It’s been 25 years since the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape went viral, marking an irreversible shift in the “celebrity” social media culture, Duncan Lay writes.
Forget Covid-19, the real decline of Western civilisation began with a celebrity home video filled with boring banality — and two sex scenes.
This year marks 25 years since the Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee tape went viral, in an age where everyone thought “going viral” meant you needed to see a doctor.
To “celebrate” this moment in time, Lily James and Sebastian Stan will be starring in a show about the pair later this year.
Presumably it won’t feature all the X-rated bits but no doubt that would be the only reason people would tune in.
You see, like a snowball rolling down a mountainside that turns into an unstoppable avalanche, the tape created a “celebrity” culture that threatens to drown us all in a blizzard of horror.
It gave birth to Kim Kardashian, which led to millions of Kim wannabes on social media and now has teenagers fixated with social media, with all its resultant mental and physical health problems.
And we can draw a direct line back to the Pam and Tommy tape.
The pair married in 1995; she was at the height of her Baywatch fame and he was a founding member of Motley Crue, so a recognisable name even if you didn’t listen to their music.
She had the inflated lips before they became standard issue for every Instagrammer and, while she was on a TV show, there were just two things keeping her career afloat — and they weren’t the life preservers she used to “save” the extras on the beach.
The tape was stolen, along with their safe, by a disgruntled employee who — so the story goes — was after the cash they allegedly owed him.
By mid-1996 it was playing non-stop on the fledging internet. I have never watched it but apparently it is about 50 minutes of classic home movie, which is to say dull, pointless and cringe-inducing. Then there are the sex scenes.
Pam and Tommy tried and failed to keep it from being released. But they might as well have tried finding deeper spiritual meaning in Baywatch. It was impossible.
For them it was perhaps their high point in terms of fame and recognition.
For us, it was the beginning of the end.
For it was precisely this blend of banality, a complete lack of acting ability and a little bit of sex that proved to be the formula for success for first the Kardashians and then their many imitators.
It has given birth to a mutant culture where it’s not about scripts, or acting ability but rather your vital statistics and how much of them you are prepared to flaunt.
Now we see the vital message about respect for women struggling to stand out against a backdrop where even the most “healthy” social media stars need to “perform” in crop tops and make sure their butt-lifting leggings are always facing the camera.
You might think it’s a bit of a long bow to draw a line from Pam and Tommy’s sex tape to a culture that sees our phone-obsessed kids disappear down social media rabbit holes for hours, days and even weeks at a time.
But history turns on such small events.
It’s been a quarter of a century since Pam and Tommy’s sex tape became famous. But now it feels like it’s the world that has been screwed.