It's fair to say that 2023 was a good year for blond girl-culture icons with a long history of being underestimated. Britney Spears may not have enjoyed the rapturously smooth sailing of Taylor Swift or Barbie but her calendar-year triumphs, including a best-selling memoir, "The Woman in Me," a newly clean romantic slate and a song, "Toxic," that's racking up record numbers on Spotify, look from the outside all the more gratifying precisely because they're so hard won.
In the 25 years since her first hit song debuted, Britney Jean Spears has been many things — a pop star, a sex symbol, a mother, an icon, a survivor — but for as long as she has been a person of note, she has also been a source of near-constant concern. We're fascinated by her. We're worried for her. And it's tempting to declare 2023 as the year Ms. Spears finally got the redemption arc she deserved. But this year also suggeste d that she might not be the one who needed redeeming.
Ms. Spears has almost always been entirely a media creation, and too many of us watching her came to believe the media when it told us that we had a right, as consumers, to get into her business and make ourselves comfortable there. The fevered reaction to her memoir, even from her biggest fans, makes it clear that many people aren't ready to accept that she has said what she wants to, is grateful for the support of her fans, has plenty of healing ahead of her, and might just want to be weird on Instagram while she does so. The ongoing refusal to let Ms. Spears have the last word — to continue to undermine her, second-guess her, disregard her boundaries, treat her as an unreliable narrator — is a thread that runs through her entire career.
It's never been just about Britney. It's about the public and the media and the cultural expectations of how young women should act, how much power they can be trusted with, whether they deserve to be heard and whether they can be believed. And if her over-examined life so far has taught us anything, it's that well-meaning concern becomes real-life cruelty in irresponsible hands.
I was never Ms. Spears's target demographic. But because I was a media critic and music journalist when she exploded onto the scene in 1998, and because it was a time before social-media algorithms and atomized newsfeeds, there was simply no escaping those instant-earworm singles and the hype around the person singing them. The enthusiasm of Ms. Spears's intended audience — teens and tweens who called into radio shows and crowded Times Square for MTV's "Total Request Live" — was soon overshadowed by the reactions of adults from whom she sought neither attention nor approval. Grown men cast themselves as hapless bystanders magnetized by the exposed midriff and schoolgirl pigtails of a knowing Lolita. (One journalist led a 1999 profile by noting that the logo on the singer's pink T-shirt was "distended" by her "ample chest," a description that still makes my skin crawl.) Wide swaths of column space were given over to concerned mothers fretting that Ms. Spears's undeniable sexuality posed a grave threat to the virgin eyes and ears of their own children.
From the beginning, Ms. Spears embodied an American ideal — a blond, white, Southern Baptist girl with a sweet drawl and impeccable manners — and so she was also the perfect screen on which to project adult anxieties in the name of protecting the children. The People magazine cover story "Too Sexy Too Soon?" set the template for pearl-clutching media. As she writes in "The Woman In Me," she was "a teenage girl from the South. I signed my name with a heart. I liked looking cute. Why did everyone treat me, even when I was a teenager, like I was dangerous?"
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
No comments:
Post a Comment