This week’s Newsweek tackles the timely topic of The Girl’s Gone Wild Effect. (Caveat emptor: If you’re using Safari, the MSN site often crashes my browser, which I can only conclude is due to Microsoft’s inherent evil.) You know, Lindsey, Paris and Britney bringing civilization to its knees by going out sans underpants.

There’s a sexist joke there that I won’t even bother with. The topic is as timeless as the girls in question are ephemeral and the magazine includes a sidebar of bad girls of the past (Marilyn, Mae West). I only regret that they did not turn the wayback machine dial a little further to remind readers of the scandalous Jean Harlow, who also famously forewent bra and panties on public occasions. The difference was, she used her real-life reputation to enhance her screen image. “Dissembling innocence was not Harlow’s way,” David Thomson wrote in his invaluable, nutty Biographical Dictionary of Film. “She was too candid. She winked, she liked her nipples to pout as if to say, ‘Get a load of this.'”

Harlow died when she was 26, but not from sex — and not from anorexia. I had originally written that she drank herself to death but received an outraged riposte from Kathryn Sweeney, president of the Sacramento chapter of the Jean Harlow Fan Club: “As a child she had strep throat –before antibiotics–resulting in scarlet fever which damaged her kidneys. (Often the heart valves are wrecked as well but I don’t know if that happened to her.) Later on her kidneys failed and she died. Because her mom was a Christian Scientist there has always been a theory that she might have recovered given better medical care. I’m not saying she didn’t drink plenty, but it didn’t kill her.” Point taken, Kathy.

Harlow’s life and death helped usher in the censorious Hays Code in Hollywood and a lot of young women saw her tale as a cautionary one. The crucial difference between her influence and that of today’s Bad Girls is that Harlow was an idol to young women of legal age. The Newsweek story, by Kathleen Deveny with Raina Kelley, focuses on the adoration bestowed upon the decidedly less talented trouble trio of today by tween and young teenage girls — girls my daughter’s age.

Franny recently got in some trouble, at school and at home, for some obscene email she had a hand in, and the whole incident has caused some soul searching on the part of her parents. Topics considered included her interest in the kind of brat/slut culture Paris et al represent. But just as Deveny concludes that the fascination many girls have with this outre behavior falls short of admiration (a middle-school teacher in Illinois is quoted saying her students “can’t understand why Britney would wear no underwear” and ultimately brand her a “hootch,” ie skank, ho etc.), we have found Franny doesn’t think much of these girls, either.

“What’s it going to say on her grave, that she partied a lot?” she once asked of Paris, and while she may have heard some version of that line from her parents, there is nothing wrong with having your voice in your child’s head. Consider all the others competing in there — including the one that tried to defend her dirty email as the kind of humor “kids my age think is funny.” You want to have a vote. Let’s hope that she keeps giving us air time.