I still have only seen like one small screen shot of these tapes. So my mind needs more visual evidence before becoming lost.

Here in the UK we've never heard of Carrie Prejean, and so my brain supplied me with information about Sister Helen Prejean while I clicked on the link, which resulted in no small amount of confusion during the time it took me to read the first paragraph of that article.

That second from last paragraph really nails it.

Ultimately, I still blame whoever decided to put Perez Hilton on that judging panel.

and so my brain supplied me with information about Sister Helen Prejean while I clicked on the link

But then my mind would substitute Susan Sarandon. So I would still have a dirty mind, but at least it would not be someone I would be of an age of being their parent.

The thing is, I don't have to shame Carrie Prejean. She built the glass house she lives in, not me. And she started throwing the stones, not me. Is it wrong to snicker to myself as the house shatters around her?

Her choices regarding her body and the nature of her sexuality are irrelevant! If she wanted to raise The drinking age to 25 or wanted to change fucking library-funding policy and you found naked pics would you still snicker at her?

If you mean generalized schadenfreude -- i.e. that things are going badly for her, not regarding what the issue is per se -- I don't really play that game (I think?) but it's a little little bit better.

I don't know, I can't write about this without fuming because my mental gears just stop working at the bizarro-land nature of this discourse. Nothing I've learned in my entire life has taught me that it's okay to shame a woman for her body. But suddenly everyone I trust to be a liberal on this kinda issue is a sneering jerk? Even if it's "you're this type of person, admit it" is judgement-less they're playing into the hands of the categorization of this type of person that type of person. Maybe there's something just deeply puritanical about american psychology ("be like us or be the Other") regardless of where on the spectrum people fancy themselves to be. I don't fucking know.

The reason I snicker at her for having a sex tape is that she was weighing in against gay marriage as a moral, Christian issue, and to then get busted for a sex tape makes her look hypocritical. It didn't *have* to be a sex tape, or anything to do with sex. I might also snicker if she'd taken some other fundamentalist Christian viewpoint that I disagreed with but was then discovered to have married a woman in Massachusetts or was a secret Wiccan or had thousands of dollars in library fines. So possibly, yes, I might would snicker with your other examples, depending on how she presented them. I realize that people aren't perfect, and perhaps it is shallow of me, but hypocracy exposed (if you'll pardon the expression) makes me smile.

What I loved most about the whole incident, though, has nothing to do with what happened after the pageant. I'm old enough to remember when conservative opinions in beauty pageants were THE way to go with the judges, and here she got slammed for it and lost the Miss USA crown. Things really do change.