Don’t get me wrong: You can put me down for a couple of boxes. After all, “every cookie has a mission,” as the video at GirlScoutCookies.org informs us. The cookies teach girls how to set goals and manage money, they fund worthy projects, they cheer up soldiers in Iraq, they give terrific foot massages. And, you know, they’re lumps of fat and sugar, so even if they don’t taste that good, they don’t taste that bad, either. But I’ll tell you how I celebrate the season: By meditating on why people lose their minds over these particular lumps of fat and sugar every single year.

I mean, people aren’t just like, “Oh, how nice, the cookies sold by cute children in retro uniforms for a vague good cause are back.” They’re like, “OMG TAGALONGS SO GOOD WANT THEM IN MY MOUTH RIGHT NOW!” And if you’re like, “You know you can get basically the same things at the grocery store any time you want, right?” they’re like, “NOT THE SAME, HEATHEN.”

Which brings us to the most obvious reason for Girl Scout cookie mania: the illusion of scarcity. If you miss your chance, you will have to wait an entire year to get another shot at the real thing, which we all know is infinitely more satisfying than the numerous facsimiles available in the supermarket year-round, let alone something crazy like homemade cookies fresh from the oven. As Rebecca Traister said in an e-mail, “It is the passion of deprivation and seasonal reward. Like when once a year you ate a ton of zucchini bread because you had 400 zucchini in your garden, or when you were excited in April because there was asparagus, and then in August because there were great tomatoes and peaches. Other examples: Cadbury Creme Eggs, Christmas trees, soft-shell crabs, and when ‘The Wizard of Oz’ used to air only at Easter, before anyone had VCRs.” Technically, you can buy fresh asparagus in January or a Douglas fir in June or a package of Lorna Doones whenever, but it is not the same. (Heathen.) So, kudos to the Girl Scouts of America for nailing the supply and demand thing and demonstrating the importance of a strong brand identity, but that still doesn’t fully explain people writing haiku about Thin Mints, you know?

Maybe it’s nostalgia. After all, one bite of a Girl Scout cookie takes you back to a time when people wrote elegant letters instead of poorly spelled texts, when popular music didn’t sound like so much noise, when “The Wizard of Oz” was only on once a year. Or something. Basically, it’s about tradition and ritual and tasty chocolate coating — what’s not to love? Those who grew up on the stock from Little Brownies Bakery still speak the cutesy, perplexing names like incantations: Tagalongs, Do-Si-Dos, Trefoils, Samoas. Here in the plainspoken, practical midwest — and everywhere else served by ABC Bakers — we call those Peanut Butter Patties, Peanut Butter Sandwiches, Shortbread, and Caramel deLites, respectively, so it’s possible I missed out on a crucial part of the mystique. It’s also possible I’m still bitter about my parents refusing to help me sell cookies in 1985 because they were from the last generation that actually believed the point was nurturing a girl’s entrepreneurial spirit, not gauging how many of my dad’s employees were afraid of getting on his bad side. (I did not win the 10-speed.) But, as a semi-professional observer of Americans’ fucked-up relationship with food (and full-time volunteer killjoy), I still see something a bit insidious in the unbridled lust for Girl Scout Cookies, especially as it’s expressed — performed? — by women.

Allow me to harsh your nostalgic buzz and/or sugar high by pointing you to the official Girl Scout Cookies FAQ, which includes the following questions:

• What about the concerns of those on low-carb diets?
• Don’t Girl Scout Cookies contribute to the childhood obesity problem?
• Why don’t you offer cookies that are whole-wheat, wheat-free, non-dairy, dairy-free, vegan, sugar-free, gluten-free, organic, low-carbohydrate, low-calorie, low-fat, non-fat, fat-free, etc.?

Now, please consider this four-page article on “surviving Girl Scout cookie season” — god help those who fail to take the proper precautions! — in which a registered dietitian attempts to determine “which are the most healthy — or perhaps I should say the least unhealthy” and offers tips for tricking your palate into believing you’ve already had a satisfying eating experience before you go to town on a whole sleeve. Four pages on how to eat cookies, people. But then, some people not normally prone to bingeing seem to need it at this time of year. Popular weight loss blogger Veronica Noone, who’s made a career out of being among the tiny percentage of people who have lost a substantial amount of weight and kept it off for years, wrote in 2007, “I am sitting here with that gross overstuffed feeling. Why? Why? Why am I doing this to myself? I’ve been totally out of control on the eating front since Thursday.” Finally, the mysterious force behind her uncharacteristic lack of discipline is revealed: “Whoever told me to throw away the Girl Scout cookies was TOTALLY right.”

Here’s my theory: In a culture obsessed with thinness, “healthy” eating and the appearance of Puritanical self-control, Girl Scout cookies are just about the last non-holiday-related foodstuffs that we are all permitted — nay, expected — to eat with abandon. Obviously, as the above paragraph illustrates, this causes anxiety for some folks. But for the average body image-troubled Jane — the kind who feels guilty ordering anything except salad with dressing on the side, the kind who begs a friend to split dessert so at least she’s got a co-conspirator, the kind who is incapable of consuming an entire sandwich without reflexively announcing her afternoon workout plans to anyone nearby — Girl Scout Cookie season is all about one glorious, exquisitely rare occurrence: Permission to eat cookies, and openly enjoy it. After all, they’re Girl Scout cookies! They are so good, you guys! Everyone agrees! So when one opines that, as Traister put it, “if people had Girl Scout Cookies all year round, they would say ‘These cookies are in fact inferior to almost every other kind of cookie you can get,’” one threatens a very precious belief: That these cookies really are worth all the fuss, so — unlike all manner of lesser sweet, rich comestibles — it’s actually OK to love eating them.

I believe it is OK to love eating them. But I also believe it’s OK to love eating far superior cookies you can make or buy on a whim any time, and perfect August peaches and tender local asparagus and salt and fried chicken and scrambled eggs. Because I believe it’s OK to love eating, period. Because food isn’t poison, and what goes in your mouth says exactly nothing about your moral fiber. Also, because lots of things taste really good. Of course, here is where I feel compelled to insert the requisite “I’m a reasonable person and not just the weak-willed straw fatass you’re imagining” disclaimer about balance and variety and whatnot — but with that out of the way, can we reflect for a moment on the “passion of deprivation” underlying the fetishization of Girl Scout cookies, and whether it’s really only about their relative scarcity? For my money, it’s also about the scarcity of opportunities for people in this culture, especially women, to admit openly that the desire for tasty food — like for sex and sleep — is a normal human drive, not a humiliating weakness that must be stamped out. Like other people look forward to Girl Scout cookie season, I look forward to a time when our culture is so free of food-based shame that many more of us can look at a box of Tagalongs and, instead of immediately polishing off a sleeve in slightly guilty ecstasy, think, “They’re just cookies, for pete’s sake. And they’re not even that good.”

The pressure of unreasonable beauty standards, of course, is old news to women, knee-deep in airbrushed images of insane physiques.  After all, the study also shows that nine out of 10 cosmetic surgeries performed by the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons — great band name, by the way — were on women. (The No. 1 procedure for ladies? Breast enlargement.) But what this increase really points to is the continuing normalization of cosmetic procedures, for both men and women. Going under the knife as a solution to your bodily woes has become more than unremarkable — it’s almost expected. In the age of “Extreme Makeover” and Cindy Jackson, it’s important to remember, as Judy Berman so aptly pointed out, that “cosmetic surgery is just that — cosmetic.” These procedures are optional. If you want to straighten your nose or get rid of your man boobs or reduce your chin, then go for it. But, whatever the latest issue of Maxim might proclaim, you don’t have to — and you shouldn’t feel like you do. As for your man boobs? I say keep ‘em. 

Oof. This news gave me feminist heart burn. Maybe it’s the realization that Margaret friggin‘ Thatcher, that powerhouse of a woman, felt the need to slim-down in order to be elected. Not that she was wrong about that — she did win, after all — and it’s plainly true that male politicians are subject to strident physical evaluations as well. The superficiality of politics isn’t news to me. Still, Margaret Thatcher, crash dieter? It’s a dissonant concept, a collision of worlds — that of empowered female leaders and self-esteem gobbling women’s magazines.

But I’ll admit my initial reaction was knee-jerk. The truth is this isn’t much of a revelation, and the diet was likely just par for the political course. I suppose my strong reaction says a little something about my own expectations, and worries, for the Lady Thatchers of the world: I fancy them as ironclad and immune to even the remote suggestion of a feminine stereotype. Because if they aren’t immune, than what woman is?

In her righteous takedown of the campaign on her Deus Ex Machinatio blog this week, Andrea Phillips calls Campbell’s “a pro-ana company,” and she sure seems to have a point. Are the food choices for women – those pathetically unseeing supermarket cart pushers – really supposed to be limited to “light” and “lighter than thou”? Phillips asks, “Since when is 340 calories a completely unacceptable amount to eat for a meal?”

To be fair to the soup monger, the fine print on the ad does describe the wares “as part of a balanced meal.” And OK, as an appetizer or light afternoon snack, a bowl of minestrone is generally preferable to a Double Whopper with cheese. But the image of two of those supermarket shoppers later tucking in to their Select Harvests, glasses of water at the ready and rolls completely untouched, says it all. A Campbell’s balanced meal: Eighty calorie, fat-free soup, water and uneaten bread. That’s mmm mmmm fucked up.

Earlier this month, she released an unsurprisingly lackluster album with the poetically appropriate name “Superficial” and started filming a new season of her heavily scripted series “The Hills,” all to the yawns of millions. Perhaps fearing that the dawn of a new decade might signal an end to our fascination with watching shallow people do questionable things, the 23-year-old then took to the cover of People magazine last week to show off her multiple cosmetic procedures — including a horrifying 10 in one day: a brow minilift, nose-job revision, fat injections in cheeks and lips, chin reduction, neck liposuction, ear pinning, breast augmentation revision, liposuction, buttocks augmentation and a little Botox thrown in. In a grand gesture of stating the obvious, she confessed that the reason she put herself through enough work to look like she’d gone through a car window was that she’s “beyond obsessed” with self-improvement. Then, just in case that didn’t get our attention, the sculpted,  pneumatically hootered blonde appeared on “Good Morning America” to tell us, in her Tin-Man-before-the oil-can-stiff-faced way, that “My main message is that ‘beauty is really within.’”

Congratulations, Heidi, you clueless, narcissistic, Playboy-posing, Jesus-invoking coauthor of a book about being famous for being famous plastic surgery junkie! You’re everything wrong with everything in the world! You win!

For her candor – and rather shameless fame-grubbing – Montag has been near universally vilified. After her story appeared on People, the commenters  eagerly panned her new look with unkind comparisons to Joan Rivers. The sentiments ran along similar lines at ABC after the “GMA” appearance, where the adjectives “talking corpse” and “plastic zombie” were bandied about.  (Unafraid as ever to be completely tone deaf, the impressively endowed Meghan McCain used her Daily Beast column this week to decry the “boob police” who allegedly “hailed” and “celebrated” Montag for “showing off her new purchases.”)  Dr. Drew Pinsky, no stranger to publicity-seeking himself, meanwhile quickly diagnosed Montag as a “female cross dresser” who “clearly has some significant emotional issues.” In short, lady, you’re a hot mess in a triple-D cup.

But there’s something almost masochistically unsatisfying about hating on Heidi. Maybe it’s just so damn easy, it feels like it’s giving the fame monster exactly what she wants.  That, of course, has been the perverse quid pro quo pleasure of reality television all along — its stars get the illusion of true fame, and viewers get the effortless joy of feeling superior to them for their craven pursuit of it.

Heidis don’t grow in labs — they just look like they do. They take root in a culture where looking like a manga avatar spun through a porn movie is not only attainable, it’s not even that unusual. Did you watch the Golden Globes earlier this week? It looked like an episode of “Sailor Moon.” 

Appearing on “Access Hollywood” a few days ago, Montag said, “I wasn’t happy with the way I looked …  On blogs and after shows, people would circle my chin and say I had Jay Leno Chin. ” She’s right, they did. They also reviled her as “ugly”  every step of the way, too.

So what did she do about it? Did she go quietly to live on a farm or help the homeless or learn a useful trade? No, she fixed it by spending enough money to bail out the American auto industry. And then we criticized her for that too. Gotcha! You want so badly to be famous? OK, but just don’t get old  or gain weight or go outside looking like an un-Photoshopped version of yourself, bitch! And if you try to, as Heidi put it, “upgrade,” we will despise you for being a big fake, judging you from exactly the same glass house from which we called you ugly. Well played, humanity.

Heidi Montag is a woman whose most evident skill is getting attention, one who has gleaned that if she needs to turn herself into a blow-up doll and open herself up to some class-A excoriation to get it, she’s still game. The most apt word I can come up with regarding that is just “sad.” Sad for someone so desperately eager to “be the best me, in and out,” sad for a celebrity cottage industry so equally eager to tear individuals down. Because as long as there are people who measure their own self-regard in relation to their disdain for others, Heidi Montag will never be out of work.  And there’s something awful enough about watching an enviably pretty young woman surgically transform into a matronly Barbie doll without piling on. That’s why I can’t be bothered hating her. I couldn’t do a better job than a whole lot of people — including, it seems, Heidi Montag herself –  are already doing for her.