She was sort of the eighties version of Paris: a celebutante whose only discernable talent was dating/hanging out with celebs (including Sylvester Stallone, IIRC). She had more of an arrogant edge to her than Paris, but was otherwise very much in the same mold.

Don't remember her? My point. Paris has hung around longer in the public eye, but eventually, time will wear her down too.

Undereducated, though they had every opportunity to get a superior education. The press carefully records their every utterance and movement. Photographed and filmed constantly, and appearing in glossy magazines and staid newspapers alike. Recieving a ridiculously large amount of money for doing nothing that materially benefits society. Lavish and decadent partying in Vegas, LA, and NYC. No marketable skill or talent that would be useful outside of the realm of mass entertainment. A tool of other powers that will benefit financially from their existence, they will wadded up and discarded when they become too old. Paris, Brit, Lindsay, et al are "sports" for women, and guys that don't like sports.

Report Rebecca to the TMU.

Once again we are conflating feminism with something that has nothing to do with feminism. I am a black man and I am a feminist. That means I support full equality of women but it doesn't mean that anyone gets to decide how individuals act. Paris Hilton is exactly what this article said, an amalgamation of American culture in precipitous decline. When money is all that matters then Paris is what you get and money is everything that matters in America. Our country is run and governed by people waiting on paychecks, kickbacks, extravagent lunches and front row seats at professional sports games.

The less fortunate of us, if you want to call rich being fortunate, sit back and complain while those hoping to make it rich one day call us haters and communists for speaking out against the atrocities of the wealthy that rule this country. There may be an element of jealousy for some but that only underscores the political and socioeconomic divide that money does afford one in this country and should not.

Paris had sex on tape. Lots of people do that. Paris gets drunk all the time in public. Lots of people do that. Paris has few friends. Most Americans have that problem. Maybe the reason we hate Paris so much, besides the fact that she doesn't deserve our attention, is because she is a reflection of us collectively and we don't like what we see because it's disgusting. At any rate, Paris has nothing to do with feminism in any way and even bringing it up in the same sentence is a disgrace to all the real women out there that work and fight everyday to make this a better world for men and women. Paris will prove to be her own undoing. She speaks for herself and herself only. If anything is a comma, it's her and Nicole. Real feminism is about empowering women like the black power movement was about empowering blacks. It is not about destroying men just like the black power movement was not about destroying whites. Women have confused feminism with being an angry bitch. Sorry but an angry bitch is just an angry bitch.

We have a terrible time in this country separating our emotions from the facts. The media is resposible for this Paris obsession because people watch it and because they have to keep our minds off the government and corporations getting away with murder, sometimes literally. Don't watch it. Just turn it off or change the channel. I'm a single man with no girlfriend so, yes, I watched the Hardee's commercial to see her quasi-porn performance but it was a one-night stand. No real man wants a woman like Paris and no man wants a woman, no matter how fine she may be, that hates men.

Thanks for the penetrating analysis Mihoshi. I can assure you that you are not alone in your assessment that I am the problem with the world. Also, I want to thank you right up front for bringing up the issue I really wanted to write a letter about anyway and it's this: Why learn? Why be smart? You are right that I am not a fan of learning or smarts, especially when such things culminate in the intergalactical genius exhibited by such a person as Becky Traister. It took probably 20 years of the best education any human being ever got to produce a mind like Becky Traister's and every day on Salon we all get to bow down in awe as we read her Einstein-like insights into the human condition.

I spent many many years among academics and in school and going to college and suchlike. I am pretty familiar with that world. I studied mathematics and philosophy. I never once met a wealthy girl who was doing a PhD in Mathematics. Never once. I did meet a few poor girls who actually did homework but my experience of the academic world was that wealthy people do not study and do not have to study. Obviously, that's purely anecdotal but I mention it in the context of your assertion that lots of attractive, wealthy women are out there doing the hard academic work and succeeding. In my experience the sort of women you are talking about are mostly going to school as a way of making social connections and then when they get out of school they get jobs for magazines and pursue careers that mostly require social skills more than smarts. Of course, social skills are a form of smarts but wealthy people I've met are not forcing their children to do mathematics. I doubt very seriously, for example, that either Becky Traister or George Bush's daughters were ever forced to sit for hours studying the Hairy Ball Theorem in topology, but I have no doubt that when I refer to the Hairy Ball Theorem they giggle. Smart.

OK, so what's my problem with school. Let's make a list...

1. Universities are like the Power Grid that delivers electricity to us. If you want to provide yourself electricity in the most effective possible way the only thing to do is to make the system bigger. I could explain that comment, but I doubt anybody would ever understand so wuddever...

2. Middle class people need smarts the way poor people need violence. Rich people need neither smarts or violence, they need servants. Again, I could explain but... wuddever.

3. All you ever got from being smart was a job.

4. If you were rich would you rather your kid spend ten years sitting alone doing math homework or would you rather your children have fun? If you choose math for your children then all you are choosing for them is that in the global economy they are going to be working for a major corporation or a university. Math and science, the only subjects where this whole "smarts" issue means anything objective rather than just being a social construct, is not a means to wealth for you individually but rather to all of us collectively. In short, by taking up math and science you are choosing nothing more than to sacrifice your life to hard work for the sake of enriching wealthy people. The only people who benefit from a billion people clamoring to get into Harvard University are the people who manage the Endowment of The Corporation of Harvard University. Even if you were the "smartest" mathematician on the planet, you are going to get anything more from studying math than a job.

5. Why do we esteem "smarts" in america? We used to be farmers and have fun but during the cold war the people who run the country realized that they would profit enormously by forcing us to stop farming and move to cities. This was all a part of creating a system of defence against the Russians. During the 1950's America created this weird hyper-fixation on technology and then SOLD that fixation to poor people as if by going to school you would have access to wealth. In realty what happened is we learned every last thing our overlords ever wanted us to learn and then the only opportunities that were made available to us were to work in defense industries as engineers building nuclear missles and things like that. Because you will never be justly compensated for the many years of your life you wasted studying to be a servant of the wealthy, you have to derive your compensation from an esteem for "being smart." You have to develop a sense of self-satisfation from being a smart person because that sense of self-satisfation is all you are ever going to get from giving your life to a University. Unless, of course, you consider a tenure track professorship (because you are so "smart") to be the absolute most dreamy and wonderful gift anybody every could bestow on you.

6. Bill Gates benefits from a university system that produces tens of thousands of computer programmers because such large numbers of highly educated desperate people drive down labor costs.

7. Everybody knows that when you take the SAT's to get into college they are basically just giving you a test to see how fully you conform to White Middle Class Civilization. Black people are demonstrably dumb, according to the SAT's. Weird. Becky Traister is demonstrably a genuis according to the SAT's.

Oh I could go on but like you said, you would have to be completely insane to speak publicly against being smart. I will conclude, therefore, by insanely quoting the Bible on this very topic... Ecclesiastes Chapter 12 verse 11. That got wrote by some smart guy several thousand years ago. Of the writing of books there is no end... blah blah blah.