Or you’re the most famous 16-year-old in the world who just feels like taking a Twitter break, and then your dad starts tweeting about how he wants you to stay.

All of this, by the way, is within days of Jon Gosselin's getting sued by TLC for his rampant media appearances, and Richard Heene facing criminal charges for the balloon boy fiasco.

Stop it, dad, you’re embarrassing me!

The creepy showbiz dad has been with us since Hildegard of Bingen’s parents pimped her out to the convent. But no longer content to stand on the sidelines, a new breed of doting father has emerged -- tireless, opinionated, and possibly more desperate for attention than his famous offspring. And the fact that so many of these TMI-dispensing dads are talking about their young, famous and notoriously troubled daughters just adds an extra coating of ick to the whole business.

In a week of shameless spotlight hogging, it’s Mr. Michael Lohan who has distinguished himself most. First, he appeared on Friday’s "Maury Povich Show" to share how he cries that his daughter has become a “hollow, hollow person.” Then told X17online.com, “If I can't get a conservatorship, then I'm going to take her to an undisclosed location and get her straight. But I know I'm gonna get charged with kidnapping.” Today, he  has an open letter to Lindsay in the new InTouch that reads in part, “Let me help you get your life back so that you can build it to where you once were."

Lindsay, meanwhile, has displayed a charming lack of self-awareness by telling Us magazine, “I'm so hurt that someone who calls himself my father needs to use the press to communicate with me." 

For troubled stars on the other side of the pond, however, things are looking up. During an interview Wednesday on a British morning talk show, Mitch Winehouse spoke of the need for more funding for drug rehab in the U.K. and daughter Amy’s own recovery. He then digressed about the singer’s “fantastic” new boobs, adding his relief that he didn’t have to pay for them. Joe Simpson, your previous comments about daughter Jessica’s “double D’s” have just been massively owned.

No one would suggest that Lindsay Lohan, still smarting from her disastrous debut as Ungaro’s artistic director, is experiencing the best of times. When the 23-year-old showed up at a gala in New York this week, her haggard, apparently cosmetically enhanced appearance was front-page news. (Let’s put it this way: She made Donatella Versace look good.) And Winehouse, who is at work on a new album, has her own history of questionable judgment. It's just that after a few reckless sound bites from Dad, one begins to wonder where they get it.

Of course not every show business daughter has a disturbing tell-all memoir in her future, and far be it from us to suggest a cause and effect between dubious parenting and a penchant for driving into sidewalks or heckling Bono. But if I had the kind of father who went around talking about how fabulous my breasts are, I’d be shitfaced 24/7.

Why do these guys do it? Good dads, we believe, love their daughters -- they let them dance on their feet when they’re little and fret over their suitors when they’re big. When the relationship is healthy and appropriate, there’s an almost romantic element of mutual adoration.

But the weird dad is in a class all his own. He too easily reminds us of the shudder-inducing older man/much younger woman cliché, then he makes it all that much more vivid by gassing on about his beautiful, troubled daughter’s physical attributes or wanting to “detox her myself.”  I'd say it’s a fine line, but honest to God, it’s not that hard. And it smacks of bonus jealousy and competitiveness and, if she’s over 18, some intense control issues.

There’s nothing worse for a parent than to stand by helplessly and see your child in pain. But anybody who thinks that going on Maury is going to make it better is perhaps not being entirely honest. The bottomless public appetite for scandalous celebrities makes it unnervingly easy to get airtime or magazine space on a famous daughter's gin-soaked coattails. Easy to be a hanger-on first and a parent second. The world is chock-full of girls going wild because they didn’t feel they got enough attention from their fathers. Congratulations, Lindsay and Amy, your antics have commanded the attention of yours. And in the process they just happen to be soaking up plenty for themselves.

Just taking it by the numbers, Vanity Fair writer Nancy Jo Sales points out that, from March to October, Jon and Kate have starred on the covers of 50 tabloids, dwarfing even Brad and Angelina. Given that the only thing that qualified the couple to be broadcast into American living rooms on a weekly basis was once having the good -- or abysmally poor -- fortune to give birth to two sets of multiples, it’s astonishing they’ve made it this far. How, Sales asks, did “two average parents from rural Pennsylvania” become “the biggest celebrity story of the year”?

The answer, as Sales writes it, is fascinating, perhaps even to those who feel an uncontrollable burst of nausea when the remote accidentally coasts across yet another “E! True Hollywood Special.” It’s hard to think of any family who could more perfectly embody our current obsessions: There’s the general obsession with mommy culture, and the specific rise in fertility treatments and multiple births. Like Obama, their children are biracial (Sales points out that the show is especially popular with Asians, and one can’t help but think that Heene, whose wife is Japanese, may have thought of this as a bonus to his hypothetical show as well). There’s the divorce, with the -- alleged -- soap-opera twists (she’s screwing the bodyguard! He’s screwing the baby sitter and the plastic surgeon’s daughter!) And there’s also a shrewd business story: How does one turn one’s everyday life into a multimillion-dollar career?

Kate Gosselin, in particular, seems to be a walking advertisement for the ways a sprinkling of magical celebrity pixie dust can bring about a literal physical transformation. When the show began, Sales writes, she was a “dowdy, sweatpants-wearing mama hen” -- one, we might point out, who had recently carried sextuplets. Now, thanks to a little surgical intervention and an army of stylists, she looks “very much like a celebrity -- from her tanned, trim body to her curiously asymmetrical blond hairdo, now so iconic as to be the model for a popular Halloween wig.” (Jon, for his part, got hair plugs). This past year, tabloids seem to have taken sadistic glee in printing the unflattering earlier photos side-by-side with ones depicting her in an orange bikini or bug-eyed glasses, as if to create a “Before” and “After” montage: See, the message seems to be, she wasn’t even pretty! But with a tummy tuck and a couple of million, anyone can look like Posh Spice! Ladies and gentleman, let’s hear it for the awesome democratic power of celebrity.

It was Kate, not Jon, who, from the beginning, was unapologetic about shilling her family on TV for the money. Yes, it takes a lot of cash to raise eight children, and before she signed with TLC she had already become “controversial” in Pennsylvania after she sued Medicaid to demand more compensation for a baby nurse. But even before the divorce, viewers seemed to freak out over Kate’s bossiness and belittling of her husband. “In an era of confusion about gender roles in marriage,” writes Sales, “Kate was unapologetically wearing the pants.” Gail Collins even went so far as to diagnose Jon as the spouse who was suffering from the “feminine problem that has no name that Betty Friedan wrote about in 1963.” Kate was the star while Jon, the laid-off I.T. guy, described himself as “Mr. Mom,” staying home with the kids while his wife went back out on book tour. He was the depressed housewife. Or as Kate put it, “I’m the cook, he’s the waitress.” “Waiter,” corrected Jon, glumly.

Although I obviously applaud, in theory, the idea of being a good businesswoman, the nature of the business -- broadcasting the lives of one’s small children, with an extra dollop of frisson coming from having a relationship that showed “friction from the start” in the words of Figure 8 producer Bill Hayes -- has given me pause from the beginning of the show. And I hope it’s not a blow to solidarity with womankind for me to say that, on the rare occasions I did watch the show in the earlier seasons -- my mom became addicted -- I was turned off by Kate’s general nastiness and control freakishness toward her husband and children, a quality I find resolutely unappealing in people of either gender. (I also find it disturbing that some people have seen these qualities as just another part of being a “busy mom.”) But when the couple’s story evolved from filming trips to the dog breeder to stage-managing a divorce, a curious thing happened: While the “business” expanded into an empire beyond even the most ambitious reality TV producer’s wildest dreams, the businesswoman seemed, for a time, to lose the P.R. war.

Weirdly enough, though Jon was the one who first admitted to having an affair (he later accused Kate of striking the first blow of infidelity by sleeping with her bodyguard, which she denies), according to tabloid editors, most readers sympathized with him. Meanwhile, the Gosselin “brand” -- a term that Kate is more comfortable with than Jon, who allegedly told a friend that his wife would only agree to go to marriage counseling with Dr. Phil, who, not surprisingly, was more concerned with keeping “the brand intact” than solving their marital woes -- went through the roof. When they were just a family with a bunch of kids, the TLC show was enough. But once the divorce hit, the scandal itself became the family business. Suddenly, as Ginia Bellafante, the New York Times TV critic told Sales, it was a story “completely suited to a multi-platform world”: “You can’t just watch ‘Jon and Kate’ on television and understand it anymore. You have to participate in it on all these different levels -- tabloids, news shows, talk shows, the blogosphere. ‘Jon and Kate’ became unintentionally brilliant because it demanded so much other consumption to find out what was ‘real.’”

In some ways, Jon and Kate were the perfect celebrity couple for our depressing, broke-ass recession year: Unlike, say, Brad and Angelina, or other celebrities who have plenty of other ways to earn their livelihood, their brand grew in direct proportion to how thoroughly they trashed their own lives. (“Brad and Angelina try to be discreet,” says an editor at In Touch magazine, “while Jon and Kate serve it to you on a platter.”) “I’m running a business -- hello?” Kate says to Sales, in her hotel room, right after taking a call from Kelly Ripa, and right before the reporter convinces her that a shopping trip for toys at FAO Schwartz might be a better plan than going for sushi at Nobu. But the most depressing part of their story is not the cavorting on yachts and beer pong contests, or the endlessly scripted crying fests on talk shows. It’s that the business wouldn’t exist in the first place if someone hadn’t decided to pay them a lot of money for the rest of us to watch while they parent their children. That part of the business, sadly, seems to be the one thing they don’t have a lot of time left to do. 

The video (below) shows two notably doughy guys attempting to pull off the hot lifeguard-CPR plot that has entertained male psyches from “The Sandlot” onward. Eggert jogs toward the boys as the camera zooms in on every trans fat and neglected ab workout. The result? The boys ditch their plan -- see, cause she's not hot anymore -- and the audience gets an eyeful of an actress who isn't nearly as obese as the closeups try to make her appear.

“Is this because I’m fat?” she asks the guys as they wave her away. But then, they're seized by cramps and call her back. Watching as they float face-down, she delivers the punch line: “Call me fat!” and leaves them to their doom.

The video would seem -- well, if not terribly witty, then at least a nice dose of female empowerment, a move that simultaneously strikes a blow toward the tyranny of the paparrazi and places Eggert back in the public eye on her own terms. But news that Eggert has signed on for the latest season of VH1's "Celebrity Fit Club," in the company of other “celebrities,” their egos and their love handles, makes the video feel a little less awesome and a little more like a publicity stunt. When Eggert was a size 2, she was fading into obscurity. In our weight-obsessed, tabloid-guzzling society, is it possible that the path to a comeback is paved with jelly donuts? Hard to say. But hey, if tabloids are going to make their bones off women who have the temerity to gain a few extra pounds -- shouldn't women profit, too? 

Can we do that? Can we take a moment to think about all that, and about the fact that Polanski pled guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, before we start talking about what a victim he is? Because that would be great, and not nearly enough people seem to be doing it.

The French press, for instance (at least according to the British press) is describing Polanski "as the victim of a money-grabbing American mother and a publicity-hungry Californian judge." Joan Z. Shore at the Huffington Post, who once met Polanski and "was utterly charmed by [his] sobriety and intelligence," also seems to believe that a child with an unpleasant stage mother could not possibly have been raped: "The 13-year old model 'seduced' by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies." Oh, well, then! If her mom put her into that situation, that makes it much better! Shore continues: "The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in California. (It's probably 13 by now!) Polanski was demonized by the press, convicted, and managed to flee, fearing a heavy sentence."

Wow, OK, let's break that down. First, as blogger Jeff Fecke says, "Fun fact: the age of consent in 1977 in California was 16. It's now 18. But of course, the age of consent isn't like horseshoes or global thermonuclear war; close doesn't count. Even if the age of consent had been 14, the girl wasn't 14." Also, even if the girl had been old enough to consent, she testified that she did not consent. There's that. Though of course everyone makes a bigger deal of her age than her testimony that she did not consent, because if she'd been 18 and kept saying no while he kissed her, licked her, screwed her and sodomized her, this would almost certainly be a whole different story -- most likely one about her past sexual experiences and drug and alcohol use, about her desire to be famous, about what she was wearing, about how easy it would be for Roman Polanski to get consensual sex, so hey, why would he need to rape anyone? It would quite possibly be a story about a wealthy and famous director who pled not guilty to sexual assault, was acquitted on "she wanted it" grounds, and continued to live and work happily in the U.S. Which is to say that 30 years on, it would not be a story at all. So it's much safer to focus on the victim's age removing any legal question of consent than to get tied up in that thorny "he said, she said" stuff about her begging Polanski to stop and being terrified of him.

Second, Polanski was "demonized by the press" because he raped a child, and was convicted because he pled guilty. He "feared heavy sentencing" because drugging and raping a child is generally frowned upon by the legal system. Shore really wants us to pity him because of these things? (And, I am not making this up, boycott the entire country of Switzerland for arresting him.)

As ludicrous as Shore's post is, I have to agree with Fecke that my favorite Polanski apologist is the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum, who finds it "bizarre" that anyone is still pursuing this case. And who also, by the by, failed to disclose the tiny, inconsequential detail that her husband, Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, is actively pressuring U.S. authorities to drop the case.

There is evidence of judicial misconduct in the original trial. There is evidence that Polanski did not know her real age. Polanski, who panicked and fled the U.S. during that trial, has been pursued by this case for 30 years, during which time he has never returned to America, has never returned to the United Kingdom., has avoided many other countries, and has never been convicted of anything else. He did commit a crime, but he has paid for the crime in many, many ways: In notoriety, in lawyers' fees, in professional stigma. He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood to direct or cast a film.

There is also evidence that Polanski raped a child. There is evidence that the victim did not consent, regardless of her age. There is evidence -- albeit purely anecdotal, in this case -- that only the most debased crapweasel thinks "I didn't know she was 13!" is a reasonable excuse for raping a child, much less continuing to rape her after she's said no repeatedly. There is evidence that the California justice system does not hold that "notoriety, lawyers' fees and professional stigma" are an appropriate sentence for child rape.

But hey, he wasn't allowed to pick up his Oscar in person! For the love of all that's holy, hasn't the man suffered enough?

Granted, Roman Polanski has indeed suffered a great deal in his life, which is where Applebaum takes her line of argument next:

He can be blamed, it is true, for his original, panicky decision to flee. But for this decision I see mitigating circumstances, not least an understandable fear of irrational punishment. Polanski's mother died in Auschwitz. His father survived Mauthausen. He himself survived the Krakow ghetto, and later emigrated from communist Poland.

Surviving the Holocaust certainly could lead to an "understandable fear of irrational punishment," but being sentenced for pleading guilty to child rape is basically the definition of rational punishment. Applebaum then points out that Polanski was a suspect in the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, a crime actually committed by the Manson family -- but again, that was the unfortunate consequence of a perfectly rational justice system. Most murdered pregnant women were killed by husbands or boyfriends, so that suspicion was neither personal nor unwarranted. This isn't Kafkaesque stuff.

But what of the now-45-year-old victim, who received a settlement from Polanski in a civil case, saying she'd like to see the charges dropped? Shouldn't we be honoring her wishes above all else?

In a word, no. At least, not entirely. I happen to believe we should honor her desire not to be the subject of a media circus, which is why I haven't named her here, even though she chose to make her identity public long ago. But as for dropping the charges, Fecke said it quite well: "I understand the victim's feelings on this. And I sympathize, I do. But for good or ill, the justice system doesn't work on behalf of victims; it works on behalf of justice."

It works on behalf of the people, in fact -- the people whose laws in every state make it clear that both child rape and fleeing prosecution are serious crimes. The point is not to keep 76-year-old Polanski off the streets or help his victim feel safe. The point is that drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not -- and at least in theory, does not -- tolerate, no matter how famous, wealthy or well-connected you are, no matter how old you were when you finally got caught, no matter what your victim says about it now, no matter how mature she looked at 13, no matter how pushy her mother was, and no matter how many really swell movies you've made.

Roman Polanski raped a child. No one, not even him, disputes that. Regardless of whatever legal misconduct might have gone on during his trial, the man admitted to unlawful sex with a minor. But the Polanski apologism we're seeing now has been heating up since "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," the 2008 documentary about Polanski's fight to get the conviction dismissed. Writing in Salon, Bill Wyman criticized the documentary's whitewashing of  Polanksi's crimes last February, after Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza ruled that if the director wanted to challenge the conviction, he'd need to turn himself in to U.S. authorities and let the justice system sort it out. "Fugitives don't get to dictate the terms of their case ... Polanski deserves to have any potential legal folderol investigated, of course. But the fact that Espinoza had to state the obvious is testimony to the ways in which the documentary, and much of the media coverage the director has received in recent months, are bizarrely skewed."

The reporting on Polanski's arrest has been every bit as "bizarrely skewed," if not more so. Roman Polanski may be a great director, an old man, a husband, a father, a friend to many powerful people, and even the target of some questionable legal shenanigans. He may very well be no threat to society at this point. He may even be a good person on balance, whatever that means. But none of that changes the basic, undisputed fact: Roman Polanski raped a child. And rushing past that point to focus on the reasons why we should forgive him, pity him, respect him, admire him, support him, whatever, is absolutely twisted. 

But we do not love Jennifer Aniston for her acting ability, nor for her success. We love her for her failures. We love her because she appears, so glaringly and consistently, as a kind of endearing loser. Her seminal loss, of course, was sexiest-man-alive Brad Pitt, as anyone who has set foot in a supermarket since 2005 knows. According to tabloid rumor, the break occurred at least in part because Aniston put her career above all else. (Unlike Angelina Jolie, whose primary tabloid narrative is one of balancing seven children, a passionate partnership with Pitt, a full career and philanthropic work, all while zipping around on a motorcycle.) “A man divorcing would never be accused of choosing career over children,” Aniston told Vanity Fair in her first interview as a divorcee. “That really pissed me off. I've never in my life said I didn't want to have children. I did and I do and I will!” Four years later, the children, like the roles in smart movies, have yet to materialize. If Pitt had left Aniston with a brood, the dominant line on her would surely be different -- we would not think of her as the poor lonely girl, bereft and barren.

The tabloids would have us believe that Aniston’s fate is no one’s fault but her own. A maddening August cover story in Us Weekly (“Why Bradley Chose Renee”) purports to explain why heartthrob du jour Bradley Cooper selected Renee Zellweger over Aniston (his co-star in "He’s Just Not That Into You"), as though choosing between two women were as easy as choosing a piece of pie from a rotating display case. “One insider” describes Aniston as “not natural … Everything is an act -- an act of her wanting people to think she is not insecure and is having a good time all the time, which just isn’t the case.” Zellweger, by contrast, is portrayed as a model of “authenticity.” If there is any truth to be found here, it may be that Aniston is looking for love in the wrong places. She doesn’t appear to understand, for instance, that it’s generally a bad idea to date one’s colleagues, especially when they are co-stars on movie sets (in addition to Cooper, see Vince Vaughn and Gerard Butler). Or that a musician eight years your junior may not be the surest bet (see John Mayer). In an article about the “whispers of an off-camera romance” between the actress and Butler on the set of the upcoming movie "The Bounty," “sources close to Aniston” tell Us Weekly: “She always falls for whoever is close by. It’s not real love.” Who knows if any of these stories are true, but there is a whiff of desperation about Aniston; at 40, her fertile years presumably on the wane, she seems always on the hunt for someone, yet almost willfully picking unsuitable men.

But let’s admit it: These are the reasons we love her. Her very lack of success -- in romance, in childbearing, in making films that are more than trifles -- makes her appealing. Jennifer Aniston allows the average person with a bad marriage, or bratty children, or no relationship at all, to feel better about his or her plight. If this rich and famous woman has troubles of her own, then truly no one is spared. In these dark days of domestic decline, does it come as a surprise that America’s sweetheart is a 40-year-old single woman without children, whose messy love life lets us feel smug about ourselves? Is this sick? Well, yes, sort of. But celebrities have long filled this sacrificial role.

Should we feel sorry for Jennifer Aniston, tabloid victim? She is obviously aware of her lovelorn appeal. In fact, she seems canny about making it work to her advantage. “[I]f I’m the emblem for this is what it looks like to be the lonely girl getting on with her life, so be it,” she recently told Elle Magazine. “I can make fun of myself, and I’ll bring it up as long as the world is bringing it up.” She no doubt understands that a viewing public who likes her -- who, indeed, feels not unlike her -- will go see her films. One has the sense that, perhaps for this reason, she selects roles that augment her hapless persona. “I have a strange parallel with movies I was doing and my life off-screen,” she joked, with discomfiting directness, while accepting an award in June. “First, it was 'The Good Girl' ... which evolved into 'Rumor Has It,' followed by 'Derailed.' Then there was 'The Breakup' ... if anyone has a movie called 'Everlasting Love With an Adult Stable Man' that would be great!”

It can’t possibly be the case that Aniston is offered only lead roles in romantic comedies. (If it is, her options may soon change, as she and friend Kristin Hahn have formed a production company, Echo Films, the mandate of which is “to develop movies with strong female characters.”) Either she is more comfortable playing these sorts of roles, or her career choices have been part of a strange, holistic approach in which her off-screen identity and on-screen characters are intended to reinforce each other. Perhaps she knows that her plain-vanilla movies are not her fans’ primary interest, and only by portraying characters that reflect some aspect of her intimate life will she offer audiences a unique and compelling narrative. “I certainly try to access my personal life when I’m doing my job,” she told Parade magazine. “But you know what they say, ‘Art imitates life, life imitates art.’” (Next on the Echo Films lineup is a romantic comedy about artificial insemination, the aptly if horribly named "The Baster.") In interviews, Aniston is constantly invoking this art-life thread. The formula, such as it is, appears to be working for her: In Forbes annual list of “Top-earning actresses,” Aniston came in second, having earned $25 million between June 2008 and June 2009. In first place, ironically but not surprisingly, was Angelina Jolie, providing proof as concrete as any that, almost five years out, both actresses have found their greatest, career-defining role not in any film but in the Aniston-Pitt-Jolie triangle.

As the Forbes ranking suggests, Aniston is a complicated cultural figure. Maybe she is not as beautiful as Angeline Jolie, maybe much of her oeuvre is schlock, but an actress who makes $25 million a year via films and celebrity endorsements (like for Smart Water), who drapes only a man’s tie over her naked, sun-kissed body on the cover of GQ, who has not only money but also fame, independence and a mansion in Beverly Hills, is not exactly an underdog who deserves our pity. We know this, and it’s why Jennifer Aniston, for all her down-to-earth Everygirlness, is difficult to love without reservation. She is either trying too hard to look like a loser, a modus operandi that reads like a ploy, given the, well, many endowments she so enthusiastically displays. (In the Elle spread, as in the one in GQ, Aniston is not shy about flashing skin.) Or she is trying too hard not to conform to the persona the media has constructed for her -- contradicting (sincerely or not?) her public persona in numerous articles and interviews. Whatever the case, she is trying very, very hard.

Hadley Freeman recently made a similar point in the Guardian, in an article that explored why Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz, both unmarried and over 35, garner very different responses from the media. “Both women are beautiful,” Freeman wrote, “but Aniston clearly works, like most would have to, quite hard at this, as a comparison between early 'Friends' episodes and recent GQ shoots proves. Diaz always came across as a naturally gorgeous tomboy who just surfs to work off her chips.” It’s not so much that Freeman is calling “Cameron Diaz lovable because she’s naturally thin” (as Anna North of Jezebel contended). It’s rather that Jennifer Aniston’s weight loss affirms that she is disciplined and calculating, a planner, a plotter, effectual. We know, because we’ve read all about it, that she follows the Zone Diet, shuns carbs, and exercises with religious zeal. And unlike Diaz, who still comes off like an adolescent girl, bopping with ease from one man to the next, Aniston, we presume, is a grown woman looking to approximate the marriage she had with Pitt. She wants kids, she’s told us: This guy may be the one. In interviews, she often drops self-help platitudes that land like heavy weather: "People who avoid the brick walls -- all power to ya, but we all have to hit them sometimes in order to push through to the next level, to evolve." Her effort is always palpable.

In the end, that sort of drive threatens people, especially when it comes from the laid-back girl-next-door. And so, Aniston must be deflated with “international media condescension,” to use Freeman’s term. She is deemed “not natural” while Zellweger is called “authentic.” But her transparent determination is not all that is threatening about her. She is a single, childless, middle-aged woman in a culture that treats women, even stratospherically successful women, as less-than if they don’t marry and have babies. Reading the subtext of her interviews, sifting through all the protestations and relationship talk, you get the sense that she may be ambivalent about fulfilling this conventional role. “Look, I don't think there’s anything wrong with living by your own rules -- you know, whatever blows your hair back,” she told GQ. “I think all women at some level just want to rage against the machine,” she said. “There are too many movies out there that don’t empower women -- movies in which their only way of being happy is finding a man. And, you know, that’s not my favorite theme.” An odd sentiment from the Queen of the Romantic Comedy. But perhaps Aniston has realized it is easier to play by the terms the culture has set for her. If she must be portrayed as tabloid loser, she might as well try to emerge a box-office winner.