Opinion: Pamela Anderson Doesn’t Need Your Redemption. She’s Just Fine.

She was the universal sex symbol. But there is more to her story, and she’s finally telling it herself, writes Jessica Bennett.

Ladysmith, British Columbia — I am sitting across from Pamela Anderson, at her kitchen table, trying to explain to her that I have an app on my phone that will make me look like Pamela Anderson.

“What?” she says, her blue eyes widening. “What is it? What could it possibly do?” I open my phone to show her. Ms. Anderson, 55, puts on a pair of reading glasses, then examines my screen, which has transformed my face into a 1990s version of her: hair in a tousled top bun, pencil-thin eyebrows, mouth in a lip-lined pout. She shrieks. “That’s insane.”

When I angle the camera toward her, she ducks out of the frame. “I am not doing it on myself. I will not. I refuse,” she says. She’s laughing, but she means it. She doesn’t want to look like a 20-something version of herself, nor does she want to relive that period in her life. Or at least she’s not going to let someone else force her to do so.

The world learned that last year, when it got word of Ms. Anderson’s reaction to Pam & Tommy, the Hulu series that tells the story of her life and, in particular, her marriage to the Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, the father of her children.

That relationship began with a four-day courtship in Cancún, Mexico, and a wedding, with Ms. Anderson in a string bikini, and mostly ended with Mr. Lee in jail after striking his wife while she was holding their newborn son. The marriage began to unravel after a video of the couple having sex was stolen from a safe in their Malibu, Calif., home — then went the 1990s version of viral.

If you grew up in a certain era, you know about that tape. Maybe you even watched it. The VHS was delivered wrapped in brown paper to the sticky hands of teenage boys and men all over the world, earning its distributors $77 million in less than 12 months.

What you might not have known — at least not until you watched Pam & Tommy — was that the tape was stolen, not leaked by the couple for publicity, and that Ms. Anderson and Mr. Lee unsuccessfully sued to try to stop it. It also wasn’t a sex tape, at least not originally. It was a 54-minute home video, filmed during the early months of their relationship, roughly eight minutes of which featured actual sex acts.

Those moments were spliced together by skeezy porn distributors, turning him into a sex god and her into a punchline. Pam & Tommy was meant to set the record straight on that bit of retro tabloid history and to depict what happens when millions of people got intimate access to the world’s most famous sex symbol. But Ms. Anderson wouldn’t play the game. She refused to watch the show.

When Lily James, the actress who stars in it, reached out after taking the role to ask if they could speak — saying in a handwritten letter, that she wanted nothing more than to honour her — Ms. Anderson snubbed her. A scanned copy of that letter still sits in Ms. Anderson’s inbox somewhere, unread.

For Ms. Anderson, Pam & Tommy felt like just another exploitation. Except this time it came wrapped in the paper-thin promise of some sort of salvation.

“It was already hurtful enough the first time,” Ms. Anderson tells me, pausing as she takes a tray of roasted vegetables out of the oven. She looks ethereal in all white, barefaced and in a pair of slippers, against the backdrop of the snow outside. “It’s like one of those things where you’re going, ‘Really?’ People are still capitalising off that thing?”

It is hard to overstate the influence that Ms. Anderson had on a particular era of culture, which happens to be the one that I grew up in. She was the distillation of straight male fantasy come to life — a small-town Canadian girl next door who’d been transformed into pure American erotica.

She was already a Playboy model when she helped make Baywatch, which was previously canceled, the most-watched television show in the world — exporting the image of a platinum blond, blue-eyed California dream, running in slow motion in a red one-piece swimsuit, to more than 140 countries.

Even three decades later, cosmetic surgeons credit Ms. Anderson with ushering in an era of plastic surgery that made them rich. She was the precursor to Girls Gone Wild, to the bared abs and sexy baby voices of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, to a whole swath of culture that seemed to argue for objectification as empowerment, as long as you could convince yourself you were the one in control.

Though to say she was objectified almost doesn’t do her treatment justice. To look back on the many, many articles written about Ms. Anderson over the years is to learn that “heads, as they always do, turn” when she enters the room.

That many of the words used to describe her “start with the letter B: buxom, blond, babelicious, bombshell, bodacious” and that on the day one women’s magazine sat down to interview her, “her freckles stood out more than her breasts.”

“Am I physically attracted to Pamela Anderson? Of course,” the critic Chuck Klosterman wrote in his low culture manifesto, Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. “But the more I see her, the more I realize I’m not looking at a person I’d like to sleep with; I’m looking at America.”

For years, Ms. Anderson would say in interviews, “I thought the novelty would wear off by now.” It hasn’t. She turns grown men into horny teenage versions of themselves. And then, of course, there’s that tape. That tape, which helped normalize online pornography and, quite literally, popularize the internet. It was a precursor to the celebrity sex tape as we know it and, ultimately, contributed to many of the privacy and revenge-porn laws that would make it harder to distribute today.

All of which made Ms. Anderson seem a perfect candidate for the kind of narrative reframing Pam & Tommy was offering — the kind we’re offering up to all sorts of women these days as we look back on the tragedies of their lives with a newer, more enlightened gaze.

And yet isn’t it all a bit patronizing, this notion that a TV show should swoop in and correct the cultural record on her behalf? At the very least, it’s awkward. “I mean, I’m probably a case study for any feminist,” Ms. Anderson acknowledges, and she considers herself one, by the way. But she’s not dead. Isn’t it sort of weird for someone else to re-examine her story while she’s right here? ‘I just blocked it out’.

For the past few years, Ms. Anderson has been doing something of a re-examination herself. She sold her house in Malibu during the pandemic and moved back to her tiny hometown on Vancouver Island, on a woodsy property next to the sea that she bought from her grandmother two decades ago. Save for a brief relationship with a construction worker who was working on her house (you can read about that one in the tabloids), she says, this is the longest period she has ever been alone.

It was here, in a modest house next door to her parents — she moved them onto the compound last year — with her three dogs roaming the garden, where she began writing down her life story. (Want to do something awkward? Ms. Anderson jokes when I first meet her. Write a book about your life and then move your parents in next door.)

At first, she thought she might post snippets on her website — a website, by the way, she only recently gained control of after years of impersonators using it to sell fake merch and cheap Viagra. Then, she thought, she might just write it all down for her sons, Brandon and Dylan Lee, who are now grown and living in Los Angeles.

But eventually — at the urging of her elder son, Brandon, the unofficial keeper of his mom’s legacy (“I work for him,” she jokes) — she decided to publish it, really publish it, in memoir form. Love, Pamela will be released this month, in tandem with a Netflix documentary co-produced by Brandon, that provides a kind of visual accompaniment.

The book is a mix of narrative and poetry (yes, Pamela Anderson writes poetry), a chronology of her life “beginning to end, my first memory to my last” that she hopes will, if not exactly set the record straight (she is hesitant to use that phrasing), just explain her to a world that has long assumed it already understood her.

If you grew up thinking Ms. Anderson had an upbringing as sun-kissed as her hair, you would be wrong. She grew up poor, with a violent father she says has softened in his older age and a mother who tried to leave him more than once but always returned.

Her childhood was at times “unbearable,” she writes, checkered by abuse: She writes that she was molested by a babysitter she eventually stood up to, telling her she hoped she died — only to learn, not long after, that the girl died in a car accident.

She couldn’t tell her parents, she writes, because then they’d know “that I’d killed her with my magical mind.” Her first sexual experience with a man, at around age 13, was with someone more than a decade her senior and ended in rape. She had a high school boyfriend who once kicked her out of a moving car and another who let his friends assault her in a back seat.

“I didn’t tell anybody,” she writes. “I just blocked it out.” Ms. Anderson was working in a tanning salon when she was discovered in her early 20s at a local football game: the Jumbotron panned to a fresh-faced brunette in a Labatt’s beer T-shirt, and the company promptly hired her as a spokesmodel.

Playboy quickly came calling; it wanted her for a photo shoot in Los Angeles, and fast. She decided to do it in part to defy her fiancé at the time, who forbade it. (That same guy, she writes, once told her she was “too sexual to be trusted” — while having an affair.) She threw up during the first photo shoot, after a makeup artist touched her breast. “I couldn’t believe a woman had touched me there, I just couldn’t,” she writes.

She would go on to pose for more covers of Playboy than anyone else in the magazine’s history, including its last nude issue, published in 2015, in which she wore nothing but a gold choker spelling “sex.”

That Pamela Anderson, hypersexualized creature, was the subject of sexual trauma is not coincidental, of course. She writes that learning to see herself as sexual was how she took back some control. “It was my choice,” she writes of her decision to pose nude. But it also “gave some people the impetus, sadly, to treat me without respect.”

Ms. Anderson parlayed Playboy into bit acting roles, like Lisa the “Tool Time” girl on Home Improvement. But it was playing the lifeguard C.J. Parker on Baywatch that truly imprinted Ms. Anderson onto the cultural memory. Baywatch was one of the most widely distributed shows in history, and many of its international deals had Pamela clauses to ensure she would appear in them, she writes. Soon came the products: Baywatch Barbie, a Pammy-Cola. Her face and body appeared on trading cards, prepaid phone cards, stickers and blow-up pool floats.

“I’ve had so many people tell me, like, ‘I just wish I could bottle you up and sell you,’” she tells me. “It’s like, I’m not a thing.”

Even before the sex tape, “Pamela Anderson” was among the most searched terms on the internet. By 2000, Guinness World Records named her the “most downloaded star” of all time. (It sent her a plaque, she says.) She made little on those offshoots, of course.

At the time she negotiated her contract with Baywatch, she said, she had no agent and no management; she’d hardly heard terms like “syndication” and “merchandising rights,” let alone knew how to negotiate for them. “I was a little girl from Canada coming here and running on a beach. Like, how would you think that would make any money?”

Sex tape or no sex tape, there was not much variation to the Pamela Anderson brand from that point forward. She had been a babe with tools, then a babe on a beach. She’d go on to play a babe who was a bounty hunter (Barb Wire), a babe mistaken for a bodyguard (V.I.P.), a babe who works in a bookstore (Stacked — get it?), one of two blond babes in a film called Blonde and Blonder and a babe playing herself, the American obsession of a Kazakh reporter named Borat.

But she was also in on the joke, at least to a point — undressing on S.N.L. to overcome her stage fright; marking off her body parts like slabs of meat for PETA; embodying the role of an animated cartoon in “Stripperella,” created by the Marvel legend Stan Lee, about a superheroine who could cut glass with her nipples. (He wanted to make the cartoon nude. Ms. Anderson said no.)

“My breasts have a career,” she once joked in Esquire. “I’m just tagging along.” Sure, she has things she wishes she could do over. The breasts (implanted, then deflated, then implanted again — “a vicious cycle,” she writes), the marriages (a handful of them, to men who seem to “progressively get worse,” she jokes), the bad career choices (reality TV), worse financial decisions (including a hefty tax debt), leading to even worse career choices (Dancing With the Stars).

But that’s not the same as having regrets. “I guess the sex symbol-y thing is part of what people think of me,” she says. “And it’s not like I’m trying to change it.”

It’s just that if anyone is going to tell the story of Pamela Anderson’s life in 2023, it’s going to be her. There was a certain dance that we expected from women who made a living, in part, off being beautiful in the 1990s (or maybe that we have always expected from sex symbols).

We expected to talk about their bodies in front of them and have them laugh along. We expected them to embody perfection but resented them for conforming to an unattainable ideal. We expected them to have higher aspirations — but sneered at any suggestion that they could. Ms. Anderson, for the most part, did this dance effortlessly: She was grateful for the hand she was dealt, happy for the opportunity, humbled by her sliver of success, even if she never had the chance to “really show what I am capable of,” she says.

But now there is a new dance we expect, often from these same women: If they’re among those who, in the past, were treated particularly unkindly — those for whom there was a sex tape, a conservatorship, an affair, a drug overdose — we offer them redemption, in exchange for their publicly living through it all again.

Pamela Anderson does not want to do this dance. She is telling her story, yes, and that story may confirm many of the things people assumed about her. But in the years since that tape was released, she also didn’t collapse.

She raised two sons, who are her staunchest defenders. She has designed vegan accessories, published a series of novels, co-wrote a book of relationship advice, produced a documentary about meat, started a foundation and became something of an art muse. Last year she made her debut on Broadway in Chicago, playing the role of the misunderstood seductress Roxie Hart — a character with whom she said she felt a particular kinship. Her performance was surprisingly well received.

But that’s the thing about that whole dumb blonde trope, Ms. Anderson says wryly: “I can only surprise people.”

For years, she says, she resisted offers to do projects about her life, unconvinced anyone needed to hear from her, content with her mark on the culture without wanting to challenge it. She isn’t after validation or affirmation and is not particularly concerned about her legacy. But the book, she says, stirred something primal in her.

She says it’s the first thing in her life over which she has had complete control — down to the copy edits, which she insisted on transferring into the manuscript herself — and losing that control was not an option. “It really was life or death,” she says. “I felt I need to tell my story. And I really couldn’t let anybody do it but me.”

We forget sometimes, when we talk about the idea of agency, that it’s as much about the stories we tell ourselves as it is about the actions we take. It’s not just about what happened to us; it’s about the role we feel we played in what happened. It’s the difference between posing for Playboy and a stolen sex tape. It’s why hearing someone recount your life to you can make you feel sick, while telling your own story, in your own words, can feel like a matter of survival.

In the trailer for Pamela, a Love Story, Ms. Anderson and her son Brandon present through a series of clips how she was exploited, lost control of her image, had to make a career out of the pieces left. But the trailer is ultimately defiant. “I’m not the damsel in distress,” a barefaced Ms. Anderson declares at one point, then suggests she’ll do all the interviews naked.

The tone, as always, with Pamela Anderson, is light and charming, but the message is clear: You spent years gawking at me, drooling over me, reducing me to a punchline. Don’t you dare feel good about yourselves for rescuing me now.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Jessica Bennett

Photograph by: Sara Cwynar

©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES