We learned today that Anna Nicole Smith died of an accidental drug overdose. As news, this is roughly on par with “the sun rose in the East this morning,” but it’ll lead lots of newscasts nevertheless. And it will generate Internet traffic. The most popular photograph on Yahoo News this afternoon is this one: a photo of Anna Nicole faking a “wardrobe malfunction” at some awards show three years ago. It has nothing to do with Smith’s death, but it captures very nicely the essence of Smith’s life: if spectacular enough, blonde hair, bee-stung lips, and large breasts can take you anywhere you want to go, especially to the top of a most-popular photo list.

I have maintained for a long while that somebody could get an advanced degree by studying the phenomenon of what gets widely viewed and e-mailed around the web. So, as a matter mostly of academic interest, I keep the most-popular-photo module on my Yahoo portal page, and I expect to be greeted by Smith’s half-exposed rack for several days to come. In fact, I’d be willing to bet this photo may break some kind of record before the vast Internet public moves on to something new.

The most popular photos on Yahoo tend to shake down into a few general categories: cute animals are hugely popular, as are beauty queens and abnormalities from the physical world (like the one showing a Chinese woman’s bound foot, which topped the list as recently as this morning). But the queen of all the photo categories is inevitably T and/or A. Once or twice a month, the most popular photo on Yahoo is from some fashion show, beauty pageant, or movie premiere somewhere featuring some woman with either her T’s or A exposed. And just about anything with breasts can become a smash: On this very blog last fall, our traffic went through the roof when our colleague Groom Lake published a Photoshopped image of Osama bin Laden with a bare-breasted Hillary Clinton. It became the most-read post in the history of the blog, although people weren’t “reading” as much as they were “ogling.” And it topped our traffic listings for months.

I’m not opposed to breasts. (I’m actually quite a fan.) And with Internet pornography grossing more per year than many third-world countries, the popularity of free breasts online is no surprise. And in the end, this particular Anna Nicole photo isn’t all that notable, really, except for this: It finally made me feel sorry for her. On the day the final chapter of her sordid life story is closed, we’re reminded in a powerful way of how trivial her life was, and how trivial our interest in it is. Practically none of the people following the Smith story minute-by-minute these last several weeks have done so out of concern for her as a human being. Practically all have been little more than porn consumers—a defanged and PG-13 sort of porn, to be sure, but porn nevertheless.

One of the criticisms frequently aimed at pornography regards how dehumanizing it is, reducing human beings to body parts and robbing them of their dignity as individuals. One of the defenses against that criticism is that many porn stars go into the trade willingly, making a free choice with both eyes open. And I suppose you could say that Anna Nicole went into her particular line of pornography willingly, too. But even if she did, I am not sure anybody deserves to be dehumanized the way Smith has been dehumanized since her death, right up to this moment, when adolescents (and those who think like them) all across the Internet are using her for masturbation fuel one more time.