So says Alessandra Stanley in today's Times. Instead we only care about Ponzi schemes, corporate looters, vapid rich wives and bribe-hungry politicians, because of the panic. Hahahahaha.

Stanley writes that we've all been so consumed with bitterly gossiping about Bernie Madoff and Rod Blagojevich and rich people shopping in secret that we've stopped talking about sad philanderers like John Edwards, Madonna (depending on what gossip you believe) and Eliot Spitzer. This is actually true!

But then she writes:

Geed trumps lust, and fraud is more fascinating than infidelity [—] it’s safe to say that the recession has arrived.

Greed trumps lust? Kind of a knee-jerk reaction (like clutching your pocketbook!), no?

We'll see.

It's really yet to be proven that the sex scandal is now passé. The Edwards scandal might have cooled off, but it's not like the Democratic politician has escaped its stain. There's just no fresh news.

Likewise with Spitzer, who still refuses to revisit the topic of his whoring.

Madonna's thing with Alex Rodriguez is a secondary story because she's Madonna. Twice divorced!

The only way to establish that people care less about sex is to wait for the next big, hot, juicy sex scandal to erupt and see what happens. It's hard to predict when such a story will, uh, come, but it's hilarious how Stanley glosses over the potential sex-and-journalism scandal at her own newspaper:

Caroline Kennedy is under tabloid attack, but the charge is presumption: even on TV, commentators openly scoff at her brief, somewhat stilted tour of upstate New York and complain that she is seeking appointment to public office with a queenly sense of entitlement.

And with a few more turns of the news screw, they could be talking about Kennedy in an entirely different, more familiar light.