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NEW YORK - Once, America's worst-behaving celebrities were over-sexed young men. From the Rat Pack of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin to the Brat Pack of Robert Downey Jnr and Rob Lowe, the emphasis was on male stars who liked to drink and party hard.
Now the tabloid headlines are dominated by the out-of-control antics of young women.
After a week in which Lindsay Lohan was arrested (again) and Britney Spears had another public meltdown, the Bad Boys of Hollywood have turned into Bad Girls; the Brat Pack has become the Britney Pack.
No male star in America can compete with the hard-partying and jail-hopping activities of the young women who now dominate America's tabloid press and cable television.
From genuine Hollywood stars such as Lohan and once-fine singers like Spears to fame-seeking missiles such as heiress Paris Hilton and her sidekick Nicole Richie, the emphasis is on sex, booze, drugs, arrests and stints in jail.
"It seems like there has been a explosion of this sort of behaviour with our younger women stars," said Gayl Murphy, a celebrity interviewer who has written a book on how stars should deal with the press.
The roll call of misbehaviour is staggering. Last week, Lohan was arrested in the small hours for allegedly drink-driving.
Apparently she was chasing another car through the streets of Los Angeles. Police found cocaine in her trouser pocket, and a mugshot of a bleary-eyed Lohan then made front pages around the world.
The bedraggled star immediately checked herself back into rehab, from which she had emerged only a few weeks earlier proudly wearing an alcohol-detection monitor around her ankle.
Now Lohan, whose latest movie opened last week, could face serious jail time.
But she was far from alone in the headlines. Spears pushed Lohan off the front pages by the weekend after OK! magazine published lurid details of a photo-shoot it conducted with the singer.
Spears, apparently under the influence of drugs, ruined the expensive clothes she was wearing for the shoot when she wiped her hands on them after eating a meal, then her dog relieved itself on a US$6700 gown.
OK!'s description of the experience contained several sentences that no PR handler would ever want to see, including: "Britney ... used the rest room repeatedly without bothering to close the door".
Finally, the session collapsed in chaos as Spears, still wearing thousands of dollars' worth of clothing and jewellery, and her staff fled.
"What we experienced was a young girl who is desperately in need of help," the magazine's report said.
Though last week was a low point for Hollywood bad girls' misbehaving, it has hardly been uncommon.
There was the tragic recent death of Anna Nicole Smith after an apparent drugs overdose.
There was the trial and conviction of Paris Hilton, who came out of jail vowing to change her life but has gone right back to being a regular feature on the party circuit.
Hilton's friend Richie, who is pregnant, also appeared in court last week and was sentenced to four days in jail and a hefty fine on drink-driving charges.
But it is not only pampered, rich white girls who are misbehaving in this new age of hard-drinking starlets.
In the world of rap music - famed for its hardcore gangster imagery - the most recent and shocking scandal involved a young woman.
This month, New York rapper Remy Ma was arrested after apparently shooting a friend who she believed stole money from her purse.
Police said Ma, 26, shot her friend twice as they sat in a car after a night club-hopping.
The incident landed Ma in the city's notorious Rikers Island jail with a US$250,000 bail bond.
One possible explanation for the rise of the Bad Girls is that it simply reflects the increasing power and visibility of women in entertainment.
Women have started playing movie roles usually associated with men (such as action stars). On US television the number of programmes based on strong female roles has soared.
Perhaps it is no surprise that some women are also following the paths blazed by the more notorious past male stars.
Badly behaving women also have a novelty factor that attracts media cover.
"We have had years of young male stars running amok. It is now so much more fun for the public to see beautiful young women being hauled off to jail," said Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University in New York state.
Recent scandals involving male stars misbehaving have involved much older men.
There was Mel Gibson's drink-fuelled rant against Jewish people, and former Baywatch star David Hasselhoff being videoed while drunk by his own daughter. Both incidents created headlines, but involved stars considerably advanced into middle age.
"The recent Hollywood bad boys hardly deserve the name 'boys'," said Thompson. "They are middle-aged, older guys."
There is also more acceptance of bad behaviour by young American girls. America is caught in the age of Girls Gone Wild videos which would once have been unthinkable.
The videos, sold by mail order, usually feature a camera crew searching at parties for girls who are willing to expose their buttocks or breasts and sometimes perform sex acts.
The nation has confronted the same social angst as Britain over young women binge drinking. So the antics of Lohan and Spears may reflect the behaviour patterns of wider US society.
There is also little doubt that the explosion of new media also plays a role in highlighting and exposing the misdeeds of the Bad Girls.
The proliferation of celebrity magazines and websites such as TMZ devoted to 24-hour Hollywood coverage makes the smallest incident into a full-blown news story.
Coupled with the proliferation of camera phones, this means hardly any moment of a celebrity's life goes unchronicled.
That casts a revealing light back on the behaviour of previous female stars. An icon such as Marilyn Monroe certainly had her fair share of personal problems, partying and high-profile affairs.
But in her day, most of it was easy to keep away from the eyes of the prying media. That is not true now.
The result is a celebrity culture in which every misstep of a Lohan, Spears or Hilton is analysed and condemned across the airwaves or broadcast on the internet.
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