Pamela Anderson with her dog out and about in Los Angeles

Many commentators’ response to this uncommonly brave action has been to profess disbelief or bafflement. If this is true, they want to know, why did she go on to make herself a sex symbol?

Two things are going on here. One is the psychology that underlies all victim-blaming. We want to believe that bad things don’t happen to innocent people. So we need either to reject what the supposed victim is saying (as here) or we need to make the victim complicit (a rape victim was asking for it, shouldn’t have been walking down that street at that time, wearing that skirt, that lipstick – you know how it goes).

The other is how unwilling we are to recognise that human beings – their emotions, their reactions and their consequent decisions – are complex. On the face of it, to make a career out of sex and sexuality is a strange thing for a sexually abused person to do. Except that it’s not – not really.

If something terrible happens to you, especially when you are young, your instinct is to try to master it. If you lose control over your body – which is what happens in the most profound way during an assault – you might try lots of ways over the ensuing years to regain it. You might ‘choose’ (I’ve put it in inverted commas because there is a never-ending debate to be had over whether anything that arises directly out of trauma is as freely adopted as the word implies) to have cosmetic surgery, to alter your body on your terms and away from the body that was abused.

If you experience repeated assault and violation, you might feel that your only option was to embrace that part of yourself that apparently keeps attracting attention. Being the hunter beats being the hunted every time.

Lucy Mangan: "Does anyone ‘choose’ to be a sex symbol?"