Pamela Anderson Teams Up With Rabbi For Anti-Porn Op-Ed

Pamela Anderson and celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach have teamed up to pen an op-ed that decries the pervasiveness of porn using Anthony Weiner‘s latest sexting scandal as a springboard.

Pamela Anderson Puts Porn On Blast

Anderson and Boteach’s op-ed, “Take the Pledge: No More Indulging Porn,” appears in today’s Wall Street Journal. Together, the two make the argument that porn is a social and cultural ill that must be cured. Their article comes on the heels of reports that Weiner, a former congressman and mayoral candidate, has failed to kick his career-curtailing and marriage-ending sexting habits. Anderson and Boteach use Weiner as an example to support their argument, though possibly conflating two separate addictions.

“What is required is an honest dialogue about what we are witnessing — the true nature and danger of porn — and an honor code to tamp it down in the collective interests of our well-being as individuals, as families and as communities,” Anderson and Boteach’s column reads. “And if anyone still doubted the devastation that porn addiction wreaks on those closest to the addict, behold the now-shattered marriage of Mr. Weiner and Huma Abedin, a breakup that she initiated, reportedly, in shock at the disgraced ex-congressman’s inclusion of their four-year-old son in one lewd photo that he sent to a near-stranger.”

Anderson and Boteach believe that pornography can be particularly destructive for married men, like Weiner.

“We have often warned about pornography’s corrosive effects on a man’s soul and on his ability to function as husband and, by extension, as father. This is a public hazard of unprecedented seriousness given how freely available, anonymously accessible and easily disseminated pornography is nowadays,” they write. “How many families will suffer? How many marriages will implode? How many talented men will scrap their most important relationships and careers for a brief onanistic thrill?”

Baywatch star Anderson, who covered Playboy 15 times during its heyday and who has long been a sex symbol, seems to be of the opinion that the sexual revolution has ended. And, with that end, the diminishing of the porn industry should follow, per Anderson and Boteach.

“The ubiquity of porn is an outgrowth of the sexual revolution that began a half-century ago and which, with gender rights and freedoms now having been established, has arguably run its course,” the duo writes, adding that young people are now the “crack babies of porn” and need to be told that porn “is for losers.”

Anderson and Boteach write, “We must educate ourselves and our children to understand that porn is for losers—a boring, wasteful and dead-end outlet for people too lazy to reap the ample rewards of healthy sexuality.”