And look at them, here they come! An assault of coy glances, glossy hair, seamed stockings, baroque garter belts. There are boas, bows, blush, lace, glitter, gauze, dimples, curves, curls. Pouty red lips, peachy grins, painted fingers, painted toes, teardrop breasts, buxom behinds, and tiny skirts being hijacked by sudden breezes. Really, though, it’s all about those faces … those smooth, indelible faces hovering in some land between melancholy and mischief, some continent where the expression “Please come here, you funny man” and “Don’t even think about it” mean the same thing. There is a blonde in a white satin teddy, hand grazing her forehead, staring off at … at what? Me? Another has slipped her Rubenesque self into a vaguely see-through catsuit. It’s glorious, yes, and yet I have to admit that something here is still off, something is wrong. Each girl inspires in me the same sad reaction …

Oh, you pretty things! How I wish I found you sexy!

Call me a fool for searching out these pastel pixies in the first place, for hoping they could do the trick. Especially when another, just as simple Google search could provide dorm-room webcams, streaming video, movie clips, amateur orgies, live-action Barbie dolls, celebrities without digitally blurred nipples, perverted teachers, perverted students, barely legal babes and kinky MILFs gone wild. But I don’t know. I’m convinced that it was somehow saucier back in the ’50s, when sex came in fleeting whiffs, when titillation wasn’t so omnipresent that it had ceased to matter. As a man today I live in an age where almost everything (that Britney video, that bikini-clad ditz eating maggots on “Fear Factor”) is geared toward the overt idea of getting me off, as if those controlling the pop cultural universe sit around conference tables saying things like, “It’s good, very good, but could you masturbate to it?” Theoretically, this should be a modern man’s utopia. And yet it’s often the opposite, muting males with a kind of erotic impotence, a jaded boredom that comes with having seen it all without having to do anything to get it.

“We’re so inundated with tits and ass all day,” says my friend the Edgy Fiction Writer, a 32-year-old man who lives in New Jersey, echoing something that I heard from about 20 guys during a wholly unscientific survey, “that you just can’t be as enthusiastic about seeing cleavage compared to a guy in the ’50s. It’s depressing. Could you imagine what it was like back then? A woman takes off her shirt and you go into conniptions. You’d be a permanent 13-year-old boy.” Another man in this late 20s, a Manhattan movie producer who’d put a hit on me if I named him here, confessed to having recently issued a personal masturbatory edict: Having OD’d on pornography, extraneous erotic inspiration is now limited to workout programs, to honeydew skin and glistening spandex, because A) that’s all he could find when he was a 13-year-old boy and B) everything else is just so … obvious. You’re finished before you’ve started.

And now here I am, staring at a sea of pinups, these beaming, lustrous fawns. Oh … and wait a second … something is … starting to … happen. A second ago they were nothing but retro kitsch, but now … I get it. The appeal of the Vargas Girl — and so much of the Marilynesque sexuality of that era — is complicated, a hall of mirrors that requires some patience for a mind like mine to grasp in a manner that moves past the intellectual and into the visceral. These creatures are all about negative space, about simultaneously revealing and concealing. “Hey, there’s more to see here,” these dewy-eyelashed girls whisper to me, “things you can’t possibly understand. And, if you’re lucky, you may one day learn. But, my poor pathetic darling, you’ll never be that fortunate, so look hard, stare at me until it hurts. Also, I smell like roses.” Diablo! My only option is to throw up my arms and beg.

Our modern sexpots, on the other hand, exist in a gradient of pornography, from softcore (Christina Aguilera, Lindsay Lohan) to hardcore (Jenna Jameson and her moaning minions) to the newly etched midground (Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson). “You’d like to have sex with me, wouldn’t you?” they shout from bullhorns. “Good, you can, because I’m easy. Also, I smell like plastic and rubber.” Don’t get me wrong: I am a man, and I’m fine with these women in my life in all their bubbly, rock-stupid brand of hotness. The problem is that they’re perishable, these brash explosions of distorted femininity: You get everything immediately and, a second later, there’s nothing left to desire, just a sarcophagus of extinct wants and wishes. They are all answers, whereas the Vargas Girl is 100 percent questions, a million “What ifs …?” neatly packaged in a pink and white corset. They are sexy in a way that you can’t quite imagine what it would be like to actually have sex with them, which, really, is what it’s all about. After all, the best sort of sex is when your mind gets overloaded, panics, hands over the reins to your body, and the only thought left whirling through your shattered little brain is that you can’t believe that what’s happening is actually happening.

Am I getting out of hand here? Yeah, probably. Nostalgia is crack; life an exercise in suspending disbelief, in getting sentimental about things you don’t really know anything about. Was it actually sexier back then? Did young men experience more of a cosmic shock at the sight of live female flesh than we do today? And what about the bedroom mechanics? Were they legitimately more fiery, or were they a series of painfully earnest fumblings and bumblings that can’t compete with our all-knowing age? It’s impossible to say. Innocence is bogus because it’s relative. For all I know there was some 25-year-old in 1952 longing for the days when a sliver of a woman’s ankle brought on hormonal seizures. Still, I can’t help thinking that we’ve reached a sort of zenith of sexual exposure. I mean, where to go from here? Holographic porn? Reality TV for the bestiality set? (Jeff Zucker, I want a finder’s fee!) Hell, I don’t even need to pretend to be a ’50s-era man to pine for a more wholesome past.

A case in point: I was born in 1979 and was 13 years old when “Basic Instinct” was released, a film that feels G-rated now but which represented the first ever full-frontal female nudity I’d seen that was … moving. Every day my best friend James and I would go to the video store and he’d distract the guy at the counter while I put the “Basic Instinct” tape into the case of something innocuous like “Gleaming the Cube.” Then we’d go home, and stare and study. The bottom line was, like the mythic man with his Vargas Girls, we felt lucky getting these peeks, as if someone like Sharon Stone was one of, say, 30 nude women we’d ever see in a lifetime, pixelated or in person. Little did we know we’d grow up and they’d be everywhere, bursting forth from every corner of culture, that we’d one day become eager young men hoping for women to … put some clothes on so we could find them crazy attractive again. That way, we’d be reminded of all we don’t know. That women have the secret, whatever it is.

This kind of overstimulation has left us rubbed raw and thoroughly desensitized. There is no eroticism here, only some really ugly nipple rings.

And a looming image of Bill O’Reilly soaping up a loofah mitt.

Yup, 2004 has been the year of Bad Sex. Really, really, really bad sex.

But is a year unexamined a year worth living? No. So below, broken into arbitrary categories, is a rundown of some of the anticlimactic moments in the giant wardrobe malfunction that was 2004.

The Exposure of Breasts and Their Painful-Looking Augmentations

Let’s just get this one over with: Super Bowl halftime show. Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake are singing a duet in which Timberlake promises that he’ll rip off Jackson’s clothes by the end of the song. At tuneful climax, he fulfills promise, exposing Ms. Jackson (if you’re nasty)’s right breast, which looks big, natural, and pretty attractive. Or would look big and natural if it weren’t decorated with a spiky nipple ring that blocks most of the view, looks upsettingly heavy, and would draw blood from any suitor who approached the heaving bosom with too much ardor. Jackson covers her exposed flesh dramatically. Chaos reigns.

How the hell did this become the most talked-about sex story of the year?

It was nine fateful months later that B-list staple and Page Six family member Tara Reid walked into P.Diddy’s birthday party in Manhattan, faced a rope line of her paparazzi tormenters, and stared at them blank-faced and oblivious as her dress fell down, fully exposing her left boob. The scene was ugly on its own: photographers laughing at the clueless Reid, snapping away until her publicist finally alerted her that the breeze she might be feeling was her missing clothing. But what really added insult to injured pride was the fact that her ineptly enlarged knocker had a ridge of purple welts around the nipple.

Gross and sad, yes. But it does present us with the chance to bid adieu to this particular chapter in American history with a line that could not be used enough in 2004: Thanks for the mammaries, ladies.

Libido-less Politics

Welcome to the American presidency, the sexless years. Trying to picture either George Bush or John Kerry having sex may be more psychologically scarring than the image of your parents doing it. For all the Swift Boaty testosterone coursing through the campaign, there were zero pheromones being emitted from the presidential stump.

John Kerry may have had a slim erotic edge simply because countless instances of hand-grasping and gazing adoration provided evidence that he was hot for his wife. Unfortunately, Teresa’s passionate devotion to husband John Heinz, dead for 13 years, sapped Kerry’s mojo.

Hope stirred when John Edwards joined the Kerry ticket, since he seemed to have a hint of that winking Clintonian appeal. But it only took a few weeks of staring at those dimples and that cherubic smiley face to conclude that John Edwards was in fact an animatronic doll escaped from the “It’s a Small World” ride at Disney World. Candidate for First Beefcake Chris Heinz showed some promise, but the real Kerry family sexpot award goes to stepsister Alexandra Kerry, who donned a long black frock for a screening of her film at Cannes and faced a phalanx of flashbulbs, unaware that all the light would render her dress translucent. Hello, titties! But by May, we were immune. Another day, another set of mams.

Back at the White House, Laura Bush — who, were she not married to an eunuch, might have been a bad-ass-librarian-who-puts-out first lady — was allowed off the lithium drip long enough to get her daughters involved in the campaign. Like the Kerry offspring, Jenna and Barbara lent their father’s campaign the only spark it had, mostly by dressing in slinky tops, getting loaded, and showing signs of lifelike exuberance, like the time Jenna stuck her tongue out at the photographers. Still, if this counts as sexy, we are seriously strapped for entertainment. At least Patti Davis posed for Playboy.

One mercy plea for future campaign strategists looking to squeeze a drop of sex appeal from their candidates: Avoid the term “flip-flopper.” It doesn’t matter who’s saying it, being it or refuting it: It just makes people think of a dying mackerel.

Why Won’t Anyone Say This Is the Worst Year in Hollywood in Recent Decades?

I just wanted to get that off my chest. And in addition to there being no great movies this year, there were very few hot ones either. Mostly we got culture-war combatants like decidedly un-sexy “Fahrenheit 9/11″ and “The Passion” (no, not that kind of passion, silly. It was a Jesus snuff film.)

The three big “relationship” movies: “We Don’t Live Here Anymore,” “Closer,” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” offered such a bleak outlook on what comes of sexual congress that they could be packaged as an encouraging gift set for those considering taking the veil.

The year’s big sensualist film was Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Dreamers,” touted as the most shocking and lubricious movie of our lifetime because it featured lanky siblings who almost have sex with each other and a perplexed friend. “The Dreamers” was graphic, and it had a number of uncomfortably bloody scenes, but the truth is that incest simply doesn’t rank high on the list of common turn-ons. If you want to do taboo, please bring back James Spader, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and some light bondage.

“Kinsey” dealt directly with sex. But when the end of your movie involves Liam Neeson doing his “Schindler’s List” “I could have saved one more” shtick while his penis, pierced in the name of scientific investigation, drips blood on the bathroom floor, your loins are not exactly engorged with desire.

The most revelatory thing about this year in pictures is the way in which the Hollywood leading man has been re-envisioned. Where once Clint Eastwood and Paul Newman stood proud and erect, daring us to find anything squishy beneath their firm, potent exteriors, 2004 brought us men who were allowed to feel.

Behold this year’s crop of movie heroes:

Sylvia: She’s so fat, she’s so loud! Her head is always in a cloud!
She doesn’t wash, or study hard! Her reading books are marred!

Headmaster: She’ll go on a diet, she’ll be so quiet, you’d better not make it into a riot!
She’ll take a bath and do her math. She’ll read “The Grapes of Wrath”!

Setting aside the fact that reading “The Grapes of Wrath” doesn’t really tackle the problem of marred textbooks, our urge to demonize the wealthy was baldly demonstrated in our first masterpiece. Of course, we weren’t alone in our hatred for the rich. Americans have a bad habit of encouraging individual success at all costs, then treating its indulgences as excessive and vulgar. Three upcoming programs — MTV’s “Rich Girls,” HBO’s “Born Rich,” and Fox’s “The Simple Life” — reflect the fascination and ambivalence we have for the wealthy. How well or badly they come across, of course, is determined largely by the prejudices of the producers, and whether they intend for the close-up on America’s most wealthy to incite thoughtful discussion or shameless rubbernecking.

It’s not too hard to guess which category MTV’s “Rich Girls” falls into. This reality show (premiering 10:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 28) follows Ally Hilfiger (yes, that Hilfiger) and Jaime Gleicher, two very wealthy girls whose lives seem to consist of shopping, getting spa treatments, and screeching into their cellphones. Apparently Ally and Jaime took the idea for the show to MTV. Can you imagine the unbridled joy at network headquarters that day? It’s not hard to see why they’d be salivating over this gem. Although Ally and Jaime are listed as producers on the show (what can that possibly mean?), the emphasis here definitely seems to be on plucking out their most absurd or humiliating moments for our glee and disgust.

Fortunately, these two are more than willing to humiliate themselves for our entertainment and appear giddy with delight over being on camera. They quickly demonstrate that they’re anxious to prance showily into dangerous territory almost the second the cameras start to roll. In one of the first scenes, where the girls chat about the prom that night while getting manicures at the Frederic Fekkai Salon, they carry on the kind of sassy, bold talk that teenagers trot out when they hope someone might be eavesdropping.

Jaime: OK, but half of me doesn’t want to have sex with him, though, because it’s very clich&eacute to lose your virginity on prom night.

Ally: This is true.

Jaime: It’s very cliché.

Ally: It’s not gonna feel good.

Likewise, the two like to talk a good show about how enlightened and egalitarian they are despite their class status, but it’s not clear that they’ve considered such things before the cameras were switched on. Riding home in the limo after a several-thousand-dollar shopping spree, the two girls discuss the importance of treating garbagemen like actual human beings. Then Jaime gets all thoughtful. “You know what I find is weird, kind of, Al?” she asks. “People pay money for clothes, but shouldn’t it be, like, a free necessity, like water, because you need it?” Nice point, except that water isn’t free, either. Later, Jaime introduces her close friend by explaining, “Liz treats every single person like an equal, whether it be the garbageman, the taxi driver, the saleswoman at Prada…” We get the picture.

Next we meet Michael, on whom Jaime has an unrequited crush that she imagines is mutual, despite the presence of Michael’s tall, pretty girlfriend, Julia. Jaime ignores her own date to glare at Michael and Julia for most of the night. “I’ve accepted the fact that Michael is with Julia, but I do think that Julia feels really threatened by me,” Jaime tells the camera. If Julia expresses her threatened feelings by sticking her tongue down Michael’s throat, then Jaime might just be on to something.

Despite claims of loving everyone from garbagemen to Prada saleswomen equally, Jaime later informs a girl at the after-prom party, “I don’t know you. I’m sorry, I can’t have a conversation with people I don’t know.” Apparently wealth diminishes your ability to talk to strangers unless they’re painting your toenails, ringing up your purchases, or taking out your trash.

Since this is exactly the kind of mutant thrill-ride that MTV is becoming known for, it’s at first puzzling why these girls’ parents didn’t stand in the way of the project. What they were thinking and why they allowed this train wreck to happen is anybody’s guess — or it is until Gleicher’s mother appears, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, eagerly joining in a conversation about Jaime’s soon-to-be-nonexistent virginity by volunteering that she lost her virginity on prom night as well. “It must not have been very good if I can’t remember it!” she croons, and the twisted road map that led Jaime to the center of MTV’s bull’s-eye suddenly becomes upsettingly clear.

At the after-prom party, Jaime is feeling far more expansive than she was earlier. “My friends are so gifted. All these people in here are probably the most gifted people in the world,” Jaime screams at a friend. “And they’ll all be so famous one day. It’s fucking ridiculous.” Well, they’ll all be famous for about one day, anyway, when this puppy hits the air. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families.

While MTV patiently observes Gleicher and Hilfiger in their natural habitat, Fox isn’t remotely prepared to leave such matters up to chance. Thus, in the long-delayed premiere of “The Simple Life” (premiering — at least for the time being — at 8:30 p.m. on Dec. 2), Paris Hilton, hotel heiress, and Nicole Richie, “Dancing on the Ceiling” heiress, pack their bags and head to rural Arkansas, where they’ll stay for five weeks with the Ledings, a farming family in the small town of Altus. After a big party and send-off by Paris’ mommy and daddy (again, what were they thinking? Are they not familiar with Fox, the network of chaotic evil?), Nicole and Paris jet off to a secret location (“Where the fuck are we?” Nicole asks repeatedly) and, upon landing, are forced to haul their massive bags into the back of an old pickup truck and drive themselves to the family’s farm.

Once they meet the Ledings and survey the room where they’ll be staying, which is populated by flying insects and has a well in the middle of it (“What’s a well?” Paris asks), the true nature of this escapade is beginning to dawn on them. “Maybe Fox didn’t invite us out here to demonstrate our fabulousness and break down stereotypes of the rich like they said,” their faces say. “Maybe this is really just about making us look like assholes.” It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for the girls when you see their faces drop.

But then they flatly refuse to help the poor grandmother pluck chickens for dinner. When they’re instead given $50 and instructed to do the grocery shopping for the family, they sulk around the store looking for the stuff on the list. When the bill comes to $65, the girls simply hand the cashier 50 bucks.

Cashier: Is this all you have?

Nicole: Yeah. Can we just have it?

Cashier: No, you can’t just have it! This is not a soup kitchen.

By the time the girls get out to the car, they’re angry.

Nicole: He wouldn’t just give it to us!

Paris: He was like, “This isn’t a soup kitchen.”

Nicole: I know! What does that mean, “soup kitchen”?

By this point, sympathy for the girls has dissipated into some mix of amusement, scorn and awe, but the comedy nudges out tragedy quickly as the girls get to know the family at the dinner table.

Nicole: Now, do you guys hang out at Wal-Mart?

The room is filled with blank faces.

Nicole: I’ve always heard that people hang out at Wal-Mart.

Paris: Why? What is Wal-Mart? ‘Cause, like, they sell wall stuff?

Nicole: It’s like Costco or like Sav-on.

Paris: You hang out there?

Nicole: In the South people hang out there.

One of the Leding children: We’re not that bad!

This kind of honesty will make the show, if it keeps up. Instead of trying to seem knowledgeable, the girls are upfront about their ignorance. Plus, aside from a few moments of disgust or fear, they’re being pretty nice to everyone they come into contact with. And, unlike MTV’s rich girls, these two both seem to have a sense of the absurdity of their situation. When the girls are talking with the teenage son of the family, and he stops to go get his jacket, they’re afforded a short moment of privacy.

Paris: He’s sooo sweet!

Nicole: He’s sweet.

Paris: He’s cute.

Nicole: We should have a threesome with him.

The two of them are instantly doubled over, laughing, and it’s clear that this show might be a lot of fun after all.

Unfortunately, “Paradise Hotel” aside, Fox isn’t all that sophisticated or skilled about its reality-TV programming. While MTV manages to showcase the quirks of its rich girls, for better or worse, Fox feels it has to layer on the fictional hillbilly element extra thick. In the highlights, the girls are shoveling road kill and manhandling cows, when, based on what we’ve seen of them so far, it would probably be a lot more fun to watch them goof around and chat with cute local boys. After all, how many times can the girl in the fancy shoes squeal, “That’s disgusting!” before it gets dull? Apparently locals in town concur, complaining less about the two women than the tactics of crew members, who seemed hellbent on shooting the ugliest parts of the town and allegedly set up a fake grape-stomping booth for the girls to take part in at a local fair. Why go to such great lengths to support your preconceived image of what the show is about, when so many entertaining moments will fall outside the boundaries of that image regardless?

The way MTV and Fox are parading around the rich folks for us to point and jeer and gawk at, it’s utterly disarming to encounter Jamie Johnson’s “Born Rich,” an American Undercover documentary on HBO (premiering 10 p.m. on Monday). A 23-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical fortune, first-time filmmaker Johnson explores the complicated comforts and challenges of growing up with more money than you could possibly know what to do with. Somehow Johnson managed to persuade heirs of the Trump, Vanderbilt, Newhouse and Bloomberg fortunes, among others, to speak candidly on camera about everything from prenuptials to private planes. Unlike the frivolous, out-of-touch lightweights on “Rich Girls” and “The Simple Life,” Johnson’s subjects are self-aware, sensitive and intelligent, and seem to share an earnest desire to do something meaningful with their lives.

Hesitant as most of us are to feel sympathy for the filthy rich, anyone who’s been unemployed for longer than expected, lived at home a little too long, or saved up money for a creative break only to spend the money without making any creative gains knows how difficult it can be to achieve goals that aren’t motivated partially by a paycheck and an authority figure breathing down your neck. The truth is, unstructured time and unlimited money can often lead to depression, not to mention the strange plane on which those who can buy gallery space, pay for studio time, and produce TV shows find themselves. Am I accomplishing anything, or am I paying to appear as though I’m accomplishing something? While those who struggle to pay the bills may have a difficult time grasping the pitfalls of wealth, they are clearly reflected in these stories. Whitney-Vanderbilt heir Josiah Hornblower admits that he went through a period of depression in college and ended up taking two years off from school to work, a period he refers to as one of the happiest and most important times of his life. One of the jobs he had was working for an oil field services company, where he interacted with regular guys without high school degrees. Hornblower reports that “really what I learned is that working hard makes me feel good.”

While Hornblower seems exceptionally well-adjusted and insightful about his position, Johnson himself sometimes appears utterly adrift on a sea of possibilities. His father seems like a nice guy, but seems to offer little in the way of active involvement in helping his son find his calling.

Many of the other kids seem slightly alienated from their families. When asked if her family approves of her life as an equestrian show-jumper, Georgina Bloomberg replies, “I’m doing what I love to do. It doesn’t really matter to me what the hell they think.” While obviously someone is keeping the groundsmen in rubber boots and keeping “My Pretty Pony” knee-deep in fresh oats, Bloomberg’s independence may be more of a side effect of her young age than a sign that her relationship with her parents is suffering.

In contrast, S.I. Newhouse IV, heir to the Condé Nast fortune, is fairly outspoken about his alienation from his father. “A lot of people who know me know what my financial situation is. I do have a place in the city, my father’s place,” S.I. Newhouse IV explains from his dorm room at Haverford, “but it’s not fun to go there. I feel like a guest in my own home.”

And alienation from your parents has a disturbing edge among young heirs, since many of them have a strong fear of being cut off. Selfish as that might sound to an outsider, it’s natural to fear being thrust into an entirely different world from the one you were raised in. For these kids, their inheritance not only messes with their sense of control over their lives but also clutters up the emotional landscape of their relationship with their parents. Still, when Luke Weil shudders to imagine a life without obscene amounts of money, it almost makes you feel sorry for him that he’ll never experience the joy and freedom of having nothing to lose.

Enjoyable as it might be to scoff at these poor little rich kids, most of them are far too earnest and sharp not to like. Surprisingly, Ivanka Trump is particularly honest and low-key. At one point, she recalls the time a stranger approached her and said, “What does it feel like to be wealthy? What does it feel like to never have felt any pain?” Instead of feeling angry, she was astounded that anyone could be so foolish. And instead of feeling envious of these rich kids, mostly we feel sorry for those, rich and poor, who believe that money has the power to shield them from the difficult task of living.

The combination of Courtney’s text and the original logos is often intentional and the results can be amusing — and at times, disconcerting. A black D.A.R.E. T-shirt — a vestige of Nancy Reagan’s drug wars — sits beneath the text: “I Fucked Kurt Cobain,” a heroin addict who killed himself. After hearing about the T-shirts from a friend, I ordered one that reads “I Fucked David Remnick” (the New Yorker editor), with the letters centered around a Champion logo.

To a casual observer, the lists and the T-shirts could easily be mistaken for the obsession of someone who has spent too much time watching MTV and reading US magazine. But as Courtney explains, it’s all part of an art project he calls “The Commodification of Celebrity.”

“Everyone’s trying to be cool by name-dropping, associating themselves with celebrity,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Instead of doing this slimy name-dropping thing, I was like, well, why don’t you just put it on a shirt? Take it to, like, the nth degree. Not ‘I sat next to Paris Hilton at a concert’ or ‘I saw Danny DeVito at a restaurant,’ but ‘I fucked Paris Hilton.’ The literal interpretation isn’t there. It’s more just name-fucking, using this commodity of the celebrity name to buy coolness, or insider status, or whatever.”

As Courtney explains his various “theories,” he becomes more animated. Every time his athletic frame relaxes into his computer desk chair, his body tenses a few seconds later as he leaps up to find another vestige of a previous exhibit, a printed-out e-mail, or an article that demonstrates his point. His eyes widen and his tenor voice reaches a crescendo at the end of sentences, which he often punctuates with a “You know?” and a furrowed brow that indicate he’s not entirely sure he buys his own explanations — or that you do. Occasionally, he pauses in the middle of his discourse de la célébrité, letting his eyes wander to some invisible spot on the wall or ceiling, running his hand through his close-cropped brown hair, and wrinkling his nose as if searching for one last piece to tie all of his ideas together.

The walls of Courtney’s apartment are decorated with large, Rothko-esque abstract paintings that he created over a year ago. Bright blocks of orange, yellow and black are arranged with precision on rectangular canvases interspersed throughout the living area and bedroom. The paintings, the lists and the shirts were recently part of a small exhibition at Duke University titled the “New American Dream.” A friend of Courtney’s at the university contacted him about exhibiting the paintings as a stand-alone project in a student center gallery, but Courtney took the opportunity to add the lists and shirts to the mix, to use all of his “art” to elucidate his philosophies about celebrity.

“I think our past heroes — the people we used to be into — were Nelson Rockefeller and Oprah, Bill Gates, Madonna,” says Courtney. “People who had actually done something.” (Lumping Nelson Rockefeller and Madonna in the same category? That’s a new one.) His work, Courtney explains, is about instant, overnight celebrity — celebrity for no reason and fame for simply existing. Reality TV stars, naughty White House interns, and party-girl hotel heiresses.

“Now I think everybody wants to be famous,” he says. “Everybody wants to be paid for being themselves, and no one wants to work hard anymore. I kind of got into this idea of the ‘New American Dream’ being fame and celebrity and effortless wealth. The hard-work thing is gone. People just want to be like, ‘I’m here! Pay me!’ Every American wants to be famous!”

Every American? “I don’t know that they want to deal with the reality of it,” he says, “But even my mom. She’d want to be a Hollywood star. I feel like it’s almost un-American to not want to be famous.”

OK, I say. His shirts seem to illustrate this point. But where do the paintings come in?

“I had these three paintings,” he says, gesturing to the abstract canvases on the wall. “One of them was called ‘Eminem,’ one of them was called ‘Andy Warhol,’ and one of them was called ‘Lil’ Kim.’” What do big blocks of color have to do with Eminem? Nothing, Courtney says. “Because people are so trained to recognize [Eminem's] name, it engages them in a dialogue, and they don’t know why they’re in it. They’re trying to figure out why it’s named Eminem.” In other words, they’re tricked into interpreting the painting through the lens of a celebrity ideal.

Warhol did something similar, says Courtney. “When Warhol did Marilyn Monroe, he used the commodity of her face to get attention for his paintings. If he’d just used me or you or his mom, no one would care. Not to devalue the fact that he did it in twelves or nines or silk-screened. Presentation was important. But it’s still Marilyn Monroe.”

As Courtney waxes poetic about Andy Warhol, my gaze drifts back to the lists on the wall. “What about the lists?” I ask.

“I went to a Web site and found out what the top eight plastic surgery procedures are,” says Courtney. “What the top eight abused prescription drugs are. A list of high luxury brands — Lear and Cartier and Rolls-Royce — those unattainable things that only really rich people can get. And then a list of eight things that I think people want from fame — sex, beauty, agency, wealth, access, control, happiness, validation…” The lists, Courtney says “show another side of being famous — having to perfect oneself for the public.” The media, he says, fabricates unrealistically pristine images of celebrities that make normal people feel inadequate, and as a result, normal people try to pursue the accoutrements of fame.

What are the implications if Courtney’s right? What happens to American society if everyone wants to be famous and no one wants to work for it? If everyone wants status, but not accountability?

“I think people are getting really complacent,” says Courtney. “We’re getting really lazy and gluttonous, and everybody wants to make $2 million and have a Hummer and drink Cristall. I don’t want to be a nihilist, but I feel like we’re just pushing toward that point where the seams are popping.”

The youngest of four children, Courtney grew up in what he describes as a “straight-up small-town middle-class family” in upstate New York, where his father worked as a salesman for R.J. Reynolds. He majored in psychology at Cornell before heading to New York in 1997 to try to make it as an artist. For all of his disdain for celebrity, Ken Courtney is currently enjoying a degree of it himself. Just Another Rich Kid shirts (Courtney says the name of his business was inspired by all the “kids in the city who portray themselves as struggling indie artists but when you delve a bit more you find out their godmother is Mary Boone or something”) have appeared in several European fashion and art publications, and Courtney’s name has appeared in bold on Page Six, the New York Post’s notorious gossip sheet. “For some reason I was just flipping through the Post,” he says. “And I looked at the highlighted names, and I saw ‘Ken Courtney’ and a reference to the shirts and I thought, That’s so weird.”

His own minor celebrity doesn’t heavily affect Courtney’s lifestyle, because as he points out, a press mention here and there doesn’t necessarily mean he’s minting money from the project. He runs the entire operation out of his tiny apartment and says he gets two or three requests a day for shirts, which he screen-prints in his apartment, often late at night. He has “two and a half” unpaid interns: art, design and fashion students who responded to an ad Courtney posted on Craig’s List for help with an “indie men’s shirt line.” They help out with the business paperwork, button sewing, and assorted other shoestring-shop activities. “I spend a lot of time standing in line at the post office,” he says.

Courtney isn’t sure how many shirts he has sold or how much money he has earned, and it’s not always apparent to onlookers that Courtney’s operation is fundamentally an art project. “I like to think that everyone thinks like this. Then I remember that I’m living in New York,” he says, laughing. “I’m making fun of all of us for being celebrity obsessed. But I don’t like explaining it to people if they don’t already get it.”

And not everyone gets it. The Strokes’ merchandising company, Blue Grape, recently issued Courtney a cease-and-desist letter for manufacturing “I Fucked the Strokes” T-shirts after spotting one in a fashion layout in Time Out New York and another in Vice Magazine. “They thought I was making a ton of cash from it,” says Courtney. “I made two shirts! Neither of which sold!” Blue Grape is demanding that he recall the “I Fucked the Strokes” shirts and send all of them to the company’s law firm, where they will be destroyed. Ah, the torments of being an artist!

Ironically, some of Courtney’s other detractors think the T-shirts are a literal incarnation of the status-grubbing attitude they skewer. Courtney shows me his favorite piece of hate mail. It reads, “I saw your site and have this to say: I hate you and everything you represent. Your ‘clothes’ are a fuckin’ scam. Whatever it is that you consider ‘cool’ fucking sucks. Anyone stupid enough to buy your bullshit deserves to wear it so that when they are seen in the street, everyone will know that they are retarded. You iron on ugly letters, inane artfag phrases, and wack images onto thrift store refuse, then sell it for a lot of money to assholes who think they are so fucking stylish. YOU HAVE NO SOUL. You and your ilk are a bunch of T. Rex lookin, Fraggle Rock rejects who need to bathe. You are wack enough to get off on this hate-letter. DIE.”

Apparently, Courtney is wack enough to get off on the hate letter. Laughing, he pulls out an ad he created from the text of the e-mail. The phrase “T. Rex lookin, Fraggle Rock rejects” is circled in red.

Courtney acknowledges that he, and his popular “star fucker” shirts, will soon face the end of their 15 minutes of fame, but says that even as that moment approaches, he has other projects lined up. The shirts are only one part of the Just Another Rich Kid line, and Courtney says he has new designs in the works. He’d also like to install the “New American Dream” exhibit in New York “if I can find a gallery to show it.”

As I cross back into the living area, I notice yet another list, carefully spelled out at eye level on the wall in black stick-on letters: “Mirror, Sell Shirts, Job, Steamer, Video Camera, Studio, Foam Core, Spoons, Tissue Paper.” A statement about the accoutrements and pressures of life as an artist? “Oh, that’s just stuff I need,” says Courtney with a laugh.

Who is this ravishing Prada-clad creature who has descended, shiny and whirring, clacking like a ravenous, scissor-legged locust onto the pages of every glossy, perfumed publication this side of Condi Nast? And why are we supposed to care? Vanity Fair can explain. The magazine’s September issue is dedicated almost entirely to this decade’s girly-fetish: the It Girl.

Coincidentally, the It Girl’s most important characteristic seems to be her affililiation with Condi Nast. Among VF’s “Its” are two Vogue contributors (Plum Sykes, Marina Rust), the daughter of a VF contributing editor (Patricia Herrera), and VF’s own fashion director (Elizabeth Salzman) and associate fashion editor (Patricia Herrera). Furthermore, as an eagle-eyed friend of mine pointed out, the full-page glamour shot of Vogue writer and Marshall Field scion Marina Rust was preceded by a 15-page Marshall Fields ad, a store that neither my friend nor I ever remembered seeing advertised in VF before.

Though the occasional girl rapper/Olympic swimmer/civil rights lawyer is sometimes tossed into the mix to make big-time magazine editors look democratic and inclusive, it seems the types of magazines that compile “It lists” have been neglecting disposable starlets in favor of power brats lately. The cool-girl-of-the-moment is once again, as she was at the turn of the last century, the “celebutante”: A superstar heiress, a “scandalous” party girl. Thanks to her father’s proclivity for trophy wives/models and her mother’s ironclad discipline/anorexic example, she is a personally trained beauty. And for a few years now she has been evicting from your consciousness the gutter icons more popular in contracting economies.

(Five, to be precise, since around the time of the demise of the Riot Grrrl and the big market boom.)

“It,” which was first used to circumspectly define the uninhibited sexiness of silent movie star Clara Bow, has now become shorthand for an “indescribable melange” of qualities, in the words of VF contributor Evgenia Peretz. But it’s really not that hard of a “melange” to describe: It’s just kind of ugly when you deconstruct it. Women who used their power, money and name recognition to stretch the boundaries of acceptable female behavior were revolutionary once. Women who use the despotic nepotism of the privileged classes to feed their voracious entitlement, self-obsession and exhibitionism are tools. Women who read more than one article about Aerin Lauder are suckers.

What ever happened to the Riot Grrrl “revolution,” anyway? Whatever happened to using fame as a platform to talk about social ills? The same thing that happens every time a few people get flush with money and everybody else becomes lost in the fantasy that they will soon join their ranks. The current obsession with dilettante debutantes just confirms that, in the grand capitalist scheme of things, a Riot Grrrl is nothing but a lagging market indicator (it’s cool to rail against money when nobody has any); the media is rarely anything more than a pliable and willing collaborator; and an It Girl is a hood ornament.

Of course, as the country’s main purveyor of fabulousness, VF can have its It and eat it, too. The magazine acknowledges the “silliness” of girls who “achieve status by doing nothing in particular” while running around with its snout up their skirts month after month. The advertisers of luxury goods that fill the glossy pages leading up to these fawning profiles (not to mention the pages of the New York Times), on the other hand, don’t find them silly at all. As a disdainful acquaintance of the depraved underage hotel heiresses, Paris and Nicky Hilton, notes in “Hip-Hop Debs,” a subtly horrified profile (accompanied by a photo spread showcasing Paris’ 19-year-old nipples), their job is to be in the right places and the right publications in the right clothes. There’s a reason designers loved |ber-It Girl Babe Paley, and her posture wasn’t it.

And in that same issue of VF, why is Gwyneth Paltrow all dressed up as if she’s about to star in a remake of “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis”? Because Prada, It couture house par excellence (among many other luxury labels), has been hawking the well-bred “I was an aristocrat in 1930s Italy” look for at least two seasons now. The It Girl is demure, ladylike, manicured and coifed. What more adorable way to promote the friendly face of fascism?

“Ever notice, that every ingenue mentioned in the tabloids is an It Girl?” groused a December 1999 Harper’s Bazaar, before going on to profile four ingenue starlets (Brittany Murphy, Clea DuVall, Natasha Lyonne and Marley Shelton). This was by way of introduction to its list of women who “set the tone and the trends for 2000, just like Alice Roosevelt Longworth did in the 1900s, when she fired a pistol in the middle of a party and made headlines around the world.” Bazaar’s list topper was Princess Alexandra Von Furstenberg.

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Theodore Roosevelt’s eldest daughter, was a high-profile debutante during the Gilded Age, a darling of the press who had a pillow embroidered with the inscription “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.” She campaigned against her cousin Franklin and her cruel imitation of hard-working, un-fabulous Eleanor was a favorite Republican party trick.

Princess Alexandra Von Furstenberg, the publicity hungriest of the three blond Miller sisters (duty-free heiresses who rose to fame upon marrying a gazillionaire, a prince and a gazillionaire prince practically on the same day), “helped relaunch mother-in-law Diane Von Furstenberg’s signature wrap dress” and confesses to being “a shopaholic.”

If there ever was such a thing as a Riot Grrrl revolution — that is, if it ever meant anything beyond selling records and green nail polish — then it was officially suppressed the day a surgically altered Courtney Love posed in Versace for VF, in a dress that would have made Eva Braun drool. But the sudden ubiquity of the “celebutante” has always been a harbinger of bad things, as any former flapper could tell you. Like other high-priced luxury items (including Gucci, Ralph Lauren and Chanel), It Girls become annoyingly visible during boom years, only to scurry back into hiding when the market collapses or the war breaks out.

Because if an It Girl knows anything it’s that nobody likes an heiress during a recession, and you can’t have a revolution without Marie Antoinette.