Lately, we have some very sexy celebrities on our hands. And not just the normal type, posing for magazine covers and falling out of their tops at wall-to-wall flashbulb events. We have bonafide old-tymey dead ones, now with sex tapes!

The first one to make a splash last month was Marilyn Monroe. Of course, she is known as an iconic Hollywood sex symbol, and nude pictures of her appeared in the first issue of Playboy in 1953 (she was on the cover, of course), so I am not sure why this was surprising to people or called an "ugly claim" by some.

I know you can't assume that because someone is a bombshell who posed nude they would allow themselves to be filmed during sex, but it sounds less far-fetched than, say, Phyllis Schlafly Sex Party, Now On DVD, doesn't it?

Of course, anytime anything happens in the news, especially the celebrity world, people start immediately screaming "hoax!" "Leading expert" on Marilyn, Mark Bellinghaus, whose credentials seem to be that he has...a lot of Marilyn Monroe stuff, lays out a detailed rebuttal at Defamer and elsewhere about why this tape is a hoax. The funny part is that in all the media/blog bruhaha, no one has seen the tape, except for the seller, and so are making guesses based on what the seller has said.

It's kind of all a fun read, though. It gets really weird when you hear the FBI was involved. Serious investigations into Monroe's alleged sex tapes? Yeah, that's not national security, that's nosiness. I understand, believe me.

Following close on the heels of the alleged Marilyn tape was the Jimi Hendrix (sex) Experience. Clips from the fifteen-minute video are circulating around the internet. Except instead of this tape being under lock and key with bonus FBI scrutiny, it is being sold by Vivid Video, the world's largest adult film producer. Interesting contrast, isn't it, how no one is squawking about Hendrix's legacy and reputation?

The experts in the case for are Cynthia Plaster Caster, Penis-Copier of the Stars and Pamela Des Barres, author of I'm With the Band, at least one of whom has seen Mr. Hendrix naked. Others, such as former lovers and historians, claim it's not Hendrix in the tape.

It's funny that in this era of Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton and even Screech from Saved by the Bell sex tapes, we now have "recently unearthed" sex tapes of the celebrities of yesterday. We should all be nervous now, though, that Barbara Walters has announced her affair with former Senator Edward Brooke from thirty-odd years ago. If her memoir doesn't sell well, can a sex tape be far behind?

SJ loves Abe Vigoda from afar on I, Asshole.