Pamela Anderson - Lust for Love: Rekindling Intimacy and Passion in Your Relationship

W hen two people from radically different backgrounds agree wholeheartedly on something, listen closely. There is a good chance that what they have to say might just be important. Let this book be the proof of that. The co-authors of this book, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and I, are indeed very different people, from very different traditions, and with very different approaches to life and the world. An outspoken, courageous, and prolific speaker and writer, Shmuley is also a religious teacher. The perspective he brings to Lust for Love is drawn from years of experience providing advice and counseling to married couples.

My background contrasts with Shmuleys. Many would consider it the opposite of his. But while the broad strokes of my biography are well known, there is also a private side of my life that few will have heard. I started modeling for Playboy at the age of twenty-two and spent my twenties as a cast member on Baywatch. At an age when most people are discovering themselves for the first time as adultsin a time before the Internet had yet taken over our lives and everyone had a taste of celebrityI found myself sharing my own image with a generation. I watched as my name broke out from my immediate circle of friends, eventually reaching households all over the world. Surreally, I was called a sex symbol, a bombshell, a goddess.

It was a disconcerting experience for a shy, small-town girl from Vancouver Islanda quiet, studious girl who loved her mom and dad but who also had to deal with no small amount of trauma. In the early days it was tough, grappling with uncertainty and the sense of exposure. But I discovered I felt comfortable as long as I pretended to be someone elseplaying the part in public, finding within myself a different persona for every shoot.

Some might smirk, but in no way do I want to disown the Playboy years or diminish their importance to me. These experiences were a sort of university for me. Through them, I was given the opportunity to meet and befriend fascinating and beguiling peoplemen and women, souls and intellectswhose experiences and character and wisdom shaped me. It was an educationunique and brilliant and precious. Thinking of these years I am reminded of the words Anas Nin wrote on the development of woman on her own terms, rather than as an imitation of man. The theme of woman finding her own language, articulating her own feelings, discovering her own perceptions.

Its sometimes assumed that I should want to renounce those years as decadent or foolish. This is not the case. In hindsight, I am very proud of the independent, unorthodox path I took, a path that allowed me to develop on my own terms, and notas some might presumeon the terms of men. I am proud of the intense spiritual rewards my life has brought me and the wisdom I have been lucky enough to receive.

Most of all, I am proud and in awe of the women Ive met along the waypowerful, wise, fascinating women; women as diverse and varied, as contradictory and manifold, as the types Nin lists in her diaries: the masculine, objective one; the child woman of the world; the maternal woman; the sensation-seeker; the unconsciously dramatic one; the churlish one; the cold, egotistical one; and the healing, intuitive guide-woman.

I want to do justice to these women. I dont at all renounce my past. It is out of those experiencesand with these companions and guidesthat I was able to define myself. It would have been so easy to lose myself then, eclipsed behind a stream of images. But I was there, among these women, and it is there I came to understand the power and autonomy that was available to me in sensuality, there that I came to possess myself in that power, and that is what saved me.