BRITTICISMS

Growing up as a dancer, gymnast, actor and singer, Britney was an easy idol for me to latch on to as a young teen. I grew up watching the Mickey Mouse Club on the Disney Channel and wished I could one day be on the show. Her dance routines in songs like “...Baby One More Time” and “Sometimes” were easy to follow. Occasionally, she’d throw in a back handspring (we called them flip flops back then) or a pirouette, making her movements all the more relatable. 

On the phone with my mother Sunday night, I told her I had just watched the documentary. “That poor young woman. Been through too much,” she told me. Although my mother is a 65-year-old Black woman, I believe she sees in Britney’s experience a particular type of cruelty towards young womanhood that many of us have faced. 

Britney Spears was a manifestation of young womanhood to the extreme, both praised for rigidly conforming to the oxymoronic desires of the public and destroyed for her efforts. From the outside looking in to her life, she embodied the spirit and tenaciousness of a new kind of teen and young adult woman, one who understood and could reclaim the power of her own sexuality and femininity. 

Nearly every public figure experiences some kind of fall, but Britney’s was particularly brutal, and it played out in front of an audience of girls who saw themselves in her. Watching the film now, from the safety of adulthood, I kept thinking that it’s a wonder any of us made it out of the 2000s in one piece.

Britney not only ushered in cultural resets in style (think low rise jeans) and music (think the rise of pop music), but also our understanding and derision towards the sexuality, independence and identity of young womanhood. Those both in support of and against her choices could project narratives (whether they be true or not) on what she represented for society as a whole. Conservatives could point to her and argue that the youth of today had lost all their morals (like when the First Lady of Maryland said she wished she could shoot her), while fans could say that she represented a new form of liberation. 

The suffering of a young woman can itself be a commodity. Even now, as we weep for Britney and all that she gained and lost, deep down we may also recognize ourselves in her fragility. What goes up must come down. But Britney’s placement on the pedestal was so high that her tumble down was all the more public, traumatizing and cruel. 

The media (both tabloids and the more reputable outlets) salivated over young women’s sexuality and terrorized them for making it visible. They relied on irony and judgment, both chastising women like Britney while also thriving on the exploitation of her image. Paparazzi turned stalking into a career path. As the documentary noted, some photographers could make up to $1 million dollars for the right shot of Britney. And the number of cameras hounding her were so large that she often couldn’t even do the things she aimed to do, like drive a car. Her life was more than just a spectacle; it was also impossible to live. Simple things like going to the store or leaving a building turned into headline news. 

In one scene of Framing Britney Spears, we see the star repeatedly say she is scared while trying to navigate through the hordes of (largely male) paparazzi. It’s clear that was not the first time she was ignored by the paparazzi or her handlers. 

Successful musicians sign up for a certain level of fame due to the nature of the job, but most don’t clamor for the sort of inescapable notoriety and utter lack of privacy we saw in Britney’s life at this time. What is a meaningful life if nowhere is safe?

If you were a basic girl, reading gossip magazines like US Weekly or watching reality TV, the mixed messages were coming for you, too. Be chaste, but be sexually liberated; be “real” but be perfect. No one girl—one woman—would ever be good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, or pure enough, but the world would certainly expect you to try, and punish you when you inevitably failed. 

Missing during this media era was a true, mainstream feminist voice to identify, dissect and call out this kind of behavior. Britney appeared on the cover of Jane magazine in 2002, but the left-of-center women’s magazine shut down by 2007, right around the height of Britney’s paparazzi frenzy. Imagine a generation of teen girls with sites that discuss women’s issues to dissect this frenzy. Social media outlets like Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook were around, but they were not the cultural behemoths we know them to be today. What could teen girls learn about the sexist treatment of the most visible young woman in the world if the discussions were not dominated by the salacious and instead were led with empathy?

The need (if there ever was one) for traditional tabloid media has been eliminated in the contemporary world. In response to the toxic culture of the aughts, the proliferation of social media has now made “regular” people the stars and turned the gaze inward. People today can find success through the commodification of themselves, making the pressure to perform, to put on a show for our audiences (no matter how small) all the more daunting. Celebrities, too, have jumped on board, creating their own narratives, whenever they want, whether good or bad. 

We see this with Britney to some degree through her Instagram account, which has become one of the only places where fans and onlookers can get a glimpse into her highly controlled life. It is also the place where some feel Britney is sharing coded messages to those concerned about her wellbeing. It’s difficult to tell if she is completely in control of what’s shared on the platform, but her content certainly feels more open and vulnerable than nearly anything else we’ve seen post-conservatorship. And if the conspiracy theories about her life hold even a semblance of truth, her account is also the place where Britney can regain agency, however small, in a world that has stripped it from her.