I can't believe that awful thing you printed about me. What did you say your circulation is?

Gosh, what would advice columnists do without pop stars and flavor-of-the-week starlets? Left to our own devices, we'd have to come up with purely theoretical examples of bad behavior.  And those always pale next to the gossamer glowiness of a case study like Lindsay Lohan, who is reported by AP to be "appalled" at a Vanity Fair cover story in which she admits to a bout with bulimia.

The Vanity Fair cover story has become a sort of pseudo-confessional in which people like Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie pretend to exorcise their personal demons, or at least those personal demons that pass the scrutiny of high-priced flacks and handlers. It is to print what the day-after stint on Jay Leno's couch is to television -- fake catharsis and real publicity in one grand, symbiotic sweep of cynical self-interest. So it seems a tad squirrelly of Lohan to claim now that the magazine misrepresented her words. (For the record, VF "stands by its story," a formulation that in other times was used to shore up journalism like Woodstein's reporting on Watergate and the New York Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers. Times, it seems worth noting, have changed.) More than that, though, it seems like a violation of the seamy deal that underlies these stories, the implicit contract that trades a tightly-controlled simulacrum of emotional nakedness for a free ride on the nation's newsstands and morning TV shows. Put simply: You can't have it both ways, honey. You can't pimp your problems to the glossies and then claim to be shocked, shocked when they put them on the street. And so to today's manners lesson: When you make your deal with the Devil, own it. It's unattractive to turn up at the Devil's doorstep a few days later claiming that you didn't know he was the Dark Ruler of, like, the whole underworld.

Still, Lohan and her team may not have completely lost their minds. When they decided to disavow the bulimia part of the story, they at least did it in a way that's consistent with the cash economy of Hollywood fame. They issued a statement to that well-known bulwark of truth and rigor, Teen People. The beat goes on.