Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee in the speedboat.

Remember when the celebrity sex video still had the power to shock, when the leak of a private home movie was greeted as a pop-culture event, with Hollywood careers in the balance?

Those were the days. On TMZ, every month seems to bring another celebrity sex-video scandal — the term "celebrity" and "scandal" being highly relative in most cases. The latest actor to land on the site in relation to a sex video was Tami Erin. (Who? Oh, she played the lead in 1988 film "The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking") Ms. Erin, now 39, first told TMZ that she was furious that an ex-boyfriend was apparently shopping the video — that was before she reversed course and decided to release the video herself, reportedly, she said, as a way of "beating him to the punch."

And then there was the I-guess-you-could-call-it-shocking news that a selfie version of a blue movie had leaked featuring Shae Bradley and Jesse J, from "Buckwild," MTV's short-lived reality show about young adults in West Virginia (a judge ultimately ordered the video destroyed). Or that Kris Jenner, the Kardashian matriarch, had made a sex video with her husband, Bruce Jenner, before they separated. Or that a leaked video of Hulk Hogan's fling with a friend's wife was making the rounds.

In an era of celebrity oversharing (reality television, red-carpet wardrobe malfunctions, drunken tweets, as well as a gradual mainstreaming of pornography), the everyday celebrity sex video is now generally greeted with a collective yawn, the type reserved for a publicity stunt by Dennis Rodman.

Blame the Internet (and lately, the ease of making smartphone videos). Suddenly, amateur sex videos were everywhere, including those starring Kid Rock, Bret Michaels, Tonya Harding, Jayne Kennedy, Vince Neil, even Verne Troyer (Mini-Me, from the "Austin Powers" films), to name a few.

It wasn't just that new technology made it easier for jerk ex-boyfriends or opportunistic groupies to produce and disseminate evidence of their dalliance with the famous. The attitudes of the stars themselves changed. For some, the sex video was no longer a shameful scandal but a publicity tool.

For that, you can thank Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, who received mountains of free publicity when former boyfriends apparently leaked private boudoir reels that became blockbuster DVDs and Internet staples. Neither said it was intentional (indeed, Ms. Hilton talked often about how painful the experience was), but it did help transform these trustafarian party girls into reality TV brand names.

For a new generation of Hollywood hopefuls, getting caught in a sex-video flap seems like the first order of business once you get off the bus, right after finding a cheap studio apartment in Silver Lake.

Take Farrah Abraham, a busty siren from MTV's "Teen Mom," who can thank her recent sex video (which she claimed was meant to be private, even though she hired James Deen, an adult-film actor, as her co-star) for getting her seemingly as much ink in the tabloids as actual stars like.

The inevitability of celebrity stag reels has become such that stars who are caught with their pants down no longer need always react with outrage, as if their career were on the line.

When TMZ unearthed a compromising video with the model Tyson Beckford, he responded with the tweet equivalent of a shrug, according to reports (the message has since been deleted).

"Don't even faze me," he wrote in a Twitter message. "We all do it, just mine got caught on film."