Pamela Anderson and the Art of Owning Yourself

From Blonde Bombshell to Owner-of-Everything (Especially her IP): Why Being Underestimated Was Her Secret Weapon

Turns out the secret to self-ownership can be a red curly shag and zero fucks to give

These days Pamela Anderson and I are rocking the same haircut: a red curly shag. We are also both BC girls of a similar vintage, with a current peccadillo for sculptural clothes and doing whatever the fuck we want with our faces, bodies, careers and lives.

All my life I’ve been fascinated by her.

I remember watching an interview with her about her detective series, VIP, where she had a producing role—she served as executive producer on 77 episodes from 1998 to 2002¹—and she said something that has stayed with me for decades. She’d realized her whole career people were exploiting her and getting rich off her, and she thought it was time for her to “self exploit.” It was a funny, non-threatening way of putting it, but it was razor-sharp insight and power move—she had decided to go from being the talent to being the owner.

Oprah had that moment too. In October 1988, Harpo Productions made television history when it assumed ownership and all production responsibilities for “The Oprah Winfrey Show” from Capitol Cities/ABC, making Oprah Winfrey the first woman in history to own and produce her own talk show.² Instead of taking a bigger salary, she negotiated to own the whole thing. She invested $16 million of her own money to build a state-of-the-art production studio in Chicago. Oprah owned 80% of Harpo Media, with her attorney Jacob owning 10%, and King World getting an equity stake of 10%. In both cases, they were wildly underestimated.

The Strategic Art of Being Underestimated

I watched Pamela get underestimated on her HGTV show, Pamela’s Garden of Eden, where she was renovating the property once owned by her grandmother in Ladysmith, BC.³ Everyone—her trades, her interior designer, her architect, including her husband (she married her contractor!)—acted like she was whimsical and mercurial and a diva. But if you watched closely, she was referring to paintings she owned (very important paintings) and past homes and architecture and art. The renovation, straight out of her imagination, later earned a Ladysmith Heritage Award from the Ladysmith and District Historical Society.

People think she’s a blonde bimbo but she is a woman of experience with sophisticated aesthetic and high standards. And this wasn’t an accident. We could probably argue her appearance, in all its iterations, including the barbie doll version, was one of her deliberate art projects. She understands what language she’s trying to speak and the visual vocabulary that gets the message across. Early in her career she spoke blonde bombshell; now in her 50s she’s speaking sophisticate.

Here’s what I suspect: she used the blonde bombshell visuals to get people to underestimate her, and then shocked them. I’d bet money she’s a killer poker player—and I’m not just speculating. She’s been involved in high-stakes poker games, reportedly owed $250,000 in poker debts at one point (she tells a mercenary story about she triumphantly settled it but unexpectedly ended up married), dated professional poker players, and even launched poker apps on Facebook. Someone who understands poker understands bluffing, reading tells, and most importantly: the strategic value of being underestimated at the table.

Oprah understood this too. As she once said: “If I lost control of the business, I’d lose myself—or at least the ability to be myself. Owning myself is a way to be myself.”⁴ She knew that being a Black woman in media meant people would underestimate her business acumen. And she used that. While the owners of her show were focused on her as talent, she was learning the business, building relationships, understanding the economics. By the time she negotiated ownership, she’d already figured out exactly what she needed—and by then, it was too late for them to say no without losing their golden goose.

The long blonde bombshell hair and presentation might have been brought Pamela Anderson to fame but it also kept her underestimated, too. It was Playboy magazine’s hairdresser who in 1989 first added “a thousand highlights” to her hair, lifting her natural brunette to a “champagne blonde.” Anderson reportedly never looked back, and began coloring her hair herself. She knew the power of this presentation and she drove it til she was tired of it, cutting her iconic long blonde hair first into a blonde bob then into something we’d never seen on her before. Recently, she debuted a shorter, shaggier chop in a striking red color, done by Paris-based hairstylist John Nollet for an upcoming film role. And in her current style iteration, we see overt evidence of Pamela Anderson’s strategic vision: It was in 2023 that she first arrived at a Vivienne Westwood show completely barefaced—a decision that has helped Anderson reframe her identity. She’s going barefaced when she feels like it, at events where everyone else is in full glam, and dressing in sculptural clothes that have a very refined, even covered-up, signature. It’s like she’s signing her name to a full-on power manifesta.

The Liberation of Artifice

I wish I’d understood then that the blonde barbie bombshell presentation was curated and not a natural thing you lucked into. I spent my teens, 20s, and yes 30s—hell my 40s let’s be honest—just thinking the beauty stick missed hitting me. Now I understand that it’s all deliberate decisions (just watch all the GRWM makeup videos by MUAs who are astonishingly ordinary and sometimes downright unattractive until they apply their art) and weaves (god I wish I’d known about weaves when I was 20, waiting years for my hair to grow and buying all kinds of products to make it look thicker. FUTILE).

I actually find it so liberating to know that all the things I was trying to fix with products and remedies could have just been bought. Buy the eyelash strip. Glue it on. Buy the weft. Sew it on. You never actually had to be born with it.

Infuriating too because I really thought other people WERE born with it.

But understanding that beauty is artifice you can construct and deconstruct—that it’s all deliberate choices you can make—isn’t just liberating on a personal level. It’s a template for understanding how power works everywhere else. If the beauty you thought was natural is actually curated, what else have you been told is fixed that’s actually up for grabs? What other systems that seemed immutable are actually just... decisions other people made that you can unmake?

This is the move that turns you from pawn in other people’s games—capital they exploit[⁵—to player. Most of your life you are playing other people’s games and functioning as other people’s capital. Even worse: historically, many of us — women, enslaved Black Americans, whole-ass colonized countries— literally were other people’s property. The moment when you decide to own yourself and own your career and own the ideas that make other people rich is the moment you both go pro and get free.

The Economics of Self-Ownership

Consider Pamela’s trajectory. During her time on Baywatch, there were so-called Pamela clauses in the licensing deals, with many international broadcasters interested in buying only the episodes in which she appeared. And yet she was never properly compensated. A C.J. Parker Barbie became a bestseller based on Anderson’s likeness, but she reaped not a penny.⁶ She made just $1,500 an episode in the first season of the show, and while she reportedly earned $300,000 an episode near the end of her run, co-star David Hasselhoff, who was also a producer, was making more and had an ownership stake.⁷

She was the reason people watched. She was the asset generating value. Someone else owned her intellectual property—her image, her likeness, her character. They trademarked it, licensed it, sold it. Made Barbies out of her. She got a salary. They got the IP.

This is the thing most people don’t understand about wealth building: salaries are capped. Intellectual property is infinite. You can only work so many hours, command so high a rate. But IP—trademarks, licensing deals, ownership of your image and likeness—that scales. That compounds. That’s what Oprah understood when she didn’t just take more money, but insisted on owning the show and trademarking her name. “OPRAH” is a registered trademark of Harpo, Inc.⁸ She owns it. The “O” logo is hers. Her name, her brand, her face—all protected intellectual property that she controls and monetizes.

Then came VIP. By serving as executive producer, Pamela Anderson finally had skin in the game. She was no longer just the blonde in the red swimsuit making someone else rich. She was building equity. She was the owner.

Anderson said in a recent interview: “The producers of ‘Baywatch’ made a fortune. I just didn’t have the representation back then”.⁹

Now here’s where it gets interesting. Oprah understood something crucial about her own nature when she fired her first agent in 1984 and hired attorney Jeff Jacobs to represent her instead. She told Forbes in 1995: “I’d heard Jeff is a piranha. I like that. Piranha is good.”¹⁰ She knew her own inclination toward collaboration and generosity—brilliant qualities, but potentially exploitable in business. So she hired an absolute shark — or a piranha — of a lawyer to protect her interests while she focused on being herself. That’s a culture-making move. She gave him 5% of Harpo (which rose to 10% when he became president), and he went to work securing ownership of her show, building her empire, fighting her battles.

This is the opposite of what most women are told to do. We’re told to toughen up, to be more aggressive, to learn to negotiate like men. Oprah said: I know who I am. I’m generous and collaborative. So I’m going to hire someone whose job it is to be the piranha while I remain myself. She didn’t change her nature to succeed in business. She built a structure around her nature that let her succeed as herself.

Pamela didn’t have that representation on Baywatch. But once she understood the game, she made sure VIP was different. She became an executive producer. She learned to protect her own interests.

Here’s the genius move both women made: let them underestimate you while you’re learning the game. Then, when you’ve figured out all the angles, make your move. It’s poker strategy applied to business. Show up looking like you’re just there for fun, while you’re actually counting cards and reading tells. By the time they realize you know what you’re doing, you’ve already won the hand.

The Visual Vocabulary of Control

What I love about watching Pamela now is how she’s rewriting the visual language. She’s in her late 50s and she’s done performing for the male gaze. Or rather—and this is crucial—she’s performing her own gaze now. Recently, at age 57, she’s been nominated for awards including Golden Globe, Gotham, and SAG Awards for her role in The Last Showgirl. When she didn’t receive an Oscar nomination, Anderson said, “I always say the win is in the work. I got to do something I really love, and I needed to do that for my soul”.

That barefaced-at-galas move is a power play. Everyone else is in full makeup armor, and she shows up with clean skin. It says: I’m not here to perform beauty for you anymore. I’m here to see and be seen. There’s a difference.

The sculptural clothes—architectural shapes, dramatic silhouettes—these aren’t pretty dresses. They’re statements of intent. They say: I’m not decorative. I’m structural. I’m building something.

And the hair. God, the hair. From platinum blonde to that gorgeous copper-red shag. When her friend suggested she stop posting sexy pictures to be taken more seriously as an activist, Anderson thought, “What have we been fighting for? Why can’t we be sexy and smart?” She’s always understood something fundamental: you don’t have to apologize for how you look to prove you have substance. You can be both. You are both.

From Property to Proprietor

Courtney Love wrote about the infamous stolen sex tape: “It destroyed my friend Pamela’s life. Utterly. It CRUSHED her and her kids. It caused massive trauma to her, her family, her community. Her finances”. And then, years later, Hulu made Pam & Tommy without Anderson’s consent, essentially re-traumatizing her by profiting from that same violation. When asked about it, Anderson said: “I think ethically it’s illegal. But I mean it’s kind of fair game. I remember people telling me a long time ago that you are basically public property and you have no right to privacy”.

Public property. That’s what they told her. You’re so famous, so visible, so available to the public imagination that you cease to own yourself.

But then she took control. She produced her own Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story, with her son Brandon Thomas Lee. She wrote her memoir, Love, Pamela, herself—no ghostwriter. When her publisher insisted she’d need help, she argued: “If I can’t do it myself, there’s just no way I’m doing this. So I learned how to write a book”. Her sons told her: “Mom, no one knows you, and they think they do”.

She’s been reclaiming her narrative piece by piece. Not by denying her past or apologizing for her image, but by owning it—owning the whole story, the complexity, the intelligence behind the image. She’s saying: you thought you knew me, but you only knew the character I played. Now let me show you the artist who created her.

The Moment of Going Pro

That’s why we can’t stop watching Pamela Anderson. And Oprah. And hopefully you.

They’re icons because they’ve been iconoclasts. They didn’t follow the scripts that were never written for them anyway. They wrote their own.

Because that pivot point—from being someone else’s capital to fully owning yourself—is the moment you stop being exploited and start culture making. It’s not a compromise or a sad accommodation to capitalism. It’s a reclamation.

When you realize you’ve been building someone else’s empire with your labor, your image, your creativity, your brand—and you decide to build your own house instead—everything changes. You go from employee to employer. From talent to producer. From asset to owner. From property to proprietor.

My business coach Erika Lyremark (whose book Think Like a Stripper is one of the best business books I’ve ever read)¹¹ says that once you stop playing the transactional game—the paycheque thinking that’s small and short-term—and start projecting yourself into the world as you are and as you want to be, that’s when your career goes stratospheric. Ditto, your life.

This is what both Oprah and Pamela did. They stopped thinking: how do I get paid more for this job? They started thinking: how do I own the whole thing? How do I build something that reflects who I actually am, not who someone else needs me to be? How do I deviate from the script that was never written for me, with my point of view, and project myself into the world on my terms?

That deviation—that refusal to stay in the lane marked out for them—is the process. The process of becoming iconic. The process of going from being someone else’s capital to owning your intellectual property. The process of liberation.

And yes, you can do this at any age. Oprah was in her 30s when she made the move. Pamela was in her 30s with VIP. Anderson just made her Broadway debut in Chicago in her mid-50s, received critical acclaim, and is now being recognized as a serious actress. I’m in my 50s, wearing the same haircut she is, finally understanding that all those years I thought the beauty game was rigged against me, the real game was the ownership game. And I was too busy trying to compete on someone else’s playing field to realize I could buy my own field.

The best part: once you own yourself, once you control your own image and labor and ideas, you get to define success on your own terms. As Pamela said about her recent film success after years of being dismissed: “I’m being seen and recognized for my work and not these tawdry moments”. Not because she was ashamed of those moments—she never asked for your approval—but because she’s so much more than those moments, and she always was.

We’re all so much more than the single stories people tell about us. The trick is owning all of it—the image, the narrative, the means of production—and finally getting paid what we’re worth. Not just in money, though yes, absolutely get the money. But in autonomy. In creative control. In the freedom to show up barefaced or in full glam, to cut your hair into a red shag or keep it blonde, to do whatever the fuck you want because you own your whole damn self.

I’ve been reclaiming and reasserting my own style as a power move, and I’ve written about how much joy and art and POWER there is in that.¹² It’s not frivolous. It’s not shallow. When you take control of how you present yourself to the world—when you dress for yourself, style yourself for yourself, show up as yourself—you’re practicing ownership. You’re saying: this is mine. My image, my presentation, my choice. It’s a rehearsal for owning everything else. Your ideas. Your work. Your business. Your life.

That’s what I learned from watching Pamela Anderson. You never actually had to be born with it—the beauty, the business savvy, the confidence. You just had to decide to own it. All of it. And once you do, you’re free.

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This is the work I do: I work with brilliant, big-thinking women who, even when they were wildly successful, were ridiculously underestimated and still talent—still capital—in someone else’s game. I help them go pro and play the game on their terms: owning their IP, building their brands, controlling their narratives. www.kellydiels.com and @kelly.diels

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1. Pamela Anderson served as executive producer on V.I.P. for 77 episodes from 1998-2002, as documented in IMDb production credits and Rotten Tomatoes listings.

2. In October 1988, Harpo Productions assumed ownership and all production responsibilities for “The Oprah Winfrey Show” from Capitol Cities/ABC, making Oprah Winfrey the first woman in history to own and produce her own talk show. Source: Encyclopedia.com, “Harpo Inc.”

3. HGTV’s “Pamela’s Garden of Eden” premiered November 3, 2022, following Anderson’s renovation of her grandmother’s property in Ladysmith, BC. The renovation earned a Ladysmith Heritage Award from the Ladysmith and District Historical Society. Sources: Victoria Times Colonist, CBC News.

4. According to the 2023 Netflix documentary “Pamela, a Love Story,” it was Playboy magazine’s hairdresser who in 1989 first added “a thousand highlights” to Anderson’s hair, lifting her natural brunette to a “champagne blonde.” Source: CNN Style coverage of Paris Fashion Week 2025.

5. Oprah told Forbes in 1995 about hiring attorney Jeff Jacobs: “I’d heard Jeff is a piranha. I like that. Piranha is good.” Jacobs negotiated Oprah’s ownership of her show and helped establish Harpo Productions. Sources: Harpo Inc. Encyclopedia.com, Reference for Business.

6. According to Variety’s 2023 interview, Anderson said of Baywatch producers: “The producers of ‘Baywatch’ made a fortune. I just didn’t have the representation back then.” She made $1,500 per episode in season one, rising to $300,000 per episode by the show’s end, while co-star David Hasselhoff had both higher pay and an ownership stake.

7. During her Baywatch tenure, international distributors enacted “Pamela clauses” in licensing deals, agreeing to purchase only episodes featuring Anderson. A C.J. Parker Barbie doll became a bestseller based on Anderson’s likeness, but she received no compensation. Source: Variety interview, January 2023.

8. “OPRAH” is a registered trademark of Harpo, Inc. The company aggressively protects this intellectual property, including the “O” logo and various brand extensions. In 2022, Harpo sued the podcast “Oprahdemics” for trademark infringement. Sources: Black Enterprise, AfroTech, Techdirt.

9. Oprah Winfrey: “If I lost control of the business, I’d lose myself—or at least the ability to be myself. Owning myself is a way to be myself.” This quote appears in multiple business case studies about Harpo Productions. Source: IBS Center for Management Research case study.

10. Erika Lyremark, author of “Think Like a Stripper,” teaches entrepreneurs to move beyond transactional thinking and project themselves into the world as they are and want to be—the shift that makes careers go stratospheric.

11. I’ve written extensively about style as power and the joy, art, and liberation of reclaiming your aesthetic choices as culture-making tools rather than sites of accommodation. See my essays on the Dangerous Woman aesthetic and transformational style at House of Cultural Influence.

12. For more on how women have historically been positioned as other people’s capital—and how we move from being exploited to owning our own intellectual property—see my essay “Bodies of Work, Not Empires” at House of Cultural Influence.