Discovering the documentary Pamela, a love story on Netflix, about the fate reserved by the media for Pamela Anderson, I thought back to all these artists who have been reduced to their image, to their sexualized body, to the desire that they have been able to arouse in men. To all those unfortunate Marilyn Monroe heirs who have been on TV for 60 years.
Pamela Anderson explains, in this nearly two-hour documentary, the exhilarating feeling of reclaiming not only your image, but also your destiny and your self-esteem. It happened when she posed for the magazine Playboy in the early 1990s. She felt liberated.
“I found something that I loved doing,” she says in this Ryan White film produced by her son, Brandon Lee. Until then, she was a shy and withdrawn young woman, who had been discovered by chance on the giant screen of a BC Lions football game in 1989.
Pamela Anderson had grown up in a violent home, with an alcoholic father, in a village on Vancouver Island, Ladysmith, where she returned to live recently. She was molested for years by a babysitter, she says, raped at age 12 by a 25-year-old man, then by a small gang of teenagers when she was 14.
Become at 22 a muse of Hugh Hefner, the editor of Playboy – “the only man who respected me,” she confided to the Times from London last weekend – allowed her to come to terms with her sexuality and launch her career as a model and actress.
But this sulphurous image of a sex symbol, of a luscious and sassy fake blonde, has become her golden cage. Especially from 1995, when a homemade video of her antics with her musician husband Tommy Lee was stolen from her home, in a safe, by a vengeful entrepreneur. And that the case found itself before the courts, in an archmediatized trial during which we did not hesitate to turn against it the image it projected.
“I felt violated,” she says in Pamela, a love story about the first sextape of celebrities to flood the web, when these intimate videos weren’t used as a springboard for reality TV. “I knew my career was over,” adds the star of Baywatch, who comes before the camera unvarnished (literally and figuratively). A 55-year-old woman, the most famous blonde bombshell of her generation, always sneering, but bearing the scars of numerous betrayals.
She resented seeing the tale of the worst invasion of her privacy turned into a Disney fiction series a year ago without her consent.
Pam & Tommy in vain has reframed history to its advantage and denounced the two weights, two measures of the way we look at the sexuality of men and women (some considered as losers, others as sluts), Pamela Anderson said to have had nightmares.
“I never watched the video; I’m not going to watch this, she says in the documentary, shot when the Disney TV series aired. No one knew what was going through our heads at that time. »
The “viral” broadcast of this explicit eight-minute video opened the floodgates to mockery from commentators. Pamela Anderson became the Turk’s head for Jay Leno, host of the Tonight Show. In archive footage from the Netflix documentary, Leno and interviewers Larry King and Matt Lauer (fired a few years ago by NBC over sexual misconduct allegations) are seen taking turns asking the actress about her breast implants.
“I don’t see how interesting it is,” says Pamela Anderson. It’s inappropriate to ask these questions to women. There must be a boundary not to cross. »
PHOTO JORDAN STRAUSS, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
Britney Spears at the movie premiere Once Upon a Time in HollywoodJuly 22, 2019
She is quite right. However, this border has been cheerfully crossed for decades. In Framing Britney Spears2021 documentary by New York Times on the famous American pop singer, we also see her delivered to the hosts of late-night talk shows who multiply the sexist comments about her.
Americans don’t have a monopoly on uncle jokes, far from it. I recently came across an appallingly sexist interview with the host of the British show Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, in 2011, with actress Amber Heard. She was there to talk about her passion for cars. He kept referring to nudity scenes in the movie that revealed her.
In 2007, closer to home, Guy A. Lepage hosted Nelly Arcan on the set of Everybody talks about itto the sound of When you give yourself (to an experienced woman) of Francis Martin: “If we rely on her books, she does not only handle the verb. »
She had learned from this “experience”, made public posthumously. A writer published three times by Editions du Seuil, reduced to her sexuality by the host of a program followed by a million viewers. Imagine all those who were not in the running for the Medici and Femina prizes…
It is obvious, and yet, it seems useful to remember it: it is not because a woman reveals herself that she strips naked in the pages of Playboywhether she disguises herself as Lolita in a music video or describes her former profession as a prostitute in a novel, she authorizes anyone to define her by her “burqa of flesh”, as Nelly Arcan said.
It remains to be hoped that things will change, that the younger generations will be less sexist than those that preceded them, that the ordinary sexism that makes it acceptable to deride Madonna’s cosmetic surgery procedures is a practice, if not on the way out. , at least losing momentum.
I may be overly optimistic, but I feel that the uninhibited sexism that Pamela Anderson suffered in the media 30 years ago would be less easily tolerated today. I am also curious to note, among what today passes for the fads of young progressives, what will be considered outdated in 30 years. This is called the evolution of morals. And maybe even the human species.