Sticking with pop cult for a moment, today saw the most extensive celebrity wardrobe malfunction since Janet Jackson flashed her breast on national television. This scandal, however, unfolded wholly on gossip web-sites uninhibited about posting graphic pictures of one-time ‘tween star Britney Spears getting into Paris Hilton’s car while wearing an extremely short skirt, under which she was naked all the way up to her C-section scars. Hilton is one of those people who can be safely ignored — her life is like a reality television show that takes place in still shots and which is better watched on mute — but Spears has had real cultural power over the past decade. She and her handlers were larely responsible for the belly-baring craze of the mid-’90s and significantly contributed to the lowering of waistlines on women’s pants and the Bratz-style sassification of pre-teen clothing. And that’s not even considering her music, to which I was basically impervious, but which was exceptionally popular with very young girls and young women around the world, making her a huge, gigantic, ginormous star. And also someone they looked up to.

I never liked Spears because I always thought she had dumb, flat, brown eyes, and no matter how she was dressed up or posed or trained to perform she was always undermined by that flat, ignorant gaze of hers. Sometime after she turned 20 she started having some kind of breakdown in public, acting out in the way a former child star might, and eventually wooing her back-up dancer away from his pregnant girlfriend and marrying him. The choice of partner seemed to indicate a real lack of character on her part, not because of his background or education or station, but because she didn’t seem to have any concern for his already pregnant girlfriend, the mother of his first child. After they married, you could see Spederline, as the couple became known, on the various tabloids and TV shows — and really, it was impossible to avoid seeing them — and there was something about them that made it seem that their whole relationship was about her having been intoxicated by her own sensuality in that way that young women can be. She seemed drunk on the discovery of her own body, and also, because of her history as a performer, incapable of seeing herself in any way other than as the object of universal adulation. And so her long, slow decline began.

She hasn’t been able to get it together since, though she did have two children. Some took her recent filing for divorce as a sign of some kind of sense having been knocked into her. But no. The flat dumb eyes of her teen years may control millions of dollars, but the ignorance, sensualism, and inability to create anything that is truly her own remain. Today she is still a product of whoever she is around (such as, now, Hilton), but possessed of so unruly a spirit that she can’t even pull of their dumb stunts or adopt their recommended fixes for long. It’s sad.