Said humiliation, in the media-driven, Dionysian cult of celebrity that's rapidly overtaking American political culture has been not so much fated as voluntarily entered into and all but agreed upon by the well-compensated victims. The only question is how much cash their notoriety helps them to accumulate before everybody gets sick of them and the next Holy Hottie comes along.

Yeah, the former Miss California USA got sandbagged. Anyway, who cares what a 22-year-old in high heels and a swimsuit thinks about gay marriage? Do they ask quarterbacks about the Stupak Amendment? Anything Carrie Prejean said was sure to annoy half the TV audience busily engaged in calculating her sex appeal to three decimal places.

Her awkward rejoinder favoring "opposite marriage" infuriated the questioner, a Hollywood gossip maven who styles himself the "Queen of All Media." After the pageant, Perez Hilton called Prejean a "dumb b----." When she objected, he went deep into the gutter, describing her with the coarsest possible term for the female genitalia. His Web site features scores of attacks on Prejean earmarked "icky-poo."

Clowning like Hilton's, of course, hurts the gay rights cause as much as Prejean's subsequent behavior embarrassed straight Christians she purported to speak for. But because she'd given the wrong answer -- and never mind that, as Sarah Palin pointed out, Prejean's position is basically identical to President Obama's -- liberals who normally denounce "sexism" only snickered.

The embattled beauty queen who soon began making the conservative talk-show rounds promoting a hastily written book describing her deep piety and victimization also happens to be a real knockout, who, if you ran into her in the grocery store, would make you think, "Wow, that girl oughta be Miss California USA." Or something.

Poor Sean Hannity practically had steam coming out his ears listening to Prejean alibi about how the sex video she'd made strictly for her beloved boyfriend ended up going public. Then seven more sex videos and a few dozen nudie photos emerged, and Carrie Prejean's brief career as a martyr to liberal hypocrisy basically ended overnight.

Great beauty always threatens as many people as it enchants. So nice try, but it looks as if you're going to have to get a real job after all. Which brings us back to Sarah Palin, who quit the best job she's ever had to capitalize on her newfound celebrity. The former Alaska governor and beauty pageant runner-up got the book rollout of every author's dreams for her ghost-written memoir, "Going Rogue."

Far from persecution and mockery, Palin got the red-carpet treatment. On supposedly liberal CNN, Jessica Yellin asked, "Can't we just acknowledge it? Sarah Palin is sexy, and she doesn't seem to hide from it. She shows her gams. She openly embraces her femininity."

Her "gams"? Yellin, a Harvard graduate, must have majored in Frank Sinatra studies. She also complained that dames like Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein "keep their femininity under wraps." It's definitely true that older broads avoid bicycle shorts.

Even at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum rhapsodized over Palin's "sex appeal that practically oozes out of every pore." Liberal and conservative commentators alike engaged in hair-splitting debates about Newsweek's "sexist" cover photo -- the one she posed for, just as she agreed to appear on "Saturday Night Live," sit for an interview with Katie Couric, etc. Anything to promote Sarah.

Personally, I'm immune to Palin's charms. Her voice alone would send me to a monastery. But no matter: Making a fetish of your sexiness and your holiness is a dangerous game. Fans can be fickle, demanding a thematic consistency rarely attainable in real life.

Palin appears far too clever for a comic pratfall like Prejean's. But how long before her enraptured public notices that she spent her triumphal comeback trashing other Republicans, sneering "Heathers"-style at Katie Couric and exchanging insults with a 19-year-old kid?

Fortunately, the world has not completely turned upside down, so my respect for Carrie Prejean is a short-lived thing. Because Larry does move on, to a caller, and that's when she throws a tantrum, removing her microphone and threatening to walk out. Except she doesn't walk. She just sits there all, "What? Can't hear you!" and "LARRY, YOU'RE BEING INAPPROPRIATE!" which has by now become a serious pot/kettle issue. 

So I give her an A for the "stubbornly refusing to answer a question I don't like" maneuver, but a D for the "storming off in a huff" one. To pull the latter off successfully, you need to A) pick the right time and B) follow through, or else C) have such a dramatic meltdown the context becomes irrelevant. She and her handlers need to work on that a bit more. But then again, the half-assed meltdown she did have was enough to get our attention, and here I am writing about it, so her natural knack for prolonging those 15 minutes can evidently still overcome any lack of artistry. Dammit. Enjoy the video.

 

Flogging her book "Still Standing" on the "Today" show this morning, Prejean brushed off the term "sex tape." She described the footage as "me by myself, there was no one else with me. I was not having sex," failing to consider that "me by myself" qualifies as sex for roughly 80 percent of the Internet population.

The news of Prejean's one-woman show comes the same week Jennifer Lopez hit her ex-husband with a fat $10 million lawsuit over his attempts to peddle footage from their 1997 honeymoon and Colin Farrell's antics with a Playboy model have resurfaced. In a world where Fred Durst has a sex tape, is there anybody left who doesn't?

Kids, back in the day, a sex tape used to mean something. There was expensive equipment to set up and hide, cassettes to load, storyboards to be drawn. It was a big freaking deal when Rob Lowe had a romp with underage girls or Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee enjoyed connubial bliss (if that's what you call it). Sex in front of a camera was still considered something porn stars did, and breaking that barrier was exciting -- and blurry.

Today, anybody can just aim the phone at the interesting bits and upload the results before they even finish. So much for our happy ending. 

The celebrity sex tape -- as well as its close kin, the much forwarded naked snapshot -- started veering toward that fabled shark tank in June of 2004. That's when "1 Night in Paris" made its Web debut. Unlike other stars who'd been caught knocking boots, Paris Hilton didn't adopt a demeanor of scandalized abasement when her video emerged. Instead, she shrugged it off with the same bored lack of interest she'd displayed during her coital performance. Her career didn't suffer. Her fame didn't abate. On the contrary -- it skyrocketed.

In the ensuing years, compromising footage of the quasi-famous has become as commonplace as conspiracy theorists at a town meeting. And amazingly, it's proved an effective way of giving Hollywood has-beens a jolt of, well, exposure. Are you a Dirty Sanchez-dispensing, former "Saved by the Bell" cast member? Are you a man whose most famous role is playing a character called "McSteamy"? Smoke a little weed, head for the hot tub and don't forget to invite a friend. (Sweeps week crossovers await! ) Is your last name "Kardashian"? That and a little raw footage can get you your own perfume line. Excuse me, I have to go roll my eyes and yawn in an exaggerated manner now.

With each new revelation of a dirty video lurking in a famous closet, the shock at the genre itself dies a little more. Had honeymoon movies of J.Lo emerged when she married her ex in 1997, it might have been a cause célèbre. Now? Big whoop. The explicit sex tape and the compromising photo are no longer potential career ruiners, nor are they the hallmark of a wild, anything-goes character -- not when so many of us, famous and not, have been there and done that. It's a fair assumption that if there aren't explicit images of you floating around somewhere, you may not have a sex life. Or a phone.

While it's easy to enjoy a moment of delectable schadenfreude watching right-wing sweetheart Carrie Prejean, who says in her new memoir that "We should earn respect and admiration for our hearts, not for showing skin to look sexy," tell Meredith Vieira about "the biggest mistake of my life," it shouldn't really come as any surprise. Prejean may be a smug, backward-thinking idiot, but she's not the whore of Babylon. So when Prejean kvetched on the "Today" show that "nothing is private," she may have sounded whiny -- but she wasn't wrong. Some people learn it in more public and embarrassing ways than others, of course (like having your mom and some lawyers watch the footage you made for her boyfriend). But what Prejean did isn't different from anything many, many people are doing in their homes and hotels and dorms right this minute, alone or with a friend or two. Deviants, perverts, married couples, teenagers and "normal, churchgoing" folks like Carrie Prejean -- we are all sexual beings, and we don't need to send our images to the Fotomat for processing anymore. Stuff's bound to happen. Prejean wanted to be Miss USA. Turns out she's everywoman after all.

The complaint filed Monday goes after more than just her implants, staking additional claim to the proceeds from her book, and accusing her of "missing events" and "using her title without authorization to help promote the National Organization for Marriage's 'campaign of intolerance' against gay marriage," reports New York Daily News. It also takes issue with the semi-nude shots that surfaced during the Miss USA scandal: Prejean swore she was a minor in the photos and claimed she hadn't posed for any other raunchy snapshots -- but K2 Productions alleges she was of age in the shots and that far more explicit photos of Prejean exist and could surface at any moment. In other words: There is still more to come from this salacious spectacle. 

Please, say it isn't so. If a lawsuit over breast implants isn't the ugliest this scandal can get, I'm not sure I can handle what's next.