I doubt it. Quite the opposite, in fact. Women like her have little going for them without men to gawk and pay their way. Her entire persona depended on the attention of men. She's the perfect woman to let men know that all you have to do is make and spend money and women will flock to you. So of course men have little but contempt for her and others like her.

Speaking as one all-American man, who probably represents a lot of other men's feelings: Anna Nicole Smith meant little to me, psycho-sexually or otherwise.

-- When she showed up in Guess ads, I thought she was hot

-- When Spy magazine wrote about her, I thought it was funny

-- When she showed her boobs in Playboy, I thought she was very hot

-- When she seemed to get bigger implants, with obvious scar tissue (in the movie "Skyscraper"), she went from hot to gross

-- When I found out she married some super-old rich guy, I thought she was rather pathetic

-- When there was a prolonged court battle, I started to completely lose interest

-- When she got all fat, I yawned

-- When she lost weight and showed up drunk on MTV, I thought she was goofy

-- When she had a reality TV show, I thought she was lame

-- When her son died of an overdose, I figured she contributed to the situation that killed him

-- When she died, I thought, wow, what was all that?

I guess (no pun intended) I feel kinda sorry for her. But not as sorry as I feel for people who die every day of causes completely outside of their control. Not as sorry as I feel for every single man and woman killed or maimed in Iraq. Not as sorry as I feel for people who are murdered by criminals, or killed in DUI accidents, day after day. Not as sorry as I feel for the people in the genocide in Sudan, or who die on both sides in the stupid Israel/Palestine conflict.

Anna Nicole Smith was like no friend of my sister. She was like nobody I ever dated. She was just some woman who liked attention and used it to get out of her small-town world. She entered a bigger world, made lots of money, but didn't have the wherewithal to do anything good with it. By all appearances she was a bad mother for her children, a bad girlfriend/wife to her men, and a bad employee for the people who hired her as a spokesperson, model, and actress. Like Elvis, she didn't have the resourcefulness to change her approach to life; she was surrounded by riches and opportunities, but the old habits kept pulling her back.

We will talk about Anna Nicole for a few days and then she will be forgotten (with occasional blips of interest as the legal matters get worked out).

Let's get back to discussing things that really matter. We have a very corrupt government that has already steered us alongside an iceberg and seems to think that ramming another one will solve the problem. Our planet is running a high fever and needs to be healed. There are a number of wars and conflicts out there that should be solved. There are economic issues in the United States that are serious and will have severe consequences for our way of life if we don't try to fix them. We need to be informed so we can hold our elected officials accountable and not be sucked in by trivial stuff they use to manipulate us. We need to improve our game and sharpen up, and poring over Anna Nicole's carcass sure doesn't help in that regard.

Salon feels it necessary to beat this dead horse.

WHO CARES?

why if they are willing to do the work should they be insecure, whatever men think. Insecurity about what someone else thinks of you is reasonable if you have reason to think they don't think well of you, unless by insecurity you mean that women believe that they are forced to be nice to men to make up for the fact that the deck is stacked against them.

We have hit hit absolute rock bottom when a talentless nobody like Smith can be called a "star." Salon is sharing in media corruption and stupidity by obsessing about Smith, and acting as if she was important and a major fixture of American culture, pop or otherwise.

Kennicott’s essay does seem particularly insightful (as well as kind to Ms. Smith in contextualizing her choices) as does Ms. Clark-Flory’s addition that the “sexual economy” of marriage is ultimately understood in terms of underlying biological drives: about survival, procreation, and the features of mating systems and behavior which further those needs.

As long as opportunities to gain resources needed for a secure and meaningful life are differentially available to the sexes, women and men will both suffer. The greater the opportunity for women to independently support themselves and gain control and resources, the less likely they will relate to men with calculation and cynical self-interest. The very drives and traits which men seem afraid to relinquish because they are unconsciously associated with mate attraction (competitive acquisition and control of power, status and resources) undermine the potential for men and women to freely relate to each other, and undermine the true security that might result from attraction, attachment and bonding free of calculation, sexual economy, and thus of anxiety and mistrust.

however it is also true that women become attracted to a smaller and smaller percentage of the male population as they have more themselves. This doesn't happen with men. So its more than misleading to suggest that women having more of everything will automatically create good things for everyone or most people.

The day Molly Ivins died, while there wasn't much notice in the mainstream media, we at the library put up exhibits of her works in all formats, books, books on cd, etc. The comments we had from our patrons were often rueful and sad and kind of personal. One in particular said, "We're gonna miss our Molly."

I can't imagine that many will be thinking that about Anna Nichole despite the media scavengers who can't stop chewing at her corpse and spewing the masticated bits all over the airwaves.