In April, after  years of the online tabloids’ pushing photos of Lindsay  Lohan looking undone in the back seats of limousines, Dr. Drew  Pinsky, the TV addiction specialist, offered his opinion of Lohan to one  of those Web sites. 
If Lohan “were  my daughter,” Pinsky told Radar–Online, the celebrity gossip site, “I  would pack her car full with illegal substances, send her on her way,  call the police and make sure she was arrested.” Pinsky went on: “I  would make sure she was not allowed to get out of jail. I would then go  to the judge and make sure she was ordered to a minimum of a three-year  sobriety program.”
It’s not clear whether a Pinskian frame-up ever  took place. But Lohan, who is 24, has been sent to jail twice since  Pinsky spoke to RadarOnline about her. Last summer she served 14 days of  a 90-day sentence at the Century Regional Detention Facility in  Lynwood, Calif., for skipping the alcohol-education classes that the  court mandated after two arrests in 2007 for drunken driving and drug  possession. She was then sent to court-ordered rehab, but she failed a  drug test not long after she checked out. She went briefly back to jail.  She was released on bail. At the end of September, she checked into the  Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, Calif., reportedly for cocaine  addiction.
Lohan’s four mug shots, which can be found on Radar, TMZ, Gawker,  Perez Hilton, Pop Crunch and dozens of other gossip sites, are online  genre pieces: studies in inky eyeliner, corn-yellow peroxide and  precinct-office fluorescence. Chin tilted down, eyes cast up, Lohan  expresses glamour — the modern starlet’s answer to grace — under  pressure.
Celebrity women may find it easy to get into glamorous  character because they’re so often arrested during evenings on the town,  dressed to the nines. Celebrity men who are arrested, by contrast,  typically get photographed right after a fight and may still have the  adrenaline, aggression and injuries that come with trading words or  blows.
When Web sites publish images of celebrities in trouble,  they also solicit comments on these images. The comments are rarely  kind. One report about Lohan in The Los Angeles Times won this response,  which is still on the newspaper’s site: “That coke-headed prostitute  will never rehabilitate herself . . . she’s forever and truly a MESS!!  Let the skank hit rock bottom . . . hard!” Online commenters seem to  concur with Drew Pinsky: what these women “need,” beyond punishment for  any particular violation of the law, is time in prison to grow up and  wipe that smug pout — and pumpkin-colored bronzer — off their faces.
Not  long ago, “The Real Housewives of D.C.,” a reality show, chronicled the  public humiliation of Michaele  and Tareq Salahi,  the Virginia couple who managed to make it into a party at the White  House without being on the guest list. While Michaele’s cast mates  watched members of the House Homeland Security Committee grill and  excoriate the Salahis, they whooped with delight. “Go to jail! Make some  license plates!” shouted Lynda Erkiletian, a longtime social  acquaintance of Ms. Salahi’s.
Over the course of the program,  Lynda and the other cast members proposed that Michaele was controlled  by her husband. They said she was unstable, a complete phony. They said  she was like Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde 
murdered  people.
In all the analysis, no one seems to zero in on what  Michaele Salahi plainly is: a pretty lady who wants to dress up and have  fun at fancy parties. Even after the story of her party-crashing broke,  Salahi still wanted to talk to Bravo’s camera chiefly about her dress  and what an impressive figure she had cut in it.
Maybe that’s not  very noble. But in itself it’s not against the law. For that matter,  alcoholism is not against the law, and neither is sleeping around or  lying about how many drinks you’ve had or even seeming very, very  skanky. For those who maturely skipped the party phase of life, gaming  the guest list (
But Russell  Simmons said I’d have a plus one! My boyfriend’s right in the door!)  is part and parcel of the night-life spirit — and also not in itself a  jailable offense.
Right after 9/11, Muslim regimes were depicted  as tyrannical in part because they demonized Western fun-loving culture  in the name of a misogynistic ideology. Slowly but surely we’ve been  doing the same thing with our most visible good-time girls, making  villains of women who are dangerous almost exclusively to themselves. We  point cameras into their darkened cars and literally up their skirts to  find cellulite or evidence of immodesty that wouldn’t exist without the  cameras. When they start drinking and doing drugs, just as many  celebrities before them have done, we become incensed, agitating for  them to go to jail. Pretty soon someone like Pinsky is openly scheming  to frame one of them so she can end up behind bars. If these women are  bad examples to our daughters, we who take a hang-’em-high attitude to  party girls have officially become bad examples to their parents.