Pamela Anderson and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach Talk About Sex
She’s one of the most famous former Playboy playmates in the world...and he’s a renowned Rabbi and spirituality expert. In this interview, Pamela Anderson and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach sit down to talk with Dr. Oz to talk about - you guessed it - sex. Do you know how to rekindle intimacy and passion in your relationship? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Could you believe that now the perception of men is that men are hormonally driven animals who can't control themselves, who don't know how to respect women.
That's bad for men, obviously.
And it's bad for women as well, for them to have this perception.
So my argument about marriage and returning to this safe place is not to sanitize sex.
It's actually to liberate sex.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We'll see you next time.
Bye.
Thank you.
She is one of the most famous former Playboy Playmates in the world.
Playmates are pretty famous, but this one is the top.
And he's a renowned rabbi and spiritual expert.
Today, they are both here, believe it or not, to talk about, well, everyone must have guessed it by now, sex.
I'm Pamela Anderson and Rabbi Shmuley Botea.
Teaming up.
Unbelievable.
Thank you both for being here.
So, Shmuley, I must admit, as you sat down and you literally doused your coffee with cream, I wondered about all the conversations we've had.
And I'm wondering, do you even listen to what I say when I point out health issues?
I've always believed in rebellion.
I've always believed in being the bad boy, and if I listened to you too much, I would sanitize my personality, I would lose all the jagged edges, and I'd be a bore.
Your background in Jewish values has taken the edge off a lot of arguments, but it's actually sharpened others.
And I want to spend some time talking about sex, not in the context of the salacious stuff that gets caught up in the tabloids, but why sex?
Human beings do the things they do in the name of sex and why we don't actually think about it many times the right way.
And you've opened my eyes in so many ways to old arguments that actually had lost their potency because they weren't expressed with a vibrant language that you often use.
So let's talk a tiny bit about the fact that you guys are sort of an unlikely pair.
And so if I can pick on you for a second, besides the fact that you're as sexy as Pamela, God bless her, what is it that attracted the two of you together?
Well, look, this book is written by two people.
One is an author and a public person, and the other is an international sex symbol.
And I think that many of the books that Pamela has authored are actually very good.
What makes us compatible in writing this book?
It's astonishing that we actually think of humanity in categories, as if Pamela is this sex symbol who would therefore presumably not believe in more traditional sexual mores or relationship mores.
And the truth is that we're all the same.
We all kind of want the same thing.
We all want passion.
We all want intimacy.
So we were on the same page from the outset.
She believes in passionate monogamy.
She believes in marriage.
She talks constantly about her parents' decades-long marriage.
It's what she herself probably aspires to.
I'll let her, of course, speak for herself, but I'm talking about giving our conversations on the book.
But it doesn't always work out that way, and you need a plan B. You try again for another passionate, monogamous relationship.
But the idea that we don't want The idea that we just want to be casual in our intimate activities with almost anyone.
The idea that that Hollywood fiction is actually real for people's desires.
It's not true.
Nobody wants that.
Nobody wants the loneliness.
Nobody wants to wake up to a stranger that doesn't know their name.
It's just that we think monogamy is a bore.
We think that marriage is kind of an institution, and no one wants to be institutionalized.
So the better alternative that she and I both work on in this book and that we promote is a marriage where you can swing from the chandeliers.
What happened to marriages that are sinful?
What happened to marriages that are erotic?
And what happened to marriages that are mysterious?
We've lost some of the essential ingredients that could make marriage and sex electrifying.
The word sensual comes up a lot in the book.
And by the way, it's fascinating because you've talked about lust for love, which is the title of the book, Rekindling Intimacy and Passion in Your Relationship.
The word love itself sometimes feels tedious to people.
It's so valuable, so important to all of us, and yet because of that it becomes ordinary.
But sensuality and lust, those are different, and they're not often interpreted the way you do.
Yeah, we both argue and we both feel that the sexual revolution was a bust.
I mean, if the one thing the sexual revolution was supposed to give us was sex, and it gave us...
Not bad sex, but it gave us non-existent sex.
Married couples have sex for seven minutes a week on national average.
That's an actual statistic.
Seven minutes?
Yeah, and that's the couple...
I always joke, and that includes the time that the husband spends begging, but...
But, you know, those are the couples that are still having sex.
Mamet, you and I have talked many times about the sexual famine in America for all the couples who are platonic.
One out of three American married couples are not having sex at all.
By the way, I do a lot of marital counseling, and usually they're coming because they're arguing or financial disagreements or her mother's too involved.
Amazingly, 95% of the time, they're also not having sex.
They never mention that.
Yeah, but maybe they're angry because the mother-in-law is there all the time, and that's why they're not having sex.
I mean, the external circumstances could make them not feel like having sex with each other.
Or the mother-in-law is there because they're not having sex.
Or...
Yeah.
This lends itself to too many jokes.
I'm going to leave the mother-in-law out of this?
No, leave it to me.
Say a small ass so that the rabbi smiles.
You know, they have this story.
This guy comes to the rabbi and says, you know, my mother-in-law just died.
What's the Jewish law?
What do I do with her?
The rabbi said I would cremate her, bury her.
No, that's wrong.
No, I said you can cremate her or you can bury her.
No, you blew it too.
And then he says, first I want her cremated, then I want her buried.
I don't want to take any chances.
Take no chances to all three.
We totally botched that joke.
We botched it.
Because we love our mothers-in-law.
We do, we do.
We love our mothers-in-law.
You may be right, Lisa, there could be all kinds of reasons, but the main reason is that they have no desire.
Desire is lost.
I'm a great believer in lust.
What happened to cosmic lust?
What happened to erotic lust?
At its core, sex is not about love.
It's not about companionship.
It is about sheer, raw animal lust.
And we have so vulgarized lust, and we have so cheapened lust that it is non-existent in our lives.
So we must always search for these third-party artificial exterior motivations to create lust.
Go to a hotel.
Go to some Mediterranean club med vacation.
You want to tell me that the average husband, his wife, takes her clothes off at night or vice versa and he's watching television?
What happened to that electric magnetism that the body had?
And it's almost like we're afraid to ask these questions.
Or we offer these pat, simplistic responses, which is what?
You expect lust to really continue after like four or five years?
You expect a man who sees the same body, same breast, same genitalia on a nightly basis to still be interested?
Absolutely.
Since when do we assume that routine and regularity are the enemies of eroticism?
The real enemies of eroticism are different things altogether, which is what we get to into this book.
I believe, nice and simple, that erotic lust is based on three things.
Mystery, unavailability, and sinfulness.
Take an iPhone, for example.
iPhones are the most successful consumer product ever launched because they had those three elements.
We learn to lust after a telephone.
Unavailable.
You can't buy it when it comes out.
Mysterious.
Steve Jobs never talked about what he was working on.
Always kept it mysterious.
And finally, sinfulness.
This rebellious upstart.
Apple.
The 1984 television commercial at the Super Bowl.
Going up against IBM. Big Brother.
Think different.
Their famous motto.
We need rebelliousness and sinfulness.
Yeah, but then once you get it, you're really angry with it and hate it.
I'm not a gay spokesperson for Apple.
I wish I were.
You only lust after it until then it freezes on you.
And you still lust after it.
It's like your spouse.
Freezes on you.
So, the sexual revolution actually undid those three principles.
It made sex A, not unavailable, but widely available, which ironically made us lose interest.
Secondly, it removed mystery and it made everything overly exposed, which again diminished lust.
And finally...
I would totally disagree with losing interest with available sex.
Ask any 18-year-old boy.
It's available and they have not lost interest.
Maybe the 50-year-old man, but not the 18-year-old boy.
They may have or seek hormonal sex.
They're not really interested in the women so much as being pushed by hormones.
They're not being drawn to women.
They're being pushed by something internal.
They're not being pulled from the outside.
They're being pushed from the inside.
And once those hormones no longer rage, that's when you see these platonic marriages.
So if I'm wrong, That the sexual revolution or, say, pornography and this kind of openness, if I'm wrong, that it has diminished interest?
Why is it that on a porn site you have to click one naked woman and 50 other pictures have to suddenly pop up?
Or so my friends tell me.
Why is one woman not enough?
Why do we need such vast quantity today?
Because we're no longer...
Boy is no longer interested in womankind.
He's only interested in the kind of woman.
And that's why you start having this standardization of female attractiveness.
Women are now having to fit into categories of attractiveness.
And they're feeling very bad about their bodies...
Take, for example, how much we insist that women have to lose weight, become entirely self-conscious about every calorie they consume.
And I'm not talking about for health reasons, the way Mehmet would argue.
I'm talking about for appearances.
I love going to the great museums of the world.
I love the Prado, and I love the Med, and I love the Louvre.
And in all of them, the great masters always painted fleshy, curvaceous women.
What happened to them?
Did the male erotic mind just suddenly change?
No, it's simple.
Back then, people used to make love with their hands, and to the hands...
Meat is neat.
But now that we make love with our eyes, to the eyes thin is in.
No, no, no.
We're a very visual age.
That's pre-Kardashian.
Come on.
You don't get more curvy.
And that is the ideal of beauty today.
It's not totally thin, genderless, non-feminine.
Think about those Kardashian chicks.
They are curvy, right?
Good point.
I think the average male, to Shmuley's point, has this belief that thinner is better.
And that may be true or not, but I can almost guarantee women do.
Women seem to want to get skinnier than the guys around them want them to be.
That's something entirely different.
That's about fashion, not about sex.
For men, it's all.
You caught me off guard.
I never thought about anything else.
You mentioned sex.
I lost my train of thought.
I got distracted.
Another point, and I'm not a teenage boy, so I don't know for a fact, but you said that this needing to click multiple women, I think that's biologically driven.
The male, if you go back thousands of years and millennia, The male is programmed to inseminate as many women as possible.
The man's desire is to multiplicity, not to a single woman.
He gets trapped into it by sex.
Right, and I've debated some of the world's leading evolutionary biologists, Richard Dawkins, or great atheists like...
Help me, some of the...
Hitchens?
Christopher Hitchens?
Christopher Hitchens and I, you moderated our debate on the afterlife, me and Christopher Hitchens.
I've heard the argument that men are basically animals who seek to inseminate as many partners as possible.
I actually don't believe that to be true.
I think men are intimacy seekers.
I think the men who are womanizers wake up and suddenly they feel like they've lost their identity.
They want something better.
Why do they, quote, settle down?
If it's true that marriage is only a social construct and it's nurture rather than nature, how is it persisted in every culture and every religion and every ethnicity throughout the world?
Social anthropology would seem to argue against the man as inseminator and much more as the man as the domestic partner.
There's lots more where that came from, but first, a quick break.
Hey, Pamela, how are you?
I'm good.
I'm good.
I just love listening to Shmuley.
He gives me hope.
Pamela, let me, if I can, ask you about why you picked the sex symbol of Shmuley to work with, and what is it about his beard, his yarmulke, and his...
Well, I love a good beard.
I love a beard.
Well, I met him a few years ago, and he just had the best advice.
And I told him he should write a book, and then he told me he was so surprised about my...
My philosophy is that he said, I should write a book.
And we thought, well, we should write a book together.
Wouldn't that be funny?
So here it is.
So share with us a little bit of your advice.
Because again, a lot of folks think of you as a playmate, actress, a woman who in many ways is defined by her sexuality.
You have very interesting views that I think the audience would love to hear on this podcast.
Obviously, I've had the blessing of having you on the show.
And so I understand some of your wisdom, but it still is remarkable that you could process it this way.
And isn't that funny?
Sometimes, well, you know, there's a lot of perception, I guess, a lot of projection and perception that I'm, you know, people are the way they are because of whatever the media portrays them as, but we're all human beings and I think we're all intimacy seekers and we're all ultimately happier when we're in love and I think we're much stronger in pairs and especially in this time,
we need to remember that because we have so much that we're facing as a species and as a And I think that it's nice to have somebody else, somebody there to kind of do the checks and balances with us.
And to do that is hard work, or at least to acknowledge and be grateful for that other person instead of this very desensitized kind of time where we think we can do it all for ourselves.
And I think a lot of these kind of gimmicky, self-help-y things where it was, you know, me first, I'm If I love myself, I can love other people.
I think people are ultimately, I think they're more depressed if they can't help others.
I think that that is kind of an empathy.
It's re-looking at empathy in our relationships, but also in our friendships and the world and living life romantically, not just in our relationships.
Well, when does a strong sexual relationship tip over and become objectification?
Well, there's so much access to, you know, imagery and we're imprinting ourselves every day with what we look at, what we listen to.
And I think we have to just do our own checks and balances with ourselves.
And I know it's hard to ask somebody else for more attention.
And it's hard to, you know, to say, look, I'm here, I'm a human being, and you'd rather play with a computer or, you know, these things are difficult to talk about in a relationship.
So I think the only thing we can do, the best thing we can do, is just monitor ourselves.
Is this making me happier?
Am I replacing the love in my life with, you know, am I on my phone too much?
Am I on Instagram too much?
Am I filling my Instagram full of temptation and people that, you know, sexy imagery that either I can't live up to as a woman or that I'm interested in men?
Mental fidelity is the biggest thing, I think, that I'm smoothly, really ingrained in me and it really made perfect sense because I think I was struggling with this my whole life, but to really just say, okay, I'm responsible for me.
I can only control myself.
So maybe if I do this, then the other person will do that too.
And that kind of goes back to what my father used to tell me, you know, a relationship is in there.
And if you're okay with the other person doing what you're doing, then do it.
But if you're not, then don't do it.
You know, you didn't hold back in the book about how objectification affected your relationships.
How were you able to overcome them?
How have you evolved in addressing them?
Divorce.
Divorce.
You know, sometimes that's inevitable and it's a sad situation, but, you know, anytime.
But, you know, and I do look back in some of my situations, I probably could have worked through a lot of things, but you can't work through abuse and sometimes narcissism is...
And it's not sociopathic behavior.
It's a little difficult to deal with, too.
And I think we all have those traits.
You know, we want to, we need to look at that within ourselves.
You've got two sons.
How do you talk to your boys about healthy relationships?
And they've seen, witnessed some of this in your own life.
But they're going to be with women some days.
The best thing I've taught them is that you don't put up with abuse.
And I've also, you know, tell them if they disrespect women, they disrespect me.
Then they go, whoa, okay, mom.
They would never disrespect their mom.
They'd never disrespect me.
But Brandon had an interesting comeback.
He said, well, what if they don't respect themselves?
And that comes back to, we have to respect ourselves and just be a good person for that other person and try and create good behavior that we can That we can both have, but you're really only in control of yourself.
And like I said, it's difficult to ask somebody else, look at me.
You know, I want you to look at me.
I don't want you to be on the computer.
I don't want you to be playing video games.
I'd rather you be with me.
This is such an...
It's unattractive, too.
So, this is what's so great about the book, and Shmueli has great advice about this forgiveness and, you know, a little bit of sinfulness and a little bit how to withdraw a little bit.
Not to manipulate, but to just make sure you have your own life and your own interests and how you grow every day and how you stay...
Kind of relevant and how we stay interesting in a relationship and these are all really great, great, great tips.
From Shmuley, who has, you know, worked with a lot of people in relationships and marriage counseling.
You know, I wish I knew him a long time ago.
Yeah, I've been trying to help Shmuley as much as I can, Pamela, but it's full time.
So, let me, if I can, I want to take this concept into a broader theater.
Because so much of how we perceive power in the world and celebrity is based around sensuality, and we're not even aware of it.
And I'll give you two examples because you've been in the news a lot about them.
You know, Julian Assange and Putin from, you know, the head of Russia.
And I see you have friendships with them, and you probably have insights into how they see the world.
Do you think that there's an element of that in their appeal?
Well, power, obviously, it's a sexy quality.
But to use it in positive ways is really important.
But confidence.
And, you know, especially Julian, he has so much confidence and so much...
He really knows what he's doing.
He believes in what he's doing.
He's just on that path and he's not going to veer from it.
And I think that's a very sexy quality.
He's also very courageous, which is another sexy quality as well.
But he's just determined.
So I... Yes, of course it's attraction that draws people to them, but like you said, you're not going to agree on everything, everybody, but powerful people are definitely sexy, and we just don't want them to take advantage of that.
Vladimir Putin may be the most confident man on the planet, but I see that side of it.
I'm just curious as they deal with the turmoil of being in the eye of the needle.
Both of them get attacked a lot because they are confident in what they're saying, and they have strong opinions, and people disagree with them.
But in the middle of all this, there's an interesting, again, I use the word sensuality just because you've been talking about it in the book, but I'm curious if that makes a political leader, Donald Trump, another example, for a lot of people, it may not be the physical embodiment of sensualness, sexuality, but there's something that people like, feel attracted towards, which is part of how I think about what you and Shmueli are discussing in the book.
Do you see that?
Well, I mean, the confidence is obviously attractive, and they definitely...
And politics is, you know, like everyone...
And, of course, it's a powerful thing to be able to be a sexual person in politics or a sexy person to use that.
But, again, you can't take advantage of it.
But men are...
I mean, I hate to say men are men because that's not very good to say.
But there's a certain...
Um, rawness and, um, maleness, like to call it, but, you know, I probably get in trouble for that.
Um, like I said, there's a femaleness.
There's a, it's like a missing piece of the puzzle.
You want someone to be strong and it's primitive.
It's, it's, it's like the caveman thing.
You know, I always wanted a caveman to drag me into a cave and that's how I was ever going to get married.
That's pretty much how it always happened.
And it didn't turn out that good.
But, um, Yeah, so I think that's affirmative.
It kind of touches something, you know, within us that feels like, okay, they're, they know what they're saying, or they're, you know, sometimes when you feel lost, you want something to gravitate towards, and I think that's even, but, you know, that's with religion, that's with communities, that's with all sorts of things,
and gangs, that are, you know, don't have parents, they search for some kind of belongingness, and I think it just catches in all of the places that we, which even proves our point even more, that we need each other, we need a relationship so we don't fall into the trappings of all these other things that could go wrong for us.
So Shmule, just to comment on that, and again, talk about the big idea of what makes some of these people who are so prominent worldwide attractive to a lot of folks.
And Pam was pointing out the importance of confidence.
It almost makes the process a bit more sensual, that Julian Assange and Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, they have their truth, they're speaking firmly in its defense, and when people criticize them, do they derive benefit from that?
Well, I actually see sensuality in a slightly different way.
I think sexuality, it captures this idea of muscularity and strength and power.
And Henry Kissinger famously said that power is the ultimate ephrodisiac.
And that's what Pamela's referring to about this confidence, which is sexy.
But sensuality evokes a certain vulnerability.
An ability to be strong enough to show weakness.
To be strong enough to evoke forgiveness and to work with those who see things very differently to you.
Yeah, Donald Trump takes it on the chin a heck of a lot.
But then he'll suddenly surprise people.
And he'll show a certain tenderness to parents who've lost children in a terrible Parkland shooting.
And people will want him to follow through with gun restrictions, etc.
But capture that moment for a second.
And people don't expect that.
And that kind of makes news.
Because we do want to see a certain sensuality in our leaders.
I think Putin probably takes a different tack.
Maybe he feels that that kind of...
Show of emotion may not play to his people.
But what we're trying to say, I think, in this book is that the sexual, the raw, the muscularity, the flexing of muscle, it hasn't always worked.
And there's a certain sensuality by which men and women connect.
And we're not a sensual age.
And that means, take Pamela, for example.
Here you have Pamela speaking...
You know, very insightfully about relationships, but she's known to the world as this very beautiful and attractive woman.
When we started speaking, I was amazed, you know, intelligence was a given, but her insights, what she had learned along the way, because we kind of take it for granted that celebrity is a red carpet lifestyle where you're just jet-setting from place to place, but you're not absorbing, you're not processing, you're not filtering, but Pamela was doing all of those things.
And I knew that any book that we wrote would be utterly incomplete without the power of her insights.
That's a sensual thing, not a sexual thing.
And our society is not sufficiently sensual.
And I think women especially are looking for sensuality.
And I think they are more drawn today to the sensual man.
There's last more to come after the break. - So again, the title of the book, "Lust for Love: Rekindling Intimacy and Passion in Your Relationship," talking to Pamela Anderson and Rabbi Shmuley Botea.
So, just to follow up on this theme, because if we're living in a society where we don't have enough sensuality, and then we start talking about becoming best friends, which both of you feel strongly about in the book as a problem, Historically, when I was growing up, our political leaders were trying to be our best friends.
Now, Putin's not trying to be our best friend.
I don't think Donald Trump has a best friend.
Ironically, it's going the opposite direction.
Pamela, it would seem that we're looking for things beyond best friendship, and I wonder why that is.
Is it because we have a sexual famine and we're lusting for love?
Of course, you want to be friends, but you want to be wild, passionate lovers, too.
That makes us feel alive and Creative and vulnerable and all those wonderful things.
Sometimes I joke in more relationships, I say, I'm not your friend.
I'm not your buddy.
I don't want to be spoken to.
I don't want to be in that category in our relationship.
I want the romance.
I want to be the girl.
And I do believe...
I used to always say, I used to say, if you were...
The more masculine you are, the more feminine I can be.
I didn't really know what I was talking about, but I kind of thought, the more masculine, but like what Schmooley says, I didn't mean exactly caveman, but there has to be a sensuality underlying it because the only way to be a good lover is to be brave and to be vulnerable and to get to know somebody.
And I think this is where all these multiple partners and sexy experiences and the sexual revolution and friends I know from the 60s who are depressed and And they regret it.
They regret those experiences because it takes a brave person to fall in love and to peel back the layers, especially with so much access to everything.
You don't have to.
You don't have to put your heart on the line because you can just swipe left and right or go to another city or get, you know, this world is so small and it's not like it used to be where we're smaller communities and we find somebody in love with them forever, like my parents, for instance.
So I think that's...
You never want that flame to burn out.
I know it's going to be ups and downs and you ride the wave of a relationship and there's stressful times.
There's times to be there and be by someone's side and the other way around.
But to constantly invoke the relationship with fun and sexy things, I think is what makes it exciting.
I mean, you want every day to feel like the first day.
And I know that's hard to do, but...
Yeah, it is hard to do, but part of the reason I think it's hard to do, and again, Pam, I love your thoughts on this, is because we have an environment where people get abused by doing the things that make them vulnerable or make them feel brave because other people don't see it that way.
And then we have the Me Too movement where a lot of bad stuff is being exposed, but then people don't even know where to draw the line.
And especially when it comes to sexuality and sensuality, when people...
You want a little bit of that animalistic tension in a relationship.
It's hard to harness that so perfectly that you never cross the line.
You know, in Sweden, it's a very progressive place.
You know, there's certain things.
But there's, you know, you can be really, really careful and it's paralyzing.
And the girls I know from there say, look, men don't move anymore here.
And I say, that's terrible because they're so afraid of crossing the line and it's been so ingrained in them not to be aggressive.
And Part of that is, okay, I guess we just have to communicate and be communicated, and the pendulum will swing.
And, you know, I had to have this conversation with my son, who I said, I know you're passionate, romantic boys, and you just, you know, you have to be careful.
You have to make sure somebody is really, that you're really communicating with someone and you're staying in these relationships and being, you know, monogamous and getting to know that person and finding where those lines are, because you have to be careful.
Well, that's a very good point, Mehmet.
So let's just delve into this, you know, briefly.
I only get through the horrible New York winters through two things.
I love skiing.
It's like little hills.
You can't go to the big mountains near New York.
But a fireplace.
I love a real fire.
Now, if you have a fireplace, you can put as many logs in as you want and you can burn it to the highest infernal-like heat as long as it's in the fireplace.
Sex is the same.
You're asking where to draw the lines.
The mistake we made in society is that we didn't put sex in the context of a committed relationship where people can be completely sexually liberated to do anything and everything consensual to each other that gave pleasure and that was exciting.
Instead, we had all of this in relationships that were undefined.
It was not the fireplace.
We didn't know how hot could it be.
What move could I make?
And we killed sex.
We killed it.
Could you believe that now the perception of men is that men are hormonally driven animals who can't control themselves, who don't know how to respect women?
That's bad for men, obviously, and it's bad for women as well, for them to have this perception.
So my argument about marriage and returning to this safe place is not to sanitize sex, it's actually to liberate sex.
Let's remember why sex is so pleasurable.
Sex is the most pleasurable of all human activities because it is the most liberating.
The one thing nobody wants is to be incarcerated.
Nobody wants to be jailed.
Nobody wants to be restrained.
Sex is where you put yourself on autopilot.
You surrender to raw animal impulse, and that can only happen when there's intimacy and trust.
And purging relationships of those things actually made sex mechanical, too methodical, too predictable, and too scary.
And we're having really, really bad sex.
And the fact that couples would rather watch TV at night than have sex, go to a movie on a Saturday night than have sex.
Sex is really something you kind of watch other people do in an exciting way in some great Hollywood film instead of having it yourself.
And it's kind of sad.
And we have to rescue it because it is the glue that actually, it's the adhesive that keeps the masculine and the feminine always bent in toward each other.
And it's what keeps marriages going.
So give me an example of how you create the right kind of mystery.
When it's in a safe place.
And then what does society do when you've, to your point, killed marriage, or rather killed sex, because marriage itself isn't what it used to be?
Okay, that's a great question.
Let me give a very simple answer.
Our perception...
Especially because of the very tragic Me Too actions.
Is that men are out of control, libidinous, hormonal creatures.
And women, you know, they love sex too, but not as much.
Men are out of control.
The truth is, women are much sexier than men.
They're much more sexually driven than men.
They are much more...
Their fantasies are so much more elaborate.
It's just that they understand that sex should have an intimate component.
So...
We know from many studies that women have these, wives have these incredible fantasies about strangers, about other men, but the average wife would never disclose those fantasies to her husband.
She will sanitize her fantasy libido because she wants to never hurt her husband.
She doesn't know if his frail, fragile, masculine ego can handle it.
So one of the things I first advocate is, and Pam alluded to this, is a sinful marriage.
That doesn't mean adultery ever because adultery is devastatingly, it's so painful and it's so dishonest and it's so immoral.
But wives should be revealing their sexual fantasies to their husbands.
And husbands should create that safe space where they can, where a woman's full libido could be on full display.
So you now have the husband who has to pursue his wife sexually in order to fully retain her again because she can't be fully possessed.
Because a woman's libido is, it's a whole universe.
Take, for example, that in the Hebrew language, we don't have a word for wife.
The word is woman.
Sarah is the woman of Abraham, and Rebecca is the woman of Isaac, and Rachel is the woman of Jacob.
Because you never really marry.
You never fully become a wife.
And yet women today are playing this charade where they're trying to show their husband, oh, I'm only into you, etc., etc.
It's not true.
We choose to be monogamous.
That's a beautiful thing.
But in terms of the need to be pursued and chased and seduced.
On the 20th year of your marriage, as in the 20th date, is still ever-present, and we forget that.
Why can't they be called a wife?
Why don't they ever become a wife?
Because the wife means that you now belong to someone, and you naturally fit into the exclusivity of a monogamous relationship.
And for no woman is that true.
Women have an incredible libido, and their husbands have to satisfy it constantly by understanding just how sexual they really are, as opposed to the Victorian sanitized model that we have today, where we're looking at the guys as being so crazy about sex, and the women, yeah, they kind of like it too, but not as much as men.
That's a lie.
Pam, do you agree?
I agree, I agree.
I think it's important for men to understand that they need to pursue their wife or their woman, whatever you want to call it, them, constantly.
Because there's some great examples in the book, too, that Shmuley points out in some of his counseling sessions where, you know, a woman is not getting any attention from her husband and she finds herself, you know, somebody at a grocery store, you know, saying something about her nails and her getting her nails done and going to that grocery store a lot.
You know, simple, simple, tiny things like that.
We all want to be pursued and admired and we have to keep doing that in relationships or we lose them.
Pamela, when was the epiphany in your life?
When did you realize...
That you needed to change the way you perceived yourself in relationships.
Who, me?
Yes.
Me?
Little old you.
Well, I was raised by wonderful, wild, fun women.
You know, my mother is very colorful, my great aunt, my auntie Vi, always setting the table, always having such a beautiful experience when we went to their house.
And it wasn't about money or anything.
It was just about living a very beautiful life with what we have when we have...
A lot.
And so I really, that's why I feel, when I see some of these girls, and I know I've been in relationships where people have had daughters, and I've met people's daughters, and I feel like I want to be that person in their life where I can show them, you can have fun, you can be sexy, you can be a good mom, you can have a great career.
And, you know, you have to just be lighthearted about a lot of it and just have fun with it.
And to be an example in these people's lives was important to me because I've had that.
So I knew from a very young age, I had things when I was young that were very traumatic to me sexually, and I found with Playboy, I took my power back in a big way.
And I look back and I see how I did that.
I didn't realize at the moment I was trying to overcome this painful shyness that was, you know, ingrained in me that was just paralyzing.
I hated it, this shyness.
And he also really talks about sharing the fantasies.
I think a lot of women read erotica and just get that language in there and start writing stories and And writing poetry and just...
Because you can start talking like that or speaking like that, not in an explicit way, but just to get those romantic words in your mouth and just to...
And you never regret it.
You never fail.
Even if you fail, it's funny and it's sexy.
So it's just to be brave enough to be...
I always say, if somebody else can do it, I can do it.
If somebody else has done it, I can do it.
So this is...
I think we just need to push ourselves to be more creative and have fun with life.
And let me just add, that's the passionate component, the sinful component.
The intimate component is as important, because our book is all about passion and intimacy.
Eyes open sex.
One of the hardest things that a couple can do.
When we make love, studies show that 90% of women cannot climax unless they close their eyes.
And the joke is that Jewish women close their eyes because, God forbid, they should see their husbands having a good time.
Sorry for all the Jewish people out there.
But we close our eyes for the same reason that we look at the numbers on an elevator as we go to the 10th floor.
What did you think?
You had a watch, 6, 7, 8, 9. Did you think the elevator was going to take a left turn and you were going to end up in Topeka?
We look at the numbers because we're in too confined a space.
It's too intimate.
And we don't want a stranger peering into our soul.
But when you make love to your spouse or the person that you're living with, even then you close your eyes.
You don't want someone to peer into your soul.
It's so much easier to get physically naked than it is to get emotionally naked.
So we close our eyes because it's too honest.
That's how distant we are even when we're flesh pressed against flesh and bone of one bone.
Eyes open sex is electrifying and you can actually feel a current that passes between the two of you.
It takes a lot of practice because it's so raw.
It's so naked.
But what it does is it leads not just to the orchestration of two halves as a whole physically, but the orchestration of two halves as a whole spiritually.
And yet couples don't even do these things.
And there's so many exercises that could lead to this passionate electric charge that we deny ourselves.
And by the way, turn the television off.
While you're making love, him watching and thinking, but I haven't seen this episode of Homeland.
It just doesn't, you know...
Pamela Anderson, Rabbi Shmuley Botte, on that note, thank you very much.
The beautiful book, Lust for Love, is out.
Pick it up, share it.
Don't read it while you're having sex, but perisexual.
