The highly anticipated biographical drama miniseries, Pam & Tommy, aired on 2 February 2022. The show chronicles the tumultuous marriage of Canadian actress, Playboy Playmate and Baywatch star, Pamela Anderson, and Motley Crue founding member and drummer, Tommy Lee. After the couple married four days after meeting in 1995, their intense and internationally publicized four-year marriage led to two sons and Lee being charged with domestic assault and child endangerment. The couple had an on-again, off-again relationship in the early 2000s and are now officially splitting ways.
The series focuses on the non-consensual publication of the couple’s sex tape that was stolen by a disgruntled carpenter who was denied pay from Lee. Although the publication and media frenzy surrounding the tape hurt both Anderson and Lee, any explicit media content featuring a woman, especially a celebrity, inordinately adversely impacts the woman more than the male counterpart. The show’s director, Lake Bell, is aware of this maltreatment of women in the media and maintains the purpose was to reclaim the narrative to shed light on the obsessive and toxic relationship society has with celebrities, but neither Lee nor Anderson were involved. The theme was, put simply, “to give Pamela Anderson a voice.” Anderson did not consent to the series creation and sources close to her indicated the detrimental mental effects generated by the production of Pam & Tommy. This production is a sad reflection of our society’s enthusiasm to commercialize women’s trauma without understanding the magnitude of our consumption.
Anderson’s body and iconic blonde hair became a 1990s sex symbol and centered around her international fame from Playboy to Baywatch platforms. She capitalized on what attracted the public’s attention which allowed her to have a flourishing career in a paternalistic (and sexist) industry but the price was her body being seen as public property. No matter what career or job a woman (or man) maintains, including sex workers, an individual’s body and any publication therein belong solely to that individual unless they have given consent. However, this extraordinarily simple concept eluded many individuals during this scandal (and still eludes misogynists today). During the ten million dollar lawsuit against all the parties participating in the distribution of the sex tape, an opposing party’s lawyer argued that since the couple often talked about their sex life to media (and with Anderson’s history of posing nude), the Lees had “forfeited their privacy rights,” according to Rolling Stone.
From a legal perspective, in the United States there are first amendment rights that are stringently protected but in Canada, if you are telling a true story in the public interest about well-known people, the right to freedom of expression under section 2 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms permits the adaption of Anderson’s story without her consent. Because the story is based closely on Amanda Chicago Lewis’ 2014 Rolling Stone article “Pam and Tommy: The Untold Story of the World’s Most Infamous Sex Tape” if the story does not defame the parties and tells the truth, then Anderson must stand by to watch her most embarrassing, and mentally draining period of her life consumed for entertainment purposes. A perfect example of capitalizing on the law with the only consideration being whether it is legal and not if it’s humane.
It may be that the effect of this series allows greater empathy towards Anderson and the misery exacerbated by society’s obsession with celebrities. However, the issue remains Anderson lost control and her privacy was outrageously violated in 1995, and just twenty-five years later, history repeats itself. The media is still using consumers’ obsession as fuel to vehicle their hurt on celebrities, specifically women. Anderson is now reliving the trauma but through a different medium in the shape of a subscription TV series combined with the media attention of other platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. The glimmer of hope to rise from this incredulous capitalization of a woman’s trauma is that notwithstanding the sexualized nature of Anderson’s career, at the end of the day, she was a victim of privacy invasion and Pamela Anderson is a symbol of resiliency for other victims of revenge porn.