It's no longer the 90s, but Pamela Anderson still makes women feel inadequate

Telegraph

5 hours ago

Pamela Anderson has reinvented herself as a 'rebel' against the rules of conventional beauty. Which is great; I genuinely applaud it. Even if it does require a bit of cognitive reorganisation.
Back in the 1990s, none of us would have pegged Pamela Anderson to become feminism's last redoubt. She was one of the women who made other women feel bad about themselves. Not deliberately, I'm sure; just by comparison.
She looked like a game of Heads, Bodies and Legs, played entirely by the male libido: plump lips, tousled blonde hair, long brown legs, and breasts so round and tempting they looked like iced buns peeping over the top of her famous red swimsuit. Hers were the first 'fake boobs' I had ever seen, and they made me feel – on top of the usual demoralised awe that comes from gazing upon an impossible ideal – a frisson of dread. If even this woman was considered, or considered herself, imperfect enough to require surgery, what hope for the rest of us?
The vapid, girl-power version of feminism that took hold in the 1990s (the decade of Baywatch, lads' mags and the supermodel) rejected the idea that there was anything weak or unsisterly about modifying your body in order to meet a tyrannical standard of beauty. Your body, your choice: ergo, anything you chose to do to yourself must be empowering.
But what about everyone else? No woman is an island. We all compare ourselves to others, and adjust our self-image accordingly. It's a bit like when you're in a sauna, naked, and then one person comes in wearing a bikini: suddenly everyone else feels hideously exposed.
The same is true of people who – whether naturally, or via considerable money, effort and pain – achieve great physical beauty. They raise the bar for everyone else. The result is a constantly escalating cycle of improvement works, turbo-charged in recent years by social media.
The more women chase it, the narrower the beauty ideal becomes. The algorithmic symmetry of an AI deepfake is the new perfection. One cosmetic surgery website lays out the maths: 'The distance from the top of the nose to the centre of the lips should be around 1.618 times the distance from the centre of the lips to the chin'; 'the length of an ear should be comparable to the length of the nose'; and 'the model ratio of volume in the lips is 1:1.6 (the lower lip having slightly more volume than the upper lip)'.
No wonder we have reached a point where, according to the Chartered Trading Standards Institute, young women are meeting untrained practitioners in public toilets to get cheap Botox, fat jabs and even butt lifts. Failing that, they hide behind smartphone filters. These smooth away all their flaws/idiosyncracies, allowing them to present to the world the melancholy sight of the person they wish they were.
And now here comes Pammy, mourning the effects of this conformity. 'With AI technology and filters, people are becoming kind of boring-looking,' she told Harpers Bazaar. At 57, she has taken to walking the red carpet without any make-up on, in order to 'challenge beauty norms. I've always been a rebel.'
The trouble is, she looks incredible: cheekbones like scythes, lightly freckled skin, jewels glittering in her Mia Farrow-style fringed bob. Is this what us fifty-somethings must now aspire to? It's a challenge alright: just not the one Anderson thinks she's making.