Jonah Goldberg Has Thoughts on Sex, Celebrity and Real People

“I paid off a poker debt with sexual favors, and I fell in love,” former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson told Ellen DeGeneres of her new beau earlier this month. “It’s so romantic. It’s romance.”

Indeed. What a shame Audrey Hepburn isn’t available to turn this hooker-with-implants-of-gold story into the date movie of the year.

In case you don’t know the story: Pamela Anderson, who made her name as a centerfold and faux lifeguard with built-in flotation devices, has gotten hitched to Rick Salomon, whose greatest accomplishment was surreptitiously videotaping himself having relations with Paris Hilton.

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For years, conservatives criticized the likes of Madonna for proselytizing commercialized decadence, and conservatives routinely came out the losers. The press, generally being liberal, disliked the perceived censorial uptightness of conservative “culture warriors.” The press, also being professionally and personally infatuated with celebrity, instinctively defended stars over the meanies, because stars boost ratings and get you into glamorous parties. The meanies stay home with their kids.

But here’s the thing: Conservatives were right about Madonna, and even Madonna has partially admitted as much. The problem is that Madonna — like Hilton and Anderson — is irrelevant. These celebrities can afford their sins or, if you prefer, their mistakes because they’re rich and famous. Madonna told one interviewer that she’s never changed a diaper. How many “working moms” can say that?

What matters is the signal such people send.

Forget the question of “bad” versus “good” for a second. These people got rich by glamorizing behaviors and values normal people simply cannot afford. The working-class teenage girl who tries to follow in Madonna’s or Paris’s or Pam’s footsteps isn’t going to follow them into the pages of People magazine. She’s going to follow those footsteps straight off a cliff. And yet, the bad guy in our culture is the person who says so.

I don’t want to restore Puritanism. But would it really be so terrible if more people pointed out that prostituting yourself over a poker debt and then marrying the John isn’t merely unromantic, it’s not even something to brag about?