This thought rises as I watch the "Teen Choice Awards" tonight, hosted by Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie. This past year, while grazing among the network channels, I've watched these two emergent pop icons wending their way cross-country in assorted episodes of "The Simple Life" -- first and second editions, sampled randomly. In all of them, they come across unequivocally as shallow, superficial, callow twits.

These are stupefyingly boring girls. Neither of them has ever said anything that suggests a capacity to think in any other form than the cliché. Neither has manifested a capacity for what I would designate as thought. They have no political awareness, no financial awareness, no social awareness (save of their own status as privileged princesses). Their sole skill appears to be an ability to declare of one thing or another, with all the certitude of moneyed youth, "That's hot."

They dispense the largesse of their approval generously (though not as lavishly as their disdain for most things, including work), and across class lines. However, heedless of the havoc they wreak in the homes and workplaces they visit, they seem often not just headstrong and clueless but actually malicious -- though equally capable of doing something really nice (or at least intended that way) for someone. All of it apparently governed by adolescent whim.

Daniel Boorstin, who died recently, made a memorable contribution to our understanding of our own culture with his 1962 book The Image. Therein he offered the most functional definition of the celebrity: someone who is well-known for being well-known. In a media-centered culture such personages proliferate, and as their population swells beyond the limits of game shows and roasts and big-budget movies with enormous casts they begin to slide into other roles, including that of role model.

To do them justice, Paris and Nicole do fulfill the fantasy of most hetero teenage boys -- and, to be broad-minded, probably quite a few lesbian and bisexual girls, not to mention various adults of both sexes -- of the sister-like pair of naughty young girls ready and willing to go wild. Still, if I let my mind drift in that direction I end up envisioning myself across the breakfast table from them the next morning trying to make conversation, something like talking to one of those kids' toys with a few dozen recorded phrases.

The only interesting thing to me about either of them is that at exactly the same moment as I see them on the tube giving out prizes I can buy a widely distributed videotape or DVD of Paris fetchingly and enthusiastically sucking cock. This doesn't represent an achievement on her part; young girls rich and poor and in between have given head for millenia, often willingly, often in front of witnesses. Still, there was a time within my living memory when doing so on the public record, so to speak, would disqualify someone from either high-society events or a public role as a spokesperson for teens. (Think of poor Pee-Wee Herman, his career shattered just because he tossed himself off in a movie theater.)

In this case, that video footage -- intended by her for release all along, perhaps -- seems to have defined her as the decade's quintessential bad little rich girl, creating an image for her and catapulting her into the kind of notoriety that nowadays elides very easily into celebrity, which in turn satisfies the requirements that qualify one as a "public figure."

I have to say that anything that gives oral sex a good name, especially among the young and impressionable, I consider a good thing and a benefit to the world. I'd like to think of it as a public-service training film. Whether it counterbalances the effect that her high-profile spoiled-brat behavior has on the same constituency I can't say.

And whether her fans can embrace the former while rejecting the latter is an open question. I can only hope they recognize and endorse the inherently democratic activity of oral sex -- available to all as a source of pleasure, regardless of class or caste or national origin -- while rejecting the bravura shenanigans that no one unprotected by wealth can get away with scot-free.

Famously, Marie Antoinette, in the last days of the French monarchy, gathered her pampered-poodle girlfriends at Versailles to play Little Bo-Peep, with carefully selected sheep and, of course, servants to clean up after them. Modern technology enables our present-day Marie Antoinettes to go to the sheep, of course, instead of having the sheep brought to them. And, in our "classless" society, it's only fitting that these princesses should drive themselves around in a camper when they go slumming: noblesse oblige, after all.

The irony of all this? Paris Hilton's parents named her after the hotel in their chain located in the capital of the country that, every July 14, celebrates the time its populace rose up in arms and slaughtered the rich who'd fed off them for centuries -- including Marie Antoinette.