What if someday one decides to run for elected office - nothing big, say the local School Board or City commission? HMMM - that skimpy football jersey picture will make a great campaign ad...

Lets slow down here.

Tracy's take: Young women strip down to almost nothing. They try to make a few extra bucks. They mean no harm. Someone might use those pictures or the requisite Q&A to prevent them from advancing in life. Aww.

My take: If you get naked on tv or a magazine or a computer, you are an idiot or a pornstar. I would rather spend my time defending people who aren't idiots or pornstars.

Don't worry Tracy. Most women who engage in this type of stuff will try their darndest to marry someone for their money anyway. Don't cry that they won't get the intership at Merrill Lynch, they weren't going to get it anyway.

TEACH YOUR CHILDREN WELL.

but if you are going to do anything sexual online you should make sure your face isn't identifiable. It's not so tough if you master the techniques, (cut off below the nose, head back, etc). Obviously this precludes some profit opportunities.

above the nose

Let's face it: Everybody's a freak.

Every member of the human race has some strange habit that 90 percent of the population finds to be disgusting, perverse, morally reprehensible or just tacky.

All the information age does, with its inevitable disolutions of artificial privacy barriars, is just encourage it and display it.

Most of the idle chatter about employers refusing to give jobs to applicants because of a google search will fade away as the workforce becomes more and more populated by people who realize this fact and ignore it appropriately.

The real question that should be asked every time this issue come up: Does the breakdown of traditional privacy have any positive or negative bearing on the generation that's expects less and less privacy every year?

...that I was smart enough to earn some of my college tuition the old fashioned way: working as a stripper, under an assumed name, wearing tons of makeup, at a two-bit truck-stop titty bar WAYYYYYYYYYY outside of town.

It was so small and off-the-radar I honestly can't even remember what the place was called, or what small podunk town it was in.

And in the decade-plus since I've left college (and that part of the country too) none of my employers have EVER been the wiser. And all of my income went to paying off my current lifestyle, rather than my tuition.

Come on, now, girls! These options still exist! In an age where a wayward Myspace comment about drug use can raise eyebrows at HR, why on earth would it seem a good idea to identify yourself as someone in the sex trade on, of all places, the INTERNET!? That information lives forever, is perpetually open to wiki-reinterpretation, and transcends your geography. Even if you DON'T want a good job later in life, don't you at least want to pretend to be respectable someday?

It's naive - and ridiculous - to think you can comparmentalize your online image from your 'real life' image, or, for that matter, your work image from your personal life. You can't subscribe to correct office behavior at work, then after work belong to a club that discriminates against blacks and Jews, and expect to be able to claim "I'm only a racist on my personal time, not at work, it shouldn't bother any one." People will always respond to the whole person, not just the parts you want them to see.

Women who wish to be found sexy, who put themselves out there in order to solicit feedback from men on their sexiness, can't then say "but at work I want only to be judged by my performance." If you prompt people to respond to you in a certain way- e.g. appearing on all fours, hosed down, in your bikini with a come hither look - then you have to expect a response. And you also have to expect that you cannot control that response - you may wish to compartmentalize it, but there is no guarantee others will follow your wishes. You must consider that a woman up for the same promotion as you who does not pose in a bikini on the internet might be considered more professional.

Bottom line if you want to be admired for your body and your looks you don't get to complain when people don't look beyond your body and your looks. There are many ways to enjoy attention for your looks without distracting from attention you wish to be paid to other qualities such as intelligence and talent.

It cracked me up to read the girl who won the college hot girl contest describe herself as a little ol' shy girl from Tennessee. Huh? Shy girls allow men to vote on their looks over a period of months and are so proud of the results they adjure their mama's to be proud too? That's a new definiiton of shy - someone should submit that to Wikipedia.

Here's the thing...when you're alone in front of a computer screen it's easy to think that you're untouchable, that what you do isn't quite "real." Psychologists who have studied people's behavior in online chat rooms have documented this. So it's no surprise that women (and men for that matter) post silly things about themselves, including embarassing pictures, details of sexual escapades and drunken episodes, etc. They reveal too much about themselves and their friends in blogs. Why? Because when you are sitting alone in front of your computer you simply don't think it's all that big a deal.

THe other problem is that with the advent of the Internet, nothing is ever truly lost. Webpages get created and forgotten, people post pictures to websites and forget about them. So all those stupid things that nearly all of us have done are now not only preserved on film, but made publicly accessible forever. I'll confess in my day I got drunk. I had sexual encounters I would like to forget I had. I've worn outfits that in retrospect I am not proud of (usually halloween costumes). There are even pictures of some of these things. The difference between my "stupid in my 20's" antics and those of 20-somethings today is that the Internet wasn't as omnipresent as it is today and my pictures therefore remain safely in a box somewhere and not on a website.

So it's not that young people are stupider, its just that it's harder to avoid the consequences of your actions. Is that fair? No. But as someone who is going employing 20-somethings, believe me when I tell you I DO use Google. Part of being a professional is knowing better than to record your stupid moments and make them available for public consumption. Just because it's so much easier now to be and see stupid doesn't mean that it's excusable. Stupid is still stupid. As an employer, I do not want to hire stupid.