Still, I can’t help but partially believe in this hypothesis, probably because I’m secretly ashamed to be attracted to Pamela Anderson. Somehow, it makes me feel stupid. It’s almost like desiring Pam Anderson is like admitting that—sexually—you have no creativity. I would feel much better about myself if I would prefer to go down on Kim Deal or Ellen Barkin. I would somehow feel smarter if what I wanted was even just a model with a mantis-like skeleton body, like Kate Moss. I profoundly prefer to be turned on by any woman who looks vaguely fucked-up; that’s much more intellectually satisfying. And I know dozens of men who have completely talked themselves into this way of thinking, so much so that they don’t even realize they’re overcompensating; these are the same people who insist they prefer Mary Ann to Ginger. In fact, I once worked with a guy who told me that he thinks Pamela Anderson is a fundamentally ugly, plastic woman who’s “antisexy.” His claim is that it’s not just that Anderson doesn’t excite him—she actually makes him want to recoil. And every woman in our office seemed to like him more after he said that.
What I’ve come to realize is that a remarkably high percentage of everyday citizens—and this applies to both men and women—actively despise Pam Anderson. Moreover, their dislike for this woman is a completely conscious decision: They’ve decided to hate Anderson on principle. But what they really hate is the modern world; what they hate is that Pamela Anderson is the incarnation of the perfect, idealized icon we all sort of concede is supposed to be impossible. We’ve established this unrealistic image of what we want from the human race, but it angers people to see that image in real life. It sort of shows why most Americans hate themselves.
Every so often I stumble across The Man Show on Comedy Central, a program where two semi-charming jerks insist that men are brilliant because men are idiots.[29] It’s the apex of that whole “we men are magnificent bastards” movement that began in roughly 1992—I think Tim Allen probably spawned it—and it suggests that true guys can only like beer and football and pork ribs and strippers. Now, granted—these are things that many men genuinely adore—but not in the rote, unilaterally Sasquatchian manner this kind of shtick always implies. A program like The Man Show is legitimately negative for society, but not because it’s misogynistic; The Man Show is socially negative because it actively tries to prove an inaccurate hypothesis that too many women already believe: The premise of The Man Show is that all men think exactly the same way. And that consensus makes it difficult to write about Pam Anderson, because everyone assumes you’re just a perv who adores tits. And that’s not true (at least not for me). In truth, you can adore tits and you can love Pamela Anderson—and without necessarily associating the former with the latter.
Am I physically attracted to Pamela Anderson? Of course. But the more I see her, the more I realize I’m not looking at a person I’d like to sleep with; I’m looking at America. And I’m sure a lot of guys who masturbated to black-and-white photos of Marilyn Monroe during the Korean conflict had the same experience, even though they probably didn’t think about it in those terms.
Answer this question. Let’s say you were given two options: You can either (a) have sex with the world’s most attractive person, but you can tell no one and no one will ever know, or (b) you can walk through life with that person hand-in-hand, creating the illusion to everyone alive that this individual is your lover—even though you will never so much as kiss.
Which would you pick?
If you’re like most people, your immediate gut reaction is to take option “a” Everyone seems to say this at first blush, mostly because we all want to imagine ourselves as visceral beings (this is especially true of men, who always pick “a” immediately). However, if you keep talking to someone about this question, and you start pointing out the specifics of what these two scenarios mean, you’ll find that everybody eventually admits that the second alternative would be more satisfying. And this query always makes me think about Marilyn Monroe and her 1954 marriage to Joe DiMaggio.
Despite lasting only nine months, the Monroe-DiMaggio union was probably the most perfect marriage in American history. In a way, it seemed like an example of how life is supposed to work: The sexiest, most desirable woman on the planet fell in love with the coolest, most beloved stud of the Greatest Generation. Yet this marriage was doomed; in fact, my suspicion is that the relationship was even more of a nightmare than we know. The more we learn about DiMaggio, the more he seems like a cold, sullen badass who was always alone (even in a roomful of people).[30] And as for Marilyn… well, she personifies every beautiful/crazy/sexy/suicidal woman I’ve ever met (and you know the type of person I’m referring to—this is the kind of girl who’s depressed by the irrational notion that men only want her for her physical appearance but who still cannot shake the equally irrational fear that she is somehow overweight and repulsive). I am certain that having sex with Marilyn Monroe was four minutes of ecstasy followed by five hours of frustration. This is one of the reasons why DiMaggio couldn’t make his marriage work, yet still felt compelled to decorate her crypt with roses for the next four decades. Remember that question I posed two paragraphs ago? Joltin’ Joe is just about the only man in history who faced this hypothetical for real and somehow picked both options. And it’s that second option—the lonely, painful option “b”—that matters metaphorically. What’s compelling about the idea of the Monroe-DiMaggio relationship—and the Monroe–Arthur Miller relationship, and the Monroe-JFK relationship—is not the idea of them being together. It’s the idea of them not being together. It’s the hollow reality of things not working out. It’s about Monroe being unattainable to everyone—world-class athletes, brilliant playwrights, and the only movie star president of the twentieth century. She was above them all.
Oh, I know: Every one of those guys had sex with Marilyn, so it’s kind of a naive notion to think of her as pure. But it’s not so much that Monroe seemed virginal; it’s more like she seemed too overtly sexual to actually participate in the unseemly process of intercourse. Trying to picture Norma Jean (ahem) “getting her freak on” is like trying to imagine Bruce Lee getting into a bar fight: Even in my mind, I can’t conceive anything that doesn’t seem like cinema. It’s impossible to think of Monroe having sex like a normal person. I always imagine a breeze blowing the curtains over the bedpost, and all her naughty bits are hidden; her hair is perfect, and she’s sorta smiling with her eyes half closed. It’s even PG-13 in my brain. Norman Mailer used to tell a (possibly) apocryphal story that claims—upon signing her first lucrative contract with Twentieth Century Fox—Monroe sardonically said, “Well, that’s the last cock I eat.” I really hate that story, even if it’s true. Marilyn Monroe is the definition of the old-school American sex symbol, and part of that definition is that it’s unfathomable to picture her giving anyone a blow job.
29
1. It’s possible that
30
2. Although the fact that he never missed a cut-off man in his entire career somehow makes this seem acceptable.