“What do you think it’ll take to get the paparazzi
to leave you alone?”
“Um… I don’t know.”
Why do we love to watch women fall?
“That night… was not a good night for her, but it was a good night for us,
because it was a money shot!”
This is the question that haunts 2021’s Framing Britney Spears,
as we watch the stages of Britney’s fall from grace in fast motion --
from the slut-shaming to the mental health problems
gleefully captured, if not triggered, by a predatory paparazzi,
to the highly suspect conservatorship that controls her finances and person
to this day.
“Britney’s father so far has refused to step down.”
So how and why did we let this happen?
“She said, ‘I don’t want anyone touching me.
I’m tired of everyone touching me’.”
Britney burst onto the scene in the late 90s
as a new kind of sex symbol -- her persona was a contradiction:
a hypersexualized schoolgirl, a naughty girl next door, a sexy virgin.
“On the one hand, you’re a sweet, innocent virginal type.
On the other hand, you’re a sexy vamp in underwear.”
“I wouldn’t say in underwear!”
And perhaps one reason she captured such global fascination
is that this contradictoriness is inherent to teen girlhood.
“She just captured that dichotomy so well of what a teenage girl is.
Teenage girls want to be adult women, but they also are kids.”
But because of this, Britney also became a target of moral panic --
as if she were causing young girls to desire to be sexy,
rather than reflecting a world that already oversexualized young girls.
Britney’s trauma illuminates three factors which converged to produce
a strikingly misogynistic moment:
the dawn of “famous for being famous culture” with its obsessive focus
on celebrity’s private lives;
the height of the tabloids’ dark power in a pre-social-media world;
and the lie of Postfeminism which falsely pretended that
systemic sexism had been vanquished.
Here’s our take on the story Britney Spears’ loss of control
told about us,
and whether or not we’ve truly moved on from this oft-repeating
misogynistic “fallen woman” soap opera.
“The main… thing that people became fascinated with
was her sort of unravelling.”
[Music]
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[Music]
To understand why people felt threatened by Britney,
we have to look at what she represented to them.
The 90s pop culture narrative was all about girl power,
from the Riot Grrrl Era of the early 90s to Buffy the Vampire Slayer
to the Spice Girls.
“Girl power is about being individual; being whoever you want to be.
Wearing your short skirts, your Wonder Bras, and your makeup.
And having something to say, as well.”
Starting with “Baby One More Time”’s release in Fall 1998 --
[Singing] “Hit me baby one more time!”
-- Britney channeled that power and embodied a striking bodily confidence
that drew both male and female fans to her.
But the biggest difference between Britney Spears’ pop stardom
and the women who came before her was the specific kind of sex appeal
she embodied.
Madonna may have sung about being touched for the very first time
and the Spice Girls alluded to practicing safe sex on “2 Become 1,”
but Britney was explicitly a kid, and was being marketed toward kids.
“I was feeling pretty good about my, uh, Barbie doll,
and then I saw the six new Britney Spears dolls.”
Britney’s appeal was not just sexuality, but an emerging or blossoming sexuality,
and implicit in that was a youthfulness.
“I think a lot of people were, like, uncomfortable with her sexuality.”
She was described as jailbait with a Lolita aesthetic.
“A lot of talk about your sexy Lolita look.”
While the 90s feminine ideal was already all about flat stomachs,
with the emaciated “heroin chic” fashion trend,
Britney took abs of steel to another level.
As Taffy Brodesser-Akner writes in Cosmopolitan,
“Britney's abs became the abs we aspired to.”
“I wanna know what kind of sit-ups you do.
I want you to teach me those sit-ups.”
The popularity of this particular body ideal gave rise to fashion trends
like crop-tops and low rise jeans, all designed to highlight a young,
almost prepubescent-looking body type.
Britney’s records sold because actual young girls (as well as guys)
liked her appeal,
but at the same time there was fear and discomfort around kids
emulating her.
“Kids made Britney Spears. And then, she remade them in her image.”
“I can’t help that.
And if the parents don’t like them to see it, then change the channel.”
Victoria Sands writes for Bitch Media that Britney and singers like her,
“were considered fetishistic ploys who blended innocence with eroticism,
subsequently corrupting their young audience.
And the media capitalized on this fictitious moral panic.”
“Firstly, I think it’s fantastic!
But if I had a little girl, I wouldn’t want her to emulate
Britney Spears, you know, if she was 12, 13.”
“These little girls start looking up to her because she is, like,
this cute little teeny-bopper, then all of a sudden
[Mimes ripping fabric].”
Britney was trapped into paying lip service to a rather puritanical idea
of young female purity --
what Jezebel’s Hazel Cills describes as the “purity movement” of the time,
which was driven by Evangelicals
and had support in the highest reaches of government.
Despite her highly sexed-up music videos,
in interviews Britney was advised to speak about her chastity
and virginity --
“Yes, I am a virgin, and I definitely want to try not to have sex
until I’m married.”
-- even while she maintained a high profile relationship
with Justin Timberlake.
“Are you really happy with her?”
“Of course, man! Look at her!”
“I know. She’s lovely, isn’t she?”
“She’s a-- She’s an 11.”
But the contradictoriness of Britney set her up for failure --
there was no way she could successfully continue to portray
both a madonna and a whore archetype in one package.
“How do you feel about all the constant speculation
about your virginity and whether you are a virgin or not?”
[Long pause] “I really wish I would have never said anything.”
Some of her contemporaries got off lighter
because they more decisively picked a lane:
Christina Aguilera -- whose sexy teenage debut single was even less ambiguous
than “...Baby One More Time” --
[Singing] “I’m a genie in a bottle, You gotta rub me the right way!”
-- said that her saving grace was never claiming virginity.
“Christina Aguilera! What’s-- What’s the big deal when I do it?”
“I think everyone always thought you had a different relationship
with young girls.”
Jessica Simpson went the other direction,
leaning further into the chaste, virginal “anti-sex appeal” persona.
“That one thing that-- that I want to share with my husband.”
Still, these other stars never quite matched Britney’s heights of fame
and influence, which inevitably made her a target.
Looking back on the 00s, it’s clear that this was
an exceptionally misogynistic era.
[Speaking over each other] “The one on the left…
the right… to the right.”
And we can understand what happened to Britney through the intersection
of three key phenomena:
First, as reality TV became mainstream,
audiences became more used to peeking behind the curtain,
and increasingly expectant of the intrusive coverage tabloids provided.
“There was always, uh, a little bit of a hunger for the unposed photographs.
As we had more of that kind of material in the magazine, you know,
sales just went, uh, up.”
In this time, we saw the birth of “famous for being famous” culture,
exemplified by Paris Hilton
(who became a household name without a traditional entertainment career).
Secondly, in a climate where the internet had growing influence
but social media hadn’t allowed celebrities to take some control
of their narratives,
the dark power of the tabloid press was at its height.
“I was the Photography Director of US Weekly for about a decade.
When I had a really healthy budget, it would be $140,000 a week on imagery.”
Gossip blogger Matt James called it a “perfect storm,”
when the internet, gossip magazines, blogs, and the tabloid press
worked together to create
“a society that was fixated on celebrity in a way that it had never been before.”
“There was too much money to be made off her suffering!”
Third, the treatment of Britney, and those who followed soon after her,
reflected the aftereffects of Postfeminism being popularized
in the 90s.
In the Postfeminist view, the women’s movement was declared
to have achieved its goals in the 70s and 80s;
the inequality women previously faced was declared to longer exist,
which made it pretty difficult to have tools to confront misogyny
when it still happened -- which it obviously did.
“Who do you want? The nice girl?
The pretty girl you can take home to mom?
Or the cheap, slutty girl you know puts out?
Everybody goes for Monica!”
In the 90s and 00s, slut-shaming was so taken for granted --
“You see Monica’s new hairdo? All slicked down with that hair gel.
At least I think it was hair gel.”
-- that a woman couldn’t call out this practice --
she could only defend herself as an individual by trying
not to get labeled in this way.
“Ever since the sex tape scandal,
I have to be really careful at how I’m perceived.”
“People are gonna say, like,
‘Oh, you know, all she’s good for
Is taking her clothes off’.”
[Music]
“How do you get control of your own life.”
“That’s why I am where I am today, it’s because I do have control.”
Framing Britney Spears challenges the prevailing narrative that Britney
was just the mindless product of a pop music machine,
reminding us that her success as an artist came largely from
her personal drive and agency.
“She was very creative. She was the one who knew
what she wanted to do, and she would make that happen,
or people would make that happen for her.”
In fact, it was Britney’s control that was precisely what fans sensed
in her and wanted to emulate.
“It isn’t the sex part that seems cool.
It’s the control and command over herself and her space
that seems cool.”
Entertainment Weekly’s oral history of “…Baby One More Time”
reveals that the concept for the iconic video was Britney’s idea.
“The concept is, like, taking place at a school
-- and it’s kind of my idea, also -- and it takes place at a school
and kids can’t wait to get out of school.
The video’s director Nigel Dick recalls thinking,
“I’m being told by a 16-year-old-girl what I should do…
[But] this girl is 16 and I’m a grown man;
perhaps she has a better perspective on her audience than I do.”
It’s striking that the “…Baby One More Time” video
also isn’t mostly focused on a girl trying to be sexy for a guy;
it’s full of sequences of Britney leading groups of her peers
in advanced choreography and impressive athleticism.
Yet while she may have had more control than many assumed as Britney the Artist,
Britney the Sex Symbol and Britney the Celebrity were another story.
“Shaved her head, attacked the paparazzi, more custody drama --
Thank you Britney Spears. Being bad is good for my business!”
As the focus turned increasingly on the superstar’s life and womanhood
instead of her work,
we can see how control was stripped away from her.
“Hey, she’s gonna to get out!”
“Wait, wait, wait, Britney!”
“Woah, let her go through, please!”
This culminated in her eventual conservatorship --
where control of her life, her finances, and her decisions,
was concretely taken away from her.
“The court gives someone else special powers to make decisions
for them.”
“It’s unusual because Britney is so young and productive.”
On the other hand, in The Cut story “Britney Spears Was Never in Control,”
Tavi Gevinson argues that Framing Britney Spears
overstates the amount of control Britney started with
to serve its narrative arc.
Gevinson writes, “it is absurd to discuss her image from that time as though
there was not an apparatus behind it, as though she existed in a vacuum
where she was figuring out her sexuality on her own terms.”
“Those are a little much […]
And I didn’t have approval over the thing.
So, that’s one picture imma say I felt a little weird about.”
She observes that the documentary is “eager to characterize Spears’s early
image as an expression of female power rather than the corporation-sanctioned
sexualization of a 16-year-old.”
And in the article, Gevinson’s friend Laia identifies Britney as a
commercially manufactured reaction to the Alanis Morissette “angry woman”
persona of the 90s --
who arguably better empowered girls to explore their own feelings
and be less male-facing.
So as tempting as it is to view Britney simply as an extension of 90s girl power
who was punished for being openly sexual,
that’s also oversimplifying.
It overlooks that she was a naïve underage girl,
being marketed as a sex symbol and “tricked” into photoshoots
that sent a message she didn’t understand when she was 16
and quote “didn’t really know what the hell I was doing.”
“The very end scene in the video in ‘Slave’
where the guy licks my face --
I didn’t know he was gonna do that.”
Perhaps the deepest truth about the moral panic around Spears
is that she got blamed for being a victim who reflected
(rather than caused)
the routine sexualizing of underage girls,
which was happening in her culture.
“I noticed last week, you had the most adorable, pretty eyes.
You have a boyfriend?”
What’s clear is that --
whatever creative control Britney did assert over her music, her image,
her performances --
this was chipped away at every step of the way.
Her artistry was devalued.
Accusations of lip-synching followed her throughout her career.
“*NSYNC, Britney Spears, why did they even have mics on?”
In their review of 2004’s Greatest Hits: My Prerogative,
NME wrote Spears “does artifice far better than she does soul,”
and that her “major talent is that of self-objectification.”
[Singing] “I’m a slave for you.”
The part of her life where she did feel like she had control was undermined,
as the part of her life where she didn’t became everything.
[Crying] “You have to realize that we’re people,
and that we need-- we just need… privacy, and we need our respect.”
[Music]
“And the headline is ‘Cover Up Lindsay, We can See Your Knickers,’
Of course you can see her knickers, your photographer is lying in the road
pointing his camera up her dress.”
The cycle of building a woman up only to very publicly kick her
off her pedestal
predated Britney and continued after her.
“What are they rehabbing first of all? What is on their list?”
[Audience laughing]
“What are they gonna work on when you walk through the door?”
“We didn’t discuss this in the pre-interview.”
Psychologist Joanna Konstantopoulou argues that part of our desire
to tear celebrities down is to do with the rarefied position they occupy,
saying: “People with fame shift into a different realm for us culturally,
and this causes us to believe that it's okay to treat them differently.”
“Critics, they’ll put you on top for a minute,
but then they’ll drag you down.
They’ll get sick of you, and they’ll destroy you.
They hate you, see, because you made them love you.”
This is especially true of famous women.
As author Sady Doyle writes: “As long as they also live out
impossible female ideals […]
they’re useful, as something that other women can aspire to
and fail to become.
But if they’re remotely unruly, if they’re flawed, if they’re in any way
recognizably human,
all of our discomfort with female visibility comes to the surface.”
“She needs to back off and put a pair of blue jeans on,
no shoes, and sing.”
The fallen woman trope goes all the way back
to Eve in the Garden of Eden,
and from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
to Verdi’s La Traviata to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,
we can easily see a common theme:
the fallen woman breaks with her society’s sexual norms.
“So that all men may know you are guilty of the sin of adultery,
and shun you in the name of evil.”
In the Victorian era, the British Library writes,
“‘Fallenness’ was associated with a downward spiral that began with sex
and led to loss of social position, ruin, and death.”
Likewise, one of the major catalysts for Britney Spears’ fall from grace
was Justin Timberlake’s reveal that while they were together,
she was not a virgin --
“Did you f[BLEEP] Britney Spears?”
[Laughing]
“Yes or no?”
“Oh man…”
“Come on, man.”
“Okay, I did it!”
-- as well as his casting her as the immoral woman
through his implication that she had cheated on him.
“The way that people treated her -- to be very high school about it --
was like… she was the school slut.”
If Britney and other “fallen” stars in recent decades could be
accused of anything,
it’s breaking the rules of their contract with the public --
by revealing that they were more complicated than whatever trope
they were initially cast as.
Britney Spears can't be the sexy virgin if she’s not a virgin.
Winona Ryder can’t be the fresh-faced ingenue
when we see her caught on a department store camera
stealing sweaters.
“The fact of the matter is that she’s been treated, in my opinion,
anything but like anybody else.”
The revelations of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements
have made us look with horror at the tabloid press
and confirmed beyond any doubt that the whole idea of a post-feminist
society was a damaging myth.
It’s imperative that we learn from this history
and don’t let it keep repeating itself.
“We are no longer going to be harassed, we are no longer going to be mistreated
or discriminated against or paid less money,
we are gonna create more opportunities for each other.”
But how far have we really come?
The reactions to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP”
mirrored the same moral panic that followed “…Baby One More Time.”
“And if anyone was to watch that video, you would see that, uh, you know,
she acts out very kinda sexually explicit moves,
and twerking has become like a fun thing for little kids now.”
The tragedy of former Love Island and X Factor presenter Caroline Flack
taking her own life revealed that the tabloid press remains a vicious,
damaging institution,
one now aided and abetted by online trolls.
"Anyone who’s ever compared one woman against another on Twitter,
knocked someone because of their appearance,
invaded someone else’s privacy,
who have made mean, unnecessary comments on an online forum,
need to look at themselves.”
The UK tabloids have given Meghan Markle the same old treatment:
building her up in order to gleefully tear her down,
while adding racism into the picture.
“Allegations that she’s associated with very racialized forms of crime,
there’s been discussions about her exotic DNA.
Her newborn baby was compared to a baby chimp!”
For all the bad social media has added to the climate,
there’s a lot of good, too --
not least because it’s taken power away from the tabloids.
Celebrities can at least attempt to control their own narratives
and speak directly to their large followings.
And the #FreeBritney movement has shown that fans truly do have
the power to be a positive force protecting a celebrity’s wellbeing.
“We stand up for you Britney Spears,
and we won’t stop until you reach freedom.”
In the end, the biggest lesson in Britney’s story
is that we owe it to everyone -- even the most supernatural of stars --
to see them as people,
and make sure they’re treated that way, too.
“I know at some point she will tell her story,
and I am so grateful for when that point comes.”
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[Music]