It’s been nearly 30 years since the first major celebrity sex tape, but did people miss the message it represented?

The internet is not a new light in its own right. It is a conductor for which the last 30 years have been an intellectual and emotional buffer stop. Our parents were born in the sci-fi era – Star Wars, Alien, Blade Runner… Weird Science -, science fiction carrying the dynamic energy of our parents wildest dreams with them into the computer era and, yeah, it was fun, for a time. 

The internet came, but it didn’t expand the breadth of subjects we could think about, only the subjects we already had access to. The first use of the internet was word-processing (in other words, pen and paper), next was email (e-mail; genius), shopping, finance and, not too much later, porn – now without a VCR. 

Nothing particularly new, but all digitized, including human sexuality. Enter Pam and Tommy, the first truly digital romance. 

Playboy’s Pamela Anderson and Motley Crue’s Tommy Lee are about as archetypal as a 90s celebrity couple can get. A record-setting playboy model and a superstar drummer for a 90s metal band. 

Anderson made the first move, so the story goes, sending Lee a drink at an exclusive crawl in Hollywood on New Years Eve 1994. They spent time getting to know each other and married… four days later in Cancun, Mexico. 

The magnitude of attention paid their relationship wasn’t strange, not for a-listers, the intrusiveness however? A different story. 

“Pam and Tommy”, the eponymous title of their unlawfully-leaked sex tape, is synonymous with celebrity sex scandal. The first of its type to be mass-produced and easily accessible via http link. 

The numbers were breathtaking, if thoroughly disappointing. Millions of people accessed the video on the web, showing infinitely more friends. So sought out was the tape that smut peddlers and VHS salesmen were charging $60 – in 1995. Within 12 months, it had reportedly grossed 77 million dollars in “legitimate” sales. 

Remembered as the first truly online celebrity sex scandal – a turning point – little is made of it constituting for both parties a sex crime or their numerous and varied attempts to have it scrubbed from the internet.

The release of the tape – orchestrated by a disgruntled former employee of Lee’s – was disastrous for the celebrities. For Pam, predictably, it was worse. 

The internet didn’t just transplant pop culture’s interest in celebrity relationship and scandal, it grafted it’s defects onto itself, creating an even-more cumbersome, even more potent parasocial leviathan. 

Lee, for his part, had his naked body permanently inserted into the annals of internet history. As a rock star however, the “image” of a love romp on a private yacht in Lake Mead with the personal fantasy of practically every American male between 12-20 was easier to handle, at least, than being that fantasy. 

The internet amplified and energised a predictably misogynistic view. Rather than a victim, Anderson was made a martyr. Speaking to Jack Hardwick of The Sun Online in January 2023, she described the tape: “It was like a rape. You are just a thing that is owned by the world.” 

Where Anderson described the incident as adding to Lee’s rockstar persona, Anderson describes loss of relationships, a noticeable career downturn and a prosecutorial intrusion of her personal life by fans. 

Made to feel like a “wh*re” (in her own and indeed others’ words), Anderson’s next film bombed at the box office whilst she was subjected to endless media speculation and paparazzi harassment. 

Fans, men and women alike, made Anderson the preeminent sex symbol of the 90s. Then, they punished her for having sex – again, I add – in private with her husband. 

Anderson’s was the internet’s first – first celebrity sex tape, first revenge porn – but there would be more to follow. Between Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and a 2014 celebrity leak which saw several celebrities targeted by hackers, the internet has 

now recorded several hundred million views towards illicit and usually illegal images of celebrities. 

Predictably, women have borne the brunt of the unfortunate consequence of this part of the internet age. Anderson has since stressed however that she is not a victim, nor does she regret her actions. 

The question burns though. Imagine, if you would, you do something everyone does. You do it privately, in your own home. It’s intimate and deeply personal and shared only with one other. Imagine then that your friends and family – that is to say your mother, brother/sister and best pal – viewing it, and in every TV screen and magazine they see.

Is that a “scandal?”, a “sex tape?” Or is it a digital sexual assault, and should be seen as such?