Recently, former Playboy playmate and actress Pamela Anderson revealed that she had been molested and raped as a child. This caused some Christian commentators to rightly sympathize with her plight and to quickly point out that these early childhood traumas most likely resulted in her later entrance into the soft-core porn industry; Anderson appeared on 11 Playboy covers and ushered in the wave of celebrity sex-tape scandals with the release of her private porn film starring herself and then husband Tommy Lee; Anderson has been married 3 times, and most recently, remarried third husband Rick Solomon. Regrettably, Solomon is most famous for distributing his own sex tape between himself and socialite Paris Hilton. Nevertheless, most tragically, at Cannes, where Anderson announced her childhood horrors, she has continued to nip-slip in front of ogling photographers; even in middle-age, relying solely upon her sagging sexual claim to fame.
Conversely, at about the same time, as the issuance of the commemorative Harvey Milk postage-stamp drew near, there has been a flurry of negative internet articles, mainly from Christian news sources, detailing the sexual transgressions of the gay political icon. Yet, like Anderson, Milk was also the victim of sexual violence. The difference? In women, they usually act out their feelings of neglect and abuse through self-victimization: oftentimes, becoming overly sexual as children and teens, seeking out abusive men, and falling into sexual exploitation. On the other hand, men tend to point the aggression outwards: striking out with violence, becoming abusers themselves, or eroticizing the victimization and their tormentor. I saw this in the gay community, when guys grew older and became the proverbial “chicken hawk;” picking up and breaking in all the new boys; less often, where the actions of several friends whom I constantly feared for their safety – when they would pursue so called “rough trade,” and later get beaten and nearly killed by those they solicited. It was a desperate attempt to resolve the schoolyard bullying that had so afflicted them as boys. And, like women, they attempted to find solace in something which is usually wretchedly familiar – within the confines of the abuse itself. Both situations are equally heartbreaking, and inevitably destructive.