February 7, 2007 -- 'I TELL YOU I can feel them! They're all around us! Young people! Getting closer and closer!"

 

So goes the William Hamilton cartoon caption.

 

WELL, THIS week Newsweek has done a poll and discovered that 77 percent of Americans say Britney Spears and Paris Hilton have too much influence over young girls. But the magazine - which put Spears and Hilton on its cover - surprises then by adding that overexposure to such celebrities may not actually do harm. (After all, didn't you have a teenage Madonna wannabe in your own circle only a few years ago? I bet she turned out all right.)

 

The magazine notes that the average age for first-time sex among girls is 17, and it's been that way for the last 20 years. Likewise, teenage pregnancies dropped after 1990 and also rates for drinking, smoking and taking drugs.

 

So I think we can safely forge ahead here in the celebrity press enjoying the antics of our current targets, young beauties who received fame too soon and are now too much, living by their own rules. Certainly if Britney and Paris were paragons of virtue, Newsweek would never give their adventures a cover and seven pages inside.

 

There are a lot of people going tch-tch, but the reality is that Britney and Paris and maybe even Lindsay Lohan are perfect for this era of instant criticism, downfall and redemption. The media don't want Britney to pull herself together, Paris to stop making those inane remarks or Lindsay to get sober. And who wants any of them to wear panties - where's the ongoing story if they do so?

 

SO BRITNEY was pictured in The Post looking unkempt at 3 a.m., coming back from a pharmacy. (This was Saturday night, the night before her ex, Kevin Federline, was reinventing himself, appearing in a Super Bowl ad for Nationwide insurance.)

 

It was a drugstore, not a crack den, but sure, Britney could use a touch of class from some of the more astute public relations managers, if only she'd listen to such advice. Imagine her in the hands of one of the masters - Pat Kingsley, Cindi Berger, Leslee Dart. Following their advice, pretty soon she'd end up wearing the right clothes, giving sincere interviews about her babies, standing thin and straight on the red carpet.

 

 

And what fun would that be? Right now, the more people carp against Britney, the more distraught she probably feels, the more nervous and less capable of pulling herself together. (Unlike Paris, criticism seems to truly wound Britney.) In less than three years, the one-time teenage pop queen has turned her life into a trailer-trash joke. She doesn't seem to have had much protection from the exigencies of sudden fame by the people who surround her. Or maybe she hasn't had protection from those very people.

I am so tired of these kinds of reports.