"Fat chicks need love too. But they have to pay." — Family Guy

This morning's ridiculous, irrelevant celebrity news: are America's talentless starlets too thin?

Let's make it a multiple choice question.

• A) Yes.
• B) No.
• C) I wonder whatever happened to Calista Flockhart.
• D) Who gives a crap?

Of course, the correct answer is D, as if it would be such a huge loss for the culture if Lindsay Lohan starved herself to death. We, as patriotic Americans, can take solace in the fact that we'll always have Camryn Manheim and Kathy Kinney.

No, I get what has the nation's unfailingly overreacting parents and health experts worried. They're afraid that the media's constant barrage of anorexic celebutantes will turn their own teenage daughters from healthy, fleshy girls into binging and purging skeletons who'll look like they just emerged from a Thai refugee camp. That's the sort of thinking that makes my bullshit meter blow a fuse, and not only because I think Nicole Ritchie is eminently fuckable no matter what her weight. (I would, however, Lysol out Nicole's vagina prior to doing her, cause God only knows what's living in there.) I'm sensitive to the issue because our mass consciousness is so busy complaining about these celebrities' figures that no one bothers to fix the real problems pressuring teenage girls on the edge of an eating disorder, namely their bitchy, catty classmates.

Message to the nation's obtuse parents and educators: here's what's actually happening in your teenager's life. Kids hit puberty and they're faced with two conflicting pressures — there's a biological pressure to reproduce and a societal pressure to repress the biological one. Your kids pretend they're grown up, and the more well-adjusted among them are able to pull it off. They can, say, saunter into a club without getting carded or walk into a bank and apply for a small-business loan or write up a proposal for the Board of Education and have it be taken seriously. I think the literature calls these the "alpha males" and "alpha girls," but in school, they're just the popular kids.

Other kids aren't quite as, uh, composed. These are the kids you see playing Harry Potter Trivial Pursuit — living in a fantasy land vicariously through the story's outcast child hero. Or they spend thirty hours a week mastering Unreal Tournament Online — face-to-screen with a computer where they have complete control over everything. Or stealing younger kids' lunch money and flushing their heads in the toilet, which, surprisingly, never happened to me.... And some girls overcompensate for their immaturity and lack of adult cool by turning all trampy and begging to get laid like their elders.

Okay, not everybody goes all out, but that doesn't mean that we don't all want to lose the baby fat. And it's not like anyone in high school has a great personality or any other redeeming quality, either. As if there's a reason to have mindless sex anyway besides chowing down on eye candy.

That's the thing. Your teenagers might want to fuck Aaron Carter or Chad Michael Murray or the Olsen twins, but when it boils down to their real options, we're all just competing with our immediate peer group. Thank God. You want your daughters to eat healthy — or you want your sons to refrain from shooting up the school — you need to get them laid.

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Let's imagine, for a moment, that teenage girls everywhere are starving themselves because Bijou Phillips has the figure of a curtain rod. (And by the way, who the fuck is Bijou Phillips anyway? Was she in anything that I give a rat's ass about, aside from Paris Hilton's Sidekick?) And let's all continue pretending that we care about the deleterious things the not-rich-and-famous inflict upon themselves. Then here's an idea: Take the skinny-ass models off the covers of those vapid softcore women's magazines.

It's capitalism gone insane, because no one wants Mischa Barton on a magazine cover, except for her mother and this guy, , Nolé Marin — stylist, America's Next Top Model judge, and fashion victim who's the reason at least eight red states hate gays. (Sean Hayes accounts for another three red states.) I, for one, am not particularly interested in seeing Mischa in the supermarket checkout line, and I'm straight. Guys don't buy Cosmopolitan or Lucky or Jane or Shape or YM or need I go on, and girls will buy Seventeen if there's a dead raccoon on the cover, just for the most embarrassing dating stories column. So why the hell not put a rather corpulent girl on the cover for once, or someone with a rash, or leprosy? It seems a bit hypocritical that the same media cretins who throw these Audrey Hepburn wannabes in our faces now try to placate the healthy-lifestyle lobby by bitching about emaciated our celebrities are. Geez, Access Hollywood, if you care about Tara Reid's eating disorders so much, I have a quick and easy solution. It involves a beer bong and a tub of lard.