Class is a major factor in the knee-slapping hilarity of Spears' free-fall. Everyone is aware that this is a girl who came from backwater Louisiana. And everyone, from bloggers to tabloid editors to me, above, is careful to make note of Federline's grubby T-shirt, his and Spears' shared taste for Cheetos, his scruffy hairdos and pregnant girlfriend. Even Britney's acne, carefully covered by expensive makeup during her reign as sparkly kewpie doll, is now offered up for our jeering consumption. As far as American media and society are concerned, fat, dirt, junk food, drug use, bad skin and raw sexuality in grown women are low-class, and therefore valuable only as an irony-laced punch line -- think Chloë Sevigny at a Target opening in Brooklyn -- and not much else.

Spears seems well on the way to losing whatever professional or monetary rewards she was able to reap from her meteoric childhood ascension, in part because she was never the motor behind it. She was processed food: created and packaged and put on shelves. All the people who are close to her -- from her mother to her managers to her shrinks to her friends to her songwriters -- are the very people who made her so widely available, who have profited from her. Maybe she's sick of being told what to do and how to do it and what to wear and what to sing and how to look good and when to take a break, but her insulation from self-sufficiency has left her declawed, unable to make sharp choices to preserve herself. She probably should have had the chance to see through that marriage to her childhood pal Jason Alexander a few months ago. As screw-ups go, it wasn't so bad. He was an old friend; she could have figured out a way to undo a youthful snafu, could have learned from cleaning up her own mess. But her handlers arrived with mops, sending the bummed-out groom back in coach.

So no wonder she's freezing out people who tell her that Federline is bad news. I'm sure that half of his appeal is that every time she tells someone she's putting dildos in her mouth, every time she grinds into him on a beach chair, every time she tells the world she's refusing to sign a prenuptial agreement, she's giving the team that got her into this public predicament the finger.

But every young woman -- and young man -- should have someone whose voice they still want to hear. Someone who hasn't bilked and whored them and prevented them from developing a sense of self. Someone they trust enough -- even when they have their fingers in their ears and are shouting "I can't hear you!" -- to listen to, just a teeny-tiny bit.

And even though I don't know her, have never met her, and was late to her fame party to begin with, I want to do a stranger intervention. I want to take this young woman aside and say, Britney? Get. A. Prenup. Do not let this guy take half your money, along with your heart and your self-respect. Preserve what you can get out of what happened to you as a kid: your bank account, at least. It's not that I think she should stop seeing him or anything. Let her have her fun, get her heart broken. I want to tell her that I get it, I really do. He makes her feel good about herself in a way that doesn't require 2,000 sit-ups a day, powerful in a way that isn't about selling millions of records. She told People magazine that she'd "kissed a lot of frogs" before finding "her prince." And I understand that it must feel that way, especially after that protracted video-for-video shootout and devastating breakup with Justin Timberlake.

But I want to give her a tip -- and this is coming from someone who is still hoping to find her own prince: When he does show up, he's not likely to already have a girlfriend in her third trimester. (Heads up, Clare Danes.) And he's not going to be anxious to have pictures of you blowing him appear on the Internet. And hopefully he'll insist on signing a prenup, because he'll care enough about you to want to make sure you know that he -- unlike everyone else in your life -- isn't in this for the cash. He'll be in it for you.

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