Does this happen to every generation? Where a cultural moment that, during our adolescence appeared deliciously shocking, is revealed to us in adulthood as, at best “troubling”, at worst a grim representation of how the world is cracked down the middle, a thick and low-humming oil dripping from its wound?
I realise now what a naive girl I must have been, to have accepted without daily outrage such clumsy horrors as the media’s addiction to Amy Winehouse’s addictions and Britney Spears’s breakdown, and I choose “naive” rather than “cruel”, because this week has been tough enough. But today, entering middle-age tired and thoughtful, I remain grateful for the ongoing trend for films and TV shows produced as correctives to those decades of casual cruelty, partly for the answers they give, and partly for the questions they leave me with.
The latest is Pam & Tommy, a scripted mini-series about the scandal that unfolded in the mid-1990s after Pamela Anderson and her new husband Tommy Lee’s sex video was stolen from their Malibu home. It does something awkward which its sister-ish piece, Impeachment (Ryan Murphy’s show about Monica Lewinsky), didn’t – it lures an audience in by starting as a screwball romp with a heist and a penis that talks back, then, with scenes of the bloodthirsty deposition when Lee and a pregnant Anderson tried to stop Penthouse from using the tape (“Do you recall how old you were when you first publicly exposed your genitals?”) sinking into something harder, a reckoning.
“It’s not funny,” Anderson told Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in 1996. “This is devastating to us.” We’re left feeling that it’s a kind of miracle she is still standing, having seen what experiences like this – ridicule, constant surveillance, objectification – can do to a young woman.
The sense of entitlement the public felt to the intimate life of this couple has endured and exploded beyond celebrity. Soon after their safe was stolen by a disgruntled electrician, the internet arrived, and quickly became its own kind of safe, now full of everybody’s videos, whether nudes, babies or dinner. What Anderson would have been shocked to learn back then, as she was forced to meet humiliation and misogyny with the wide bright smile of an air hostess, was that two-and-a-half decades later many millions would willingly share similar videos every day.
When the mini-series finishes, the reckonings keep wrecking, as we sit with the fact that both Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson declined to be involved. It’s been reported that Anderson finds it “shocking” the series has been made without her consent. “Pamela has no regrets about her life, but the only thing she would probably erase is this burglary,” said “a source” last month. “She feels so violated to this day. It brings back a very painful time for her.” Could the retelling of the story, including a dramatisation of Anderson miscarrying, prove just as harmful to her as the story itself?
This is the lemon that sours the drink. It’s fabulous that discussions about objectification, invasions of privacy and abuses of power are being ignited by glossy TV shows, and that viewers like me are being prodded to question our own complicity. But we’re a couple of years into the project now, and they’ve only got us so far.
For all the focus on feminism online and its mainstreaming in the media, the world’s politics have not kept up. Rape and sexual assault appears basically legal – only 1.3% of rape cases are now being prosecuted, recorded rapes and sexual offences in England and Wales have “hit a record high” and we’re learning about a multitude of cases where women are suffering at the hands of police supposed to protect them. Across the world, women’s abortion rights are being snatched away. Decades after Anderson and Lee’s sex tape, the posting of nude images of women without their consent is rife, but unlike revenge porn, it is legal – a report by the Revenge Porn Helpline calls it “collector culture,” as the pictures are traded like football cards.
That issue of consent – the idea that Pamela Anderson might feel violated not just by the ripples still felt by the exploitation of her “sex tape”, but by the world revisiting it today – is illustrative of how talking can be prioritised over action. Producers must have felt hers was too good a story not to tell – meaning the story ceased to be hers.
It’s a funny kind of entertainment, a comedy caper about misogyny that features a talking penis, and leaves you awake at 4am, guilt and a little rage rattling through your throat. But the discomfort is a reminder. If what seemed funny then seems disgraceful now, then something is clear: the actions we take today will look very different to the next generation, looking afresh at the world and ready to find their own cracks.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
