Pamela Anderson Blames Porn for Anthony Weiner’s Sexting. Is She Wrong?
Pamela Anderson and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach might, on the surface, seem like they don’t have much in common, considering the former is a Playboy cover girl and actress and the latter is a media personality and host of the TLC series Shalom in the Home. However, the pair does share one surprising ideology: that porn is evil.
The pair teamed up to pen an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, published Thursday, in which they condemn pornography and blame it for choices made by serial sexter Anthony Weiner. The former New York congressman and one-time New York mayoral candidate just this week found himself once again in the spotlight for sending NSFW pictures of himself to an online paramour — including one in which his toddler son is asleep in bed beside him, an action that has now led to Weiner being investigated by New York’s Administration for Children’s Services. Also, his wife, Huma Abedin, announced the couple’s separation following the recent revelations.
But, according to Anderson and Boteach, it’s not Weiner’s fault, rather it’s porn’s “corrosive effects on a man’s soul and on his ability to function as husband, and, by extension, father.”
But it should be noted that such an argument is dangerous on many levels: It sets up a paradigm that exonerates men from their own decisions while condemning the sex workers who create the pornography. It also seeks to strip these workers of their livelihoods. Not to mention, of course, that it shifts the focus onto the industry of pornography — which in no way has been linked to Weiner’s case — and off of Weiner’s decision making.
“If you want to look to why someone like Anthony Weiner is going to transgress, this is really a question for him,” says Kate D’Adamo, the National Policy Advocate at the Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center, and not a question for those who work in pornography.
She explains that focusing on pornography, something that Weiner himself has not publicly connected to his situation, seems misguided, especially since the crux of the Weiner matter is “a question of what people think they can get away with in society and think they won’t get caught with.”
Furthermore, D’Adamo adds, “Adultery happened long before porn was created and the emergence of Twitter didn’t invent these kinds of transgressions. The conversation about why people commit adultery needs to start with things that happened before porn and the Internet.”
D’Adamo also notes that the kind of logic laid out in the Anderson-Boteach op-ed furthers a dangerous cultural narrative around the idea that men’s sexual desires are uncontrollable, an idea that helps perpetuate what we think of as “rape culture.”
The op-ed, she says, “falls into the trope of ‘men will be men,’ which really undermines things like consent and the development of relationships. There is this assumption that boys will be boys and any kind of exposure to anything sexual will make them act out.” What this does, she clarifies, is create a presumed norm where men’s responsibility for their choices — especially those pertaining to sex — is waived in full.
And D’Adamo says that the cultural stigmatization of pornography only furthers the problem: “We can’t have open conversations about pornography and sexuality, including pornography, prostitution, and the agency people have over their own bodies.”
The Anderson-Boteach op-ed also denies that for many women, pornography and the sex trade are inherently feminist.
“We forget the agency we’re seeing in people who engage in sex work and that their decision is one of economic justice,” says D’Adamo. “They are making a decision to utilize their bodies in a way that best meets their circumstances to have economic stability. There is nothing more inherently feminist than seeing a situation where a woman says, ‘These are my circumstances and these are the decisions I make’ — and then respecting that.”
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