After five marriages and countless magazine covers, the former Baywatch star makes being makeup-free and unattached look the best of all worlds
P
amela Anderson has been married five times. She has made the kind of romantic decisions – impulsive, reckless, incorrigible – that suggest someone who struggles to be alone. She had known her first husband only a few days; her second marriage lasted four months; she described her most recent, in 2020, as “a disaster”. Now, at 58, she is finally single.
“There’s that great Osho quote – ‘The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love.’ That’s where I’m at right now,” she told AnOther magazine. “I just want to unleash the dragon. I don’t need anybody in my way. I want to get it out. It happens at different times in everybody’s life, and this is my time.”
Inspiration can come from the most unlikely of places, but the pneumatic 90s pin-up must be the most unexpected feminist icon so far. And yet, her new insistence on decentring men is merely the latest entry in a list of role model moves she has made recently. It’s quite the 180 from someone whose raison d’être once appeared to be the male gaze, who surgically altered her body to cartoon proportions to appeal to them, who has said: “My boobs had a career and I was just tagging along.” Thanks to her, a badly scripted, worse acted teatime TV show about lifeguards was an international smash hit. (No one tuned in to Baywatch for the articles.)
