With the Pamela Anderson & Tommy Lee sextape being the topic of the moment, it requires some of us to return to middle school in order to relive this specific period. For starters, we didn’t get our hands on it until spring 1998, nearly some two years after the video had come out. White, suburban middle schoolers were literally the last people on earth to catch up to any trend.
Much like how middle school is the most awkward time in a person’s life, this was also a rather awkward moment in history, especially for those in the seventh and eighth grades. Internet was just beginning to be installed in computer labs and classrooms across America, although it was more of a novelty than anything else. The proliferation of cell phones was still a year or two away.
Getting your hands on porn at this time was a challenge. You were basically stuck with magazines and/or videos that were heavily used or unwanted. We’re talking about the middle mystery magazine in the $9.99 three pack sold at the local liquor store. Hell, acquiring a Maxim or FHM was difficult. There were clerks at Tower Books who wouldn’t sell them to teenagers without a parent.
Everyone in middle school knew there were naked ladies on the internet. But brutally slow loading times, along with computers randomly freezing at the most inopportune moment, meant it was incredibly risky to search for at school.
Of course, that didn’t stop us from trying. Saturday school seemed like the perfect opportunity to give this a go. Just a few kids in a library with plenty of computers and some poor teacher who pretty much hated life.
On one Saturday, I was there with two other kids I knew. Not so much friends, but dudes you’d be comfortable looking at sexy ladies online around. We said we needed to use the computers to work on an “assignment”. That was a pretty blatant lie, but the person supervising didn’t really care.
After some handwringing and dares, one of us was bold enough to try. Somehow, he ended up on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition website and pulled up a video of Rebecca Romijn. It played for about 20 seconds before freezing on a close up of her crotch.
In my head, it felt as if we were waiting for the video to resume playing for maybe 30 seconds. In reality, we must have been hovering over that monitor for 15 or 20 minutes because eventually the Saturday school supervisor got up for the first time all day, turned off the computer and told us all to go back to the table.
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Seeing the Pamela Anderson & Tommy Lee sextape in middle school
A few months later, another opportunity arose. This time, we would be able to see the Pamela Anderson & Tommy Lee sextape in middle school. Okay, so that is a complete overstatement. A kid had found like a 45 second clip online. But hey, that was better than nothing.
Of course, we still needed a computer with internet access to watch it on. Preferably one without any adults around. Luckily for us, there were a few teachers who let kids loiter in their classroom after school and we knew the perfect spot.
We must have watched the clip like 20 times. Obviously, this was very exciting for a trio of eighth graders. It’s also a fond memory from a very weird time in history. Watching a snippet of the Pamela Anderson & Tommy Lee sextape in middle school could have only happened in 1998.
While Pam & Tommy has done a good job of representing the period for Generation X, let’s not forget what a wild time it was for us Millennials as we were coming to terms with both technology and our changing bodies.
