Yesterday, Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote an open letter on Broadsheet to all the "celebrities" who appear in leaked sex tapes. Short version: You are all dumb sluts.

She begins:

Today's revelation that Hustler is releasing a 75-minute opus of "Real Housewives" star Danielle Staub doing the nasty is just the latest in a genre that wore out its welcome long before Dustin Diamond popularized the Dirty Sanchez. At this point, if you're a contestant on "Survivor," ever ran for president or have the name "Kardashian," we just assume there's a video out there of you making your O face. And our fatigue from your narcissism has actually finally won out over mere prurient curiosity.

Believe us, when it comes to the getting on of anyone's freak, we give a really wide berth. But call us cynical, we just can't shake the suspicion that what was once a private, loving act between an aspiring model and an aspiring DJ has now become something else—the pilot for a new Bravo series. Spare us the outrage at how you feel sooooo betrayed, how you have no idea how this could have fallen into the wrong hands. At least Jesse James admitted that, deep down, he wanted to get caught. This whole pretext of "I didn't really make and distribute my own little porno here" so you can give the public something that appears furtive and dirty and secret while still showing off how weird you look in night vision? Enough. And if you are actually dumb enough to make a sex tape and think it won't get leaked, you are too dumb to ever have sex again.

Allow me to translate for all the dumb sluts reading along here: You were asking for it. You saaaay you don't want the sex tape of your boyfriend coercing you into making a sex tape revealed to millions of downloaders, but we know better. You say no, but you mean yes. And if you can't figure even that much out—well, you're a dumb slut, after all.

We would like to just let this slide, but it turns out that your dumb sluttiness is getting veeeeery, very inconvenient for us sex bloggers out there in the business of covering dumb sluts. This business: Let me tell you, it is rough. We are routinely chained to our laptops and forced to watch Dustin Diamond, Kim Kardashian, various Survivors, and all manner of one-time political candidates pretend to not want us to be watching them do it, and then pen Internet posts detailing our displeasure with this scenario. We tolerated this, for a time. But now: A Real Housewife? For 75 minutes? This, it is too much to bear.

Perhaps you are wondering whether people who are tired of being forced to watch celebrity sex tapes are actually just too stupid to use the Internet? And to that we say: Quiet, dumb sluts. We are very busy judging you right now.

There may have been a time, long ago in the Tommy and Pam era, when simultaneous horniness and access to technology was a novelty. And there are no doubt still many, both in the celebrity spotlight and here among the rabble, who just want to mix it up a little in the bedroom now and again. There's no shame in wanting to watch yourself blow your boyfriend, I suppose. As far as attention-getting ploys go, though, the sex tape makes going out without your underpants look downright classy.

Of course, there are exceptions. There's "no shame," we suppose, in making a videotape of yourself having sex, as long as you ensure that your last name never becomes famous, you never run for office, you never appear on television, and you never participate in any beauty pageant. There's no shame in it, as long as you never attend middle school. There's no shame, as long as you never blog about sex—just like us dumb sluts. But if visual imagery of you engaging in sex ever comes anywhere near the periphery of possible Salon blog topics—well, prepare for a thorough public shaming. It's a long, lonely road, shame: We will not also be shaming the ex who leaked the tape without your consent, nor the porn company that's profiting from it, nor the downloaders consuming "the sex tape they didn't want you to see!" The dumb sluts will have to go it alone on this one. If you're lucky, you'll be joined by people who do not wear underwear. There's a special place in hell for both of you.

As a friend pondered recently: What happened to the eroticism of imagination? Whether you're a Real Housewife or just plain folk, a transitory adventure, with no record beyond the smile you just can't wipe off whenever you remember it, can be pretty goddamn awesome. And if ever there were a moment to stop self-promoting, to worry less about how cool this looks and more about how nice it feels, that'd be while you're doing it.

And where would a good round dumb-slut-shaming be without an Andy Rooney moment to cap it off? Sex was just better in the good old days, before some dumb slut got her hands on a video camera. Of course, there's always the possibility that you dumb sluts aren't videotaping  yourself each and every time you have sex, that you're not all ignorant to the peculiar pleasures of sex with the lens cap on, and that you're actually quite aware of how nice sex feels. If so . . . Well. It looks like you're even sluttier than we thought.

Photo via makelessnoise, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

On Sunday evening, Rima Fakih was crowned Miss USA 2010. By morning, her reign had already been tarnished by the requisite beauty queen sex scandal. Photos had surfaced of the now-24-year-old Fakih dancing on a stripper pole in a local radio event titled "Stripper 101." But as Broadsheet's Tracy Clark-Flory notes, Fakih's "official Miss USA glamor shots" (above) are actually significantly more risque than the "stripper" shots, which revealed Fikah—clothed—in short-shorts and a tank top.

Well, well, well. What on earth could possibly be happening here?

First, Clark-Flory lays out the sexual landscape:

What's absurd—no, make that what's most absurd—about this faux scandal is that the photos of Fakih pole-dancing are far tamer than the official Miss USA glamor shots. As Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote last week, it seemed pageant officials were "heading scandal off at the pass" by releasing a "spank-worthy collection of its contestants in lingerie." Fakih is wearing less clothing in her glamor shot than in her pole-dancing pics—we're talking fishnets, a garter and a bra compared to a tank top and booty shorts. In all seriousness, you're likely to see racier getups on suburban soccer moms at their local strip aerobics class.

"The beauty queen's fall from grace has been institutionalized and mainstreamed," Clark-Flory continues. "The post-win scandal is now every bit an expected and essential part of the pageant as the swimsuit portion of the show. It's all so predictable and boring. Could it be that we're nearing maximum sex scandal capacity?"

Not a chance. Clark-Flory is right that it's boring, predictable, and hypocritical for the Miss USA pageant to expect completely virginal contestants when the pageant itself encourages its Misses to embody the other half of that particular dichotomy.

But this pattern—parading its contestants in string bikinis and high-heels, and then clutching its pearls over any unsanctioned skin-showing—is hardly an idiosyncrasy of the pageant circuit. This comes from a long and storied tradition of (a) expecting women to be extremely sexy, and then (b) furiously policing their sexuality by confining it to particular contexts, which are controlled by (c) assigned (usually) male guardians, like fathers, husbands, and pageant organizers.

That's why Americans have got our sexy teen pop stars who are saving themselves for marriage, our Christian true-believers who are saving their breast implants for their husbands,  and our beauty queens who are explicitly judged on how sexy they are—as long as they're only sexy for Donald Trump. Last year, Miss California USA funded Carrie Prejean's breast implants, only to ditch her when she almost showed them off. It doesn't matter that these beauty queens are often wearing less clothes in the pageant than they are in their "sexy photo scandals"—they're still not saving themselves sufficiently, and for that they deserve to be shamed.

Trump, like many arbiters of female sexuality before him, wants a lady in the street but a freak in the, uh, swimsuit competition. He'll never find one—it's difficult to find a young woman who can perform sexuality at Miss-USA-standards without any practice.  So what's the only way to keep the dichotomy alive? Dole out the shaming when any less-than-perfectly-chaste photos arise. In an age when beauty pageant interest is flagging, the American public is still invested in that virgin-whore narrative—and slut-shaming for fun and profit has proved a reliable investment for Trump.

It's no secret that The Huffington Post fancies itself a left-leaning Web rag. Wikipedia describes Arianna Huffington's aggregatorial monster as "an American liberal news website." Conservapedia's definition, however, might be more helpful: "The site is an extreme mouthpiece for liberals," it reads. "The Huffington Post calls itself an internet newspaper of blogs, news and video but often is referred to as a hate site where its one-sided news cannot be trusted."

But even HuffPo's liberal readership gets tired of hating on conservatives sometimes, guys. Sometimes, they just want to sit back, relax, and look at accidentally bare nipples—just like the rest of America. This one-sided liberal hate site has one fatal weakness—boobs. Let's check out some recent stories from the Huffington Post's entertainment section:

* Here are some photos of Natalie Portman's nipple.

* Here are some photos of Beyonce's nipple, complete with HuffPo-provided "NSFW zoom."

* Here are some photos of Pamela Anderson's nipple (hardly news, but a boob's a boob).

* Here is an entire page devoted to recently naked women (and Barack Obama).

* Here is a collection of zoomed-in photos of 23 celebrities' breasts, made into a fun game called "Guess the Celebrity Breast Implants?"

Pretty standard entertainment-section blog fare here—though HuffPo does go above and beyond with the "NSFW zoom." You don't see a Beyonce nipple that close just anywhere.

So, what do nipple slips and boob jobs have to do with liberal politics?

The obvious answer, of course, would be nothing. People—even progressive, conservative-hating, liberal-minded people—will click on nipple slip slideshows and boob jobs guessing games, and that's a big part of the Huffington Post's model.

But look past the nipples, if you can, and you will find a clear liberal bent in HuffPo's non-boob Entertainment stories. Yesterday, the top three links on the Entertainment page could be considered GLBT interest stories: "Adam Lambert Confirms Rolling Stone To Address His Sexuality"; "WATCH: Neil Patrick Harris' FANTASTIC Tonys Closing Song"; "Gordon Ramsay Shocks Audience With 'Lesbian' Rant About Journalist." Also on the page yesterday was blogger Jackson Katz's post directly addressing the objectification of women in entertainment, titled "Eminem, Misogyny and the Sounds of Silence." Even "Guess the Celebrity Breast Implants" was inspired by a progressive premise: the Carrie Prejean controversy, which the Huffington Post began following as a homophobia-shaming story, before turning around and covering it as a topless-photograph-shaming story.

Here's the lib logic on that one: How dare this professional spokesmodel both hate gay people and take revealing modeling photographs? Our only choice is to shame her by posting them on our Web site. It is the only thing that will finally reveal her hypocrisy (and reel in the pageviews)!

This same Prejean logic is used by the Huffington Post to justify its other women-as-object pieces, as well. Though Senior Features editor Katherine Thomson didn't immediately return my request for comment yesterday, HuffPo has, in the past, addressed stray nipples directly. Cenk Uygur, host of "The Young Turks," took this position on the Janet Jackson flap:

CBS was fined $550,000 for showing Janet Jackson's right nipple on live television. Coal mines that endanger the lives of their workers are commonly fined $60 per violation. . . . How do you like those priorities?

Uygur has a point—who cares? It's just a nipple! Only a religious conservative would bother to make a stink out of a body part which most men, women, and children have in sets of two. It's almost enough to make fetishizing nipples on your Web site sound like a liberal position. If it pisses off the religious conservatives, that means it's a good thing, right? After all, this is just "entertainment," anyway—who cares if it's progressive or not when we're all just staring at nipples and having a good time? As Harry Shearer points out on HuffPo, everybody's doing it!

The problem is that people really do care about nipples. They care so much about nipples that the Huffington Post devotes pages and pages of photographs to them when women accidentally (or, you know, against their will) reveal them to the public. In that way, there's no difference between the religious conservative who is scandalized by a bare breast popping up in the middle of his football game and a liberal Web site which devotes its resources to naked chicks. A woman's body part is a priority. Real women's issues, not so much.

The Prejean logic, while tenuous, is at least accompanied by her blatant homophobia; how items like "Rihanna's Battered Face (PHOTO)" and "Valerie Bertinelli Gets Back In Her Bikini" key into HuffPo's liberal identity remains a mystery to me. But I'm confident that any item that reaps a lot of pageviews can some way, somehow, be justified as "liberal."

Pageant spokesman Roger Neal said Tuesday it appears the 21-year-old Prejean has run afoul of several sections of the 12-page contract that prospective contestants were required to sign before competing in the state contest.

The contract contains a clause asking participants whether they have conducted themselves "in accordance with the highest ethical and moral standards" and if they've ever been photographed nude or partially nude.

Ah yes, because the "highest ethical and moral standards" are crystal clear in an organization which PROMOTES LADIES WALKING AROUND IN SWIMSUITS THAT SHOW OFF THE FAKE BOOBS IT BANKROLLS.

The distance that Miss California USA is attempting to place between its own sexism and Prejean's homophobia doesn't just call attention to its hypocrisy—it also reveals its deep ignorance of the marriage issue.

Really, supporting gay marriage means embracing marriage equality in all unions, and extending marriage rights to same-sex couples is a tacit rejection of marriage as a sexist institution. Giving two men or two women the right to marry means dismantling the idea that stable marriages are achieved only by embracing traditional roles—one person (the man) is the strong, rational worker, while the other (the woman) is the submissive, emotional caregiver. Gay marriage is, indeed, a threat to traditional "opposite marriage"—and it's as much about fighting sexism as it is homophobia.

Well, well, well, isn't this interesting. The National Organization for Marriage is bristling at Perez Hilton's request for YouTube to remove a NOM ad (above) which features footage of Hilton calling Miss California Carrie Prejean a "dumb bitch." Hilton claimed that NOM had violated copyright laws by lifting "about three seconds of footage" from his video blog. NOM's lawyers have appealed the video's removal to the video sharing site.

It's no surprise that NOM would fight to keep the video up—Perez Hilton is probably wrong here, as the clip is short enough to constitute fair use. The interesting part is the way NOM executive director Brian Brown has characterized Hilton's request.

It seems like only yesterday that NOM was working exhaustively to remove YouTube copies of the leaked audition reels to its now-infamous anti-gay "Gathering Storm" ad. And yet, In an interview with Bloggasm, Brown painted Hilton not just as a copyright law novice, but as a coward.

"I don’t know people’s motivations, but it seems pretty clear that Perez is embarassed about the fact of what he said," Brown said. "There’s no other reason of why he would try to take it down. . . . it doesn’t look good for him. So clearly it’s not that hard to figure out. He doesn’t want it up because he’s embarrassed by it."

Really, Brian Brown? There's no other reason? Let me throw another possibility out there: Perez Hilton is gay, you run an organization that works against gay people, and he doesn't want his image used in your anti-gay advertisements. I'd even venture to say that he probably knows that he's not going to win any copyright action, and wants to do whatever he can to be a huge pain in your ass, because anytime anyone takes action against NOM for anything they're guaranteed to make headlines.

Perhaps the reason Brian Brown thinks Hilton is ashamed of calling Prejean a "dumb bitch"—has Hilton ever been ashamed of anything?—is because the theory works so nicely with Brown's own YouTube take-down campaign. Did the National Organization for Marriage ask YouTube to take down its leaked audition videos because it wasn't "fair" for other people to use their material—they were totally going to use those hilarious videos of actors stumbling over their homophobia? Or was it because the tapes made them look completely and awesomely ridiculous—in short, they were "ashamed." I'd say the answer is "not that hard to figure out."

Yesterday, Keith Olbermann and Michael Musto took five minutes out of their busy schedules to skewer anti-gay-marriage Miss California Carrie Prejean after the "news" broke that the Miss California Organization had paid for Prejean's breast implants. Olbermann and Musto choose to shame Prejean by tearing into her body—riffing on boobs as "performance enhancers," saying the Miss California Organization's comments "added saline to the wound," and comparing her breasts to basketballs.

A blogger at the Conservative XPress responded to the Olbermann segment, writing, "Anyone know of any women's rights groups defending this woman yet? Nope? Didn't think so."

I'll do it.

Why is the commentary on Prejean's anti-gay commentary so devoid of the context of the Beauty Pageant?

So, Carrie Prejean is a homophobe. Is that any surprise, seeing that she's a product of a pageant machine which proudly parades its sexism in front of television screens across America? And now, the mainstream media is shaming Prejean for her pageant-consistent beliefs because she did something that would—what—help her win a beauty pageant?

The Miss California Organization leaking the news of Prejean's boob job is not sweet revenge for her intolerant comments. The organization paying for her fake breasts only reiterates the fact that pageant organizers deal in and profit from sexism, not public service. Meanwhile, they act completely sanctimonious when one of their fembot minions voices another shameful view? What a clusterfuck.

Try to think of a situation where a man is forced to parade his near-naked body in front of celebrity judges and millions of television viewers for an hour, and then speak for about ten seconds on public policy. It doesn't happen. Everyone knows those women weren't chosen for their policy positions, and that they essentially have no business commenting on political issues. And yet, the Q&A section remains. Why? To produce Youtube videos of pretty girls stumbling over "thinky" questions.

Perhaps the Prejean blowup will move pageant organizers to be more careful about coaching their representatives on the Q&A. But who cares? It's still a fucking beauty pageant.

Last night, NBC aired the 2009 "Miss USA" pageant, and apparently about a minute of the telecast was actually kind of interesting. Among the pageant's barely-recognizable celebrity judges was gossip blogger Perez Hilton, who managed to emerge from the pageant's cloud of spray tan and tacky gowns to ask Miss California Carrie Prejean a real question (above): What are her thoughts on gay marriage?

Here's what Prejean had to say:

"Well, I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. Um, we live in a land that you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage and, you know what, in my country and my family, I think that—I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anyone out there, but that's how I was raised, and that's how I think it should be—between a man and a woman. Thank you."

The answer was met with cheers and boos. Hilton responded instantly with his bitch face, but waited to crawl back into the safety of his gossip blog empire to call Prejean a "dumb bitch" and declare her response "the worst answer in pageant history"—putting it below Miss Teen USA South Carolina's infamous pageant Q&A performance:

[youtube:v=qQdhMSEqhfg]

Hey, what California lacks in South Carolina's eloquence, it makes up for in bigotry.