Paris Hilton, America's True Sweetheart

If pretty is as pretty does, then beautiful people have a lot to answer for. They've been up to some ugly business lately. They steal each other's mates on Temptation Island, eat cockroaches and pig guts on Fear Factor, and spit poison behind each other backs on "America's Next Top Model."

And we can't get enough of it.

We love to watch them betray their dark and venal hearts and display their moral vacuity as they sell their sleek skins for the almighty buck. Punishing the pretty is big sport, from Hunting Bambi, an apocryphal story about shooting bikini clad babes with paint pellets, to any number of modern horror movies like "Scream," "Cabin Fever," and "Jeepers Creepers," where they're dispatched by the dozen.

Witness the gleeful feeding frenzy over Paris Hilton, the Pamela Anderson for a new generation. The universal licking of chops at the undoing of the impossibly slender, fabulously blond, revoltingly rich heiress resulted in a worldwide epidemic of wet lips. Paris Hilton is a "stupid, spoiled, superficial socialite who dresses like a high-class escort and, given the recently disclosed pornographic video she made with an ex-boyfriend, probably acts like one too," or so says a recent profile of her in Rolling Stone Magazine. Hilton may have youth, beauty and money (an estimated inheritance of $30 million) but she is most famous for being fatuous.

Her highly anticipated Green Acres-style reality TV series "The Simple Life" premiered on Tuesday night, chockful with dumb blonde antics. The show chronicles the adventures of the two "celebutantes," Hilton and her best friend, Nicole Richie (daugther of Lionel), as they "make the transition from filthy rich to just plain filthy." (Take that however you will.) In the first episode, she struggles to get her brain around two challenging concepts: Wal-Mart ("Is it, like, where they sell wall stuff?") and soup kitchens. It explains why Hilton has been so eager to point out in her promotional interviews that she was, I mean, like seriously, just acting, okay?

Since there's nothing better than watching a ditsy size-zero cutie make an utter fool of herself -- think Jessica Simpson of "The Newly Weds" and her burning desire to know just what buffalo wings are made of -- there is no doubt that the series will be a runaway success.

The Paris Hiltons of the world provide reassuring evidence of divine justice for us mere mortals. Vain is from the latin root Vanus meaning empty or without substance. Pretty vacant, as the song goes, is how we like to think of the beautiful people. Photographer Helmut Newton, famed for his portraits of beautiful naked women, said this of the many models he encountered: "Either they are so dumb that they can only sit there silently staring straight ahead with vacant looks on their faces, or they get on my nerves because they can't stop blabbering." I hear you, Helmut.

The hotties of the world may be long and lithe in limb but in the brain department they're the equivalent of 98-pound weaklings. Shows like "The Simple Life" allow the rest of us to kick sand in their faces and laugh at their dumb expressions. We may be spotty and pudgy, but we've got brains and brains don't sag or wrinkle with each passing year.

No wonder then that we can't bear it when some of those beauties turn out to be (gasp!) smart. It makes the Rumplestiltskin part of your brain stamp its hairy little feet and just say NO. They are out there. Nell Freudenberger -- the 28-year-old writer -- whose very first story in the New Yorker started an epic bidding war over her book, the recently released "Pretty Girls" (Ecco Press 2003) is young, beautiful, and very talented. What hope is there for the rest of us!

Kim Barry Brunhuber, who was a Ford Model for 10 years, is a reporter/anchor for CJOH-TV in Ottawa, and most recently the author of "Kameleon Man." With a masters degree in journalism from Carleton University, Brunhunber's stories have been broadcast around the globe but he still gets judged by the cover of his book: "I've had people come up to me and say 'Oh, you're so articulate,' like hey you can talk, firstly, because I'm good looking or because I don't sound like they think a black man should sound. It's hard to defend good looking people, the 'don't hate me because I'm beautiful', but how you're treated by other people can be very limiting."