Later, she had married men that were not suited to her. She was still searching for “the one”.
Pamela and I both agreed that love was not enough in a happy marriage. There had to be lust, desire, and an electric gravitation from one partner to the other that transcended mere feelings of warm companionship.
Many statistics claim that about 70 per cent of the internet today is devoted to online porn, where men are becoming so bored with looking at one naked woman that each photo needs to be accompanied by hundreds of links to click other nude women – or so my friends tell me. In addition, I counsel countless marriages that are being ravaged today not by infidelity, but by husbands who are addicted to porn and not making love to their wives.
And perhaps this was the most shocking and revelatory story that Pamela shared in our book, Lust for Love. That here she was one night, in bed, waiting for a man she loved to come up – but even she was not enough to get him off his computer. He chose the internet over her.
And if it could happen to Pamela Anderson, well, I’m assuming it could happen to anyone.