I should say right up front that, as a comparatively spry twenty-eight-year-old, I'm not usually given to the "won't somebody please think of the children?" hand-wringing that older commentators are given to when confronted with a sexualized adolescent. Once they've come out the other side of puberty, teenagers have sex -- whatever, it's a fact, and not one that either concerns or affects me. But my response to the July issue of Vanity Fair -- with its "IT'S TOTALLY RAINING TEENS!" cover line, foldout of nine quite sexy young women most of whom are under the age of twenty, and the subsequent pictorial inside was...well, a bad feeling.

And not only for the reasons you might think. Sure, putting the shapely curves and bends of these rather young people on the cover of a magazine primarily read by grownups is a little off-putting. Men my dad's age shouldn't, ideally, know for a demonstrable fact that little Olivia from The Cosby Show now wears a D cup, but then again, it's not like they were all in lingerie like that foldout cover of the very first VF Hollywood issue -- remember the one that had Jennifer Jason Leigh cowering in a bra and panties and heels at Nicole Kidman's feet? It's that the kids in this issue are all younger than my baby sister and yet preternaturally savvy and Hollywoody that their seemingly accelerated sexuality is beside the point: of course they could easily pass as adults; why shouldn't hard-bitten showbiz veterans look the part?

My esteemed colleague The Man From F.U.N.K.L.E. -- himself a former child star (or "star," since it was only in Canada) -- has very strong feelings on the subject of child performers in show business. And I mean very strong: if there were a bill before the government to make it unlawful for any person under the age of eighteen to appear in a movie or TV show, he would lobby strenuously for it. His argument, as I understand it, is that exposing children to the show business milieu before their minds are fully formed -- before they are able to comprehend that getting tutored in History on the set of Full House while an assistant attends to your every passing whim and makes certain not to look you in the eye is not normal -- can warp them for life. God knows that getting famous is liable enough to warp fully-grown adults for life, but think how much more of a monster Jennifer Lopez would be if she had been in a position to demand lilies in her toilet bowls before she even had all her permanent teeth.

I didn't subscribe to the view that children and teenagers should be entirely barred from the world of show business before I read this issue of VF, but after it, I have come around. And not, I should add, because James Wolcott's article is so well written and persuasive; quite the contrary, in fact. For one thing, I don't know how old Wolcott is, but he's no comparatively spry twenty-eight-year-old; every pronouncement he makes on the subject of tween showbiz stars and the power they wield in their grownup industry is in this grandfatherly "oh, these kids today and with their hi-fis and their skateboards" tone, which, okay, yes, may be the attitude most of VF's readers may have toward the phenomenon of tween ascendancy, but they'll probably skip the article anyway -- and if Wolcott is so bewildered by Alexa Vega's career trajectory that he can't even take it seriously enough to come up with a decent story about it, why is VF doing the story at all?

Anyway, the real meat of the article wasn't even collected by Wolcott: "V.F. West Coast editor Krista Smith did the grilling as I sat in, soaking up 'the scene.'" Smith's questionnaire resulted in brief fact boxes accompanying each star's photo (and expanded at the back of the issue), although eventually Wolcott gets bored of trying to make his own observations and peters out by turning Smith's bullet points into prose. Oh, and embarrassingly gushing over his new girlfriend, twenty-one-year-old Alexis Bledel of Gilmore Girls: "In this procession of perky extroverts, here was one introvert who had torn off the veil to view life for what it is: sucky....Yet once she stopped looking as if she were about to dissolve into tears of boredom, she made the most insightful comments about acting of any of our participants..." Wolcott doesn't share these allegedly insightful comments with the readers; maybe he fears that we can't handle the truth. He does add, "And her idol is Gandhi, proof of a social conscience and an awareness of an existence beyond show business." Or an awareness that such an answer makes her look good, maybe? Finally: "Alexis Bledel, who has no pets, should adopt a cat. They could silently stare at each other in perfect communion." Um, back off, old man.

To be fair, not all the teens -- inasmuch as they reveal themselves to Smith, as opposed to being interpreted for us by Grandpa Wolcott -- are soulless. Like any sample of any twenty-eight people, some are (or come across as being) thoughtful and pleasant, and some are creepy little junior RealDolls -- and break down pretty much along the lines you expect them to. You know, some of them idolize Jodie Foster, and some idolize Princess Diana, and you can probably guess which one of those is Hilary Duff. And it's entirely possible that the VF tweens would all be perfectly normal outside the context of a large-scale magazine package; maybe it's just the act of observing them with the Wolcott gaze makes some of them seem obnoxious and icky. Except Solange Knowles; I feel like she'd be kind of a douchebag under any circumstances. And I know from bitter experience that Milo Ventimiglia is, like, the original douchebag. (And also not a tween; judging by his birth date, he was probably about two years behind me in school, and as I've already confessed, I'm pushing thirty.) But is it the circumstance of being a child star -- with all the related trappings of wealth and pampering -- that makes them so annoying and creepy, or do only annoying and creepy children aspire to become child stars and have the tenacity to stick with it? If James Wolcott knows, he's keeping it to himself.

The rest of the issue is typical 2003 VF, with all that that implies -- lots of filler that looks interesting, and yet is boring. First off, there's Graydon Carter's Editor's Letter, containing the (now) usual mix of Michael Bloomberg excoriation and absolutely no reference whatsoever to what's in the issue. Carter does know he isn't the editor of The New Yorker, right? Just checking.

As is my custom, I skipped over virtually everything in Fanfair except the page about movies, and instantly regretted it when I read Bruce Handy's blurb about 28 Days Later, the upcoming horror film by Danny Boyle. Why Handy has to take a perfectly good (I hear) zombie movie and tortuously turn it into a metaphor for post-September 11 terrorism, I do not know. I mean, I'm sure there's more to it than a mere zombie movie (although, as far as I'm concerned, mere zombies are enough all on their own to make a great movie, thank you very much), and yes, I realize that it's not necessary to know the artist's precise intention when deconstructing his artistic product, but if you have space enough in a two-hundred word story to acknowledge that the film was in production before September 11, 2001, then you don't need to use the rest of your allotted space to insist that it is, too, a September 11 allegory. "A prologue has animal-rights activists breaking into a research facility where chimps...are injected with a virus referred to only as 'rage.' (Isn't that what Mohammed Atta had in his bloodstream?)" SHUT UP, BRUCE HANDY, GOD.

There are several points in the issue where the pitfalls of running a monthly magazine, with its long lead time to press, are in evidence -- a reference in the tweens story to Hilary Duff's (now defunct) relationship and (now ended) rosy future with the Walt Disney Corporation, for instance; a reference in the Mike Fleiss/Mike Darnell reality-TV story (which I'll get to) about a forthcoming special (a canine beauty pageant) that has already long since aired -- but the most unfortunate is probably the appearance in Vanities of the late Art Cooper, former editor of GQ, telling us he's reading The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. Thanks for the tip, Art. [Shiver.]

Also in Vanities is, seriously, the oldest pop-culture story in the history of ever: the story about retitling movies for foreign markets. I remember reading this story -- a list of alleged Japanese titles of American movies, translated back into English, which turned out to be apocryphal -- at my parents' kitchen table in the house they sold five years ago. And now, VF has picked it up, for all their readers who've never heard of the internet, I guess. There are five boxes of movie titles, translated into Spanish or German or French or Italian or Portuguese, and then back into English, and the reader is invited to guess the movies' original titles. Ooh, fun, a little game! Not. Pass.

Moving on to the features: okay, bear in mind that, as I mentioned above, there is a long feature about reality TV. VF's editors could have followed the long tween photo package with the reality-TV story, for a thematically logical transition. But no. Instead, immediately following a two- page spread on which Kaley Cuoco (who? Exactly) plays tug-of-war with Jared Padalecki and Milo Ventimiglia, we get "Bush's Brain Trust." If that's not the most jarring disconnect in the annals of VF features, it's got to be in the top ten. Oh, and I didn't read it, because yawn. So yawn, in fact, that I'm not even going to bother making the completely obvious joke inherent in the hed "Bush's Brain Trust," because you've all already made it yourselves.

But "Reality Kings" -- which I did read -- followed immediately after that, and as such things go, it was pretty good. Too often, when major mainstream media outlets like VF take on the reality-TV boom, it quickly devolves into a pearl-clutching diatribe about how low TV can go and Roman vomitoria and whatever happened to decency in broadcasting and what William Paley is probably doing in his grave, which is predictable and boring and beside the point, anyway. VF's article by Mark Seal moves along at a nice clip, chronicling the adventures of Mike Fleiss (TV producer and the man who brought us The Bachelor and Are You Hot?) and Mike Darnell (the Fox network's executive in charge of reality programming) and how they have come to be so powerful when their background is in assembling cheapo shows about disgruntled employees peeing in their bosses' coffee and the like. If you're interested in such things -- which I am -- it's a good article. And even the photos are funny, because the 5'1" Darnell is photographed beside the fairly tall Fleiss, and Darnell is wearing these cowboy boots with gigantic heels that I would bet money contain lifts. Dude, Darnell, you're short. So what? You're also rich, so who gives a shit?

And the rest, I skipped. I don't care about the troubles of very very wealthy real estate moguls, so "Devastating Luxury" was not for me. I started to read "A First-Class Affair," about the making of a '60s movie called The V.I.P.s, but I abandoned it after a couple of pages because it was too boring. (Scandalous affairs in the '60s were like that, I guess.) Then it was just a run up to the Proust Questionnaire, which is normally pretty annoying, and when Arnold Schwarzenegger is the subject, it's not likely to be less annoying than usual. And wasn't. "Which words or phrases do you most overuse?" "'Maria, I said I'm sorry' and 'Yes, dear.'" My skin crawls. And the more I know about him, the more skin-crawly he becomes.

On the whole, a pretty so-so issue -- particularly since VF is so dismissive of the tween boom (and the tweens responsible for said boom) while being simultaneously so proud of itself for giving it any attention. "This only looks like Teen Vanity Fair," promises very small and probably jokey (I say "probably" because it seems like a joke, but isn't funny) print in the bottom left corner of the cover. "Welcome to the launch part for Teen Vanity Fair" is the lead for Wolcott's story, though he goes on to sniff, "Britney or Christina who?, we can hear a few voices muttering on the bus." Wait, it all becomes clear: this issue really is a test balloon for Condé Nast to see how an actual monthly Teen Vanity Fair would go over with the kids, but Wolcott hates the idea and is trying to undermine it by anchoring the test with a half-assed feature! Oh, Grandpa. You're so crafty. Now sit still and eat your applesauce.