Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and/or have better things to do than spend your days on trashy filth-peddling websites like, um, FOX News and MSNBC), you’ll have already heard that two stars of the upcoming Sex and the City movie have been in the tabloid news this week. First, news broke that Kristin “The Cute, Demure One” Davis had starred in a sex tape; by late Tuesday, the scandal had been downgraded from “sex tape” to “just sex photos” (see them in their very not-safe-for-work glory here). Then, blogs started passing around an excerpt from a British magazine interview with Sarah Jessica Parker, in which the SATC star/executive producer reacted defensively towards a MAXIM article designating her “the unsexiest woman alive.”

Imagine, two actresses from the same heavily-anticipated film with “Sex” in the title, making headlines for their sexiness of lack therof in the same week! What an incredible coincidence, right? No matter how furiously both actresses camps try to paint their clients as women wronged totally independently of each other or the multi-million dollar project both are promoting, there’s evidence that the SJP story, at least, was fully manufactured.

FishbowlNY points out that the MAXIM story Parker apparently recently so strenuously objected to was actually released in October. “Why were Parker and the interviewer bringing up the five month old Maxim interview?”  Fishbowl editor Neal Ungerleider asks, then answers: “It’s simple: By feigning anger at the poll, Parker got free press in (among others) the New York Post, the New York Daily News and Fox News for the upcoming Sex & The City movie. Friggin’ genius.” Ungerleider also claims that SJP’s publicist has been sending the interview about the MAXIM piece around to other publications, which would make sense––today’s gossip blogs rarely spontaneously pounce on British magazines unknown stateside for quotes.

As of this writing the Davis camp has yet to concede that the woman in the widely circulated explicit photos is even her, so there’s no ironclad evidence that the actress or the Sex and the City corporate machine at large were responsible for their leaking. But not only is the timing suspicious, it seems like both the Davis and the Parker incidents are about drawing attention to these older, not exactly on-the-rise actresses by running them through the kinds of humiliations that regularly propel younger, brighter stars to the top of WeSmirch. FishbowlNY calls this “stealth marketing”; I’ll call it “self-promotion via self-degradation.”