I can't help being reminded of the derision heaped on Miss USA for the all-too-human sin of slipping and falling at the Miss Universe pageant in Mexico City in late May.

The Mainstream Media largely misreported that she was booed only after her fall, when in fact she had been harassed every time she showed her face in public for weeks prior to the finals, for no other reason than her national origin. At the finals, the organizers had to call in extra security for fear the hostile mob might storm the stage. It's hardly surprising that under all that stress a moment's loss of focus might lead to a slip and fall.

She was denounced then in hateful posts by bloggers such as Wonkette as "stupid", although as a young lady of color and a magna cum laude graduate of a highly regarded college she hardly fits the usual stereotype.

The video was shown an astonishing number of times on cable TV, leading to this outburst from Chris Matthews: "I think MSNBC ran this 4,000 times today. Let's not us do it again. Can we stop this joke? Let's stop now. Let's stop doing that picture. Somebody seems to get a kick out of that, somebody who doesn't like women or something." I think Matthews has spotted the elephant in the room that no one wants to mention.

Dozens of copies of her spill were posted on YouTube, receiving millions of hits. Some of the copies were re-mixes with derisive sound effects, showing the impact repeatedly to suggest sexual intercourse. Many of the comments were sexually suggestive. The fact of the matter is that the public humiliation of an attractive woman is a turn-on to many men, and the run-away popularity of this clip can only be explained in these terms.

Since May, Rachel Smith has been an exemplary Miss USA. Unlike her predecessor, she has not done drugs or been involved in public scandal. Perhaps she has been stupid, because she HAS been totally ignored by the media, while Tara Connor, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Miss Teen South Carolina have been made into celebrities by the media.

. . . what gender's got to do with it, I shot an angry e-mail off to CNN when their clownish daytime anchorwoman was whooping it up over this clip, asking whether had been courageous enough to laugh hysterically over equally inane Presidential statements,

or if they reserve the fearsome power of the press for eighteen- year-old schoolgirls.

I posted my earlier letter because I thought it contained information that might be of interest to Salon readers, and specifically because the racist and misogynous abuse of Rachel Smith is less well known and less defensible than that of Miss Teen South Carolina.

Give me a break. Show me one male pratfall on YouTube that draws the millions of views that Rachel Smith's did, not to mention the sexually-tinged comments, especially on the Spanish-language clips posted by Mexicans. When something draws such intensity of interest, enduring even after three months, it's a pretty good bet that sexuality is a covert motivation.

"Speaking at the sad state of US education and lazy minds, you've never met a logical fallacy you didn't like have you? You have no familiarity with the formal concept of reason, such as a properly constructed deductive argument, do you?"

Speaking of logical fallacy, we seem to have descended to the level of ad hominem discourse. If you can develop a properly constructed deductive argument from the case of Miss Teen South Carolina, let's have a look at it. In the mean time, you don't know me, and the logical fallacy is yours.

I remember JFK a bit differently. He was the first President to frame civil rights as a moral issue. True, he didn't pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he did propose it at a time when the Democratic Party depended on the support of the Solid South, and it's hard to do much lobbying with a bullet in your brain. And how many Americans alive today recall a time when our President could travel overseas and be greeted by crowds numberings in the hundreds of thousands chanting "USA! USA!" That may well happen again with a black President who has ended our war in Iraq. With a lessor President -- like the one currently in office -- we probably wouldn't have survived the Cuban Missile Crisis. And without JFK there would have been no Peace Corps or nuclear test ban treaty, and man would never have set foot on the moon. Not a bad record for only a thousand days.

Perhaps you've been drinking too much Republican kool-aid.