They leaked on Friday: what appeared to be web cam photos of Kat Dennings, naked, posing for a mystery recipient on the other end of an online chat, joining what’s become a long line of young stars caught in compromising positions, compromised by someone they thought could be trusted. There are two issues here then – the fact that they keep doing this dumb sh-t, and also that they keep getting betrayed.

I mean... she’s young. They’re all young. And this is what they do. They talk about the sex, they think about the sex, they do the sex, and then they want to do more of the sex. I wrote the same thing when Miley Cyrus’s cell phone hot shots were leaked a couple of years ago. It may have been stupid that she did it, but it wasn’t at all surprising that she did it. At that age, they’re obsessed with it. Miley however wasn’t legal at the time. This is not Kat’s problem. Kat’s problem, and Miley’s too, and everyone else who’s been f-cked over this way, is that we live in an online age and people will sell you out without hesitation. This is one of the few occasions I am happy I am old. Because that was me a long time ago.

I was 17. I had a boyfriend. He came over after school. We did what we all do when the parents aren’t home after school. What? No, no. Of course not YOUR kid. Just everyone else’s kid. So we were fooling around one day. And I had these crazy gold leggings. Do not ask me why I had gold leggings. This is, of course, the detail Sasha fixated on the other day when I told her about it. The gold leggings are not important. Just know they were hot and I wore them with an oversized white dress shirt and a belt and it was badass.

So the gold leggings wrapped flatteringly around my ass. And he had a camera. So we took pictures of me in the gold leggings without my shirt on. No bra. This of course is back in the day before digital cameras. You take the picture, you have to develop the film.

Remember when we had to develop film?

We developed the film. In black and white. Because even as horndogs, we were trying to be arty. Oh my God, this is making me laugh. Anyway, we took the film to the one hour photo the next day and of course I hated the way my body looked, so that was a big boner killer, and I ended up shoving the pictures in a shoebox and eventually we broke up.

Cut to two years later. I was in university and my parents bought a new house. I wasn’t around to pack up my old sh-t. You know what happened. That is exactly what happened. My Squawking Chicken mother, who does not know the meaning of privacy, couldn’t just move the shoebox as is, she went through the shoebox and found the photos. Let me repeat this for you just in case you were skimming and fail to appreciate the f-ckedupness of my situation: my mother found my gold leggings topless photos.

Please.

There’s the mother issue, and then there’s the Chinese issue, and then there’s the Squawking Chicken issue. Your mother finding your topless pictures is mortifying enough. Your Chinese mother finding them makes it worse. Because Chinese people are afraid of sex. This is why they so often end up sexually deviant. And my mother is straight up nuts. So I’m telling you, there was some drama:

“If I wanted to raise a tramp I would have put you in a beauty pageant.”

“If I wanted to raise a tramp I would have stayed in Hong Kong and let Little Kwan, that whore in the poultry village, teach you all her tricks, you’d be working there getting paid in chicken wings!” (This might be my mother’s all time best line ever. Also PS Little Kwan is always her go-to whore. Like whenever she sees a whore in the movies, my ma will always bring up Little Kwan as a benchmark. Like, that whore in that movie is almost as dirty as Little Kwan from the poultry village.)

“No wonder I lost so much at mah-jong today. You cursed every hand. You shamed my skills. You let Mrs Yung step all over me. She ate all my good hands. When will you pay back mommy?”

I had the temerity, unfortunately, to point out to her that Mrs Yung couldn’t have possibly seen my topless gold legging photo spread. This only set her off even more:

“You call mommy a liar? You show mommy how you pose. You lie down and show mommy what you did in the camera. I want to see.”

Dude, she would not leave it alone until I actually got into my bed and recreated the same positions in the pictures. MY MOTHER. And that’s the story of why I’ll never take my shirt off in front of a camera, not even for my husband, ever again. She made her point. Parents these days do not know the value of Shaming as a disciplinary device. It works. And she destroyed those images. They’re gone. Thanks God. I was lucky, like some of you I’m sure (oh don’t even front), to not have to grow up in the age of instant imaging. Because if did, I’m sure one way or another, my gold leggings would find themselves online. Like Kat Dennings, minus the gold leggings.

I don’t think less of her that she did it. She has never promised Mickey Mouse to stay a virgin, she has never asked paps to shoot her leaving church, she has never publicly declared that she would stay pure until marriage, at least not that I know of. Kat wasn’t a hypocrite. Kat was just a dumbass. You just can’t anymore. Especially not when you work in LA. Especially not when you’re famous. You just can’t.

Because it’s hard enough to find true friendship when you’re a civilian, it’s even more elusive when you live in Hollywood. Interestingly enough, these images happened to make a splash on the day her new film Daydream Nation was just picked up for distribution. Now there is no reason to believe that Kat Dennings plays those cards. After all, it’s not like she’s consistently up in your face at parties and in Vegas and papped at lunch at Joan’s on Third. Her outer circle on the other hand, well that’s the point, isn’t it? Who, really, can you trust? Betrayed? Definitely. Used? Also possible. But ultimately? You just can’t send your boyfriend sexytime photos anymore, with or without gold leggings. This generation has made it something you can never keep private.

Kat looked great, and fully clothed, at the Elle Magazine Women in Hollywood event a few weeks ago. Am attaching those instead. As for the titty shots, if you need to see them, I’m sure you’re industrious enough to find them on your own.


Photos from Alberto E. Rodriguez/GABRIEL BOUYS/Jason Merritt/Gettyimages.com