NEW YORK (AP) -- The consensus is clear: Britney Spears performed like she was sloshing blindfolded through mud at MTV's Video Music Awards. No one disputes that the troubled pop princess royally mangled her much-heralded comeback.

But what about the nastiest comments of all - those about her body? "Lard and Clear," read Monday's headline in the New York Post. "The bulging belly she was flaunting was SO not hot," wrote E! Online. And so on.

Was it fair? Did Spears, lest we forget a mother of two, deserve to be held up against the standard of her once fantastically toned abs, sculpted by sessions of 1,000 tummy crunches? Or was she asking for it by choosing that unforgiving black-sequined bikini?

More profoundly, in an age where skinny models and skeletal actresses are under scrutiny for the message they're sending young girls, what does it say that we're excoriating a young woman for a little thickness in her middle?

So here is Rule 31:

Hollywood’s enthusiasm for hyper-skinniness has led to something called the “lollipop look,” in which a celebrity is so emaciated that her head looks too large for her bony body. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that this skeletal look is either normal, or glamorous, unless your definition of “glamour” includes starvation, bingeing and purging, gastric bypass surgery, and other debilitating and wasting diseases.

And never make the mistake of confusing the celebrity body image with how real people’s bodies actually look.

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This may be difficult to realize because yours may be the first generation in the history of mankind to pass through adolescence without seeing anyone naked in person. The key words here are “in person,” because of course you can access a hundred thousand nude pictures with the click of a mouse. But at least you’ve been sheltered from ever having to see a naked classmate in the shower after gym class. Apparently, that’s just too much reality for you to handle.

It was not always so. For generations, group showering was just a part of life, a routine that emphasized basic hygiene, common sense, and the reality of puberty: if you didn’t shower you’d stink. It was also an early reality check: we learned that bodies weren’t perfect, that they came in various sizes, stages of growth, and variations. This sort of knowledge actually is useful, especially when it comes to deciding what’s normal and what is freak of nature.

But some years ago the geniuses who run your school decided that no matter how sweaty or rancid you might be, you wouldn’t have to take showers after gym class. Eventually that idea spread to a lack of showering after any athletic event – which, in spite of deodorants and body sprays, leads to some very long and ripe rides home on the team bus.

 Of course, this insulation from real-world nakedness means your generation has to get its notions of the human body from such reliable and trustworthy sources as Hollywood, magazines, and the internet. And grownups wonder why so many young women are obsessed with looking like Keira Knightley.

Unfortunately, millions of your peers look at super-thin stars like Mary-Kay Olsen or Lara Flynn Boyle and think they are normal. The rest of us think, “get those girls a milkshake, a cheeseburger, anything.”...