There’s a moment in Britney Spears’ new memoir where she’s called into an MTV studio and forced to watch a video of strangers complaining that she was “too sexy.” Spears, then 18, had just performed at the Video Music Awards from the year 2000where she had ripped off a shiny black tuxedo to reveal sequined nude pants and a sequined nude bra, and pedestrians wandering around New York’s Times Square had decided she had crossed a line.
MTV had produced the awards show and Spears’ performance had paid off, but she also wanted a piece of the backlash. Now we could see Spears see us criticize her. She was expected to argue in her defense, but she did not know what she had done wrong. “All she wanted to do was sing and dance,” she writes in “The Woman I Am.” “Why did everyone treat me, even when I was a teenager, like I was dangerous?”
The title of Spears’ English memoir (“The Woman in Me”) is part of the lyrics of her 2001 ballad “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.” The song functions as an articulation of the suspended adolescent state over which she once ruled. But now, more than 20 years later, it also seems like a premonition. First, Spears was robbed of her childhood and then denied her adulthood.
When Spears’ debut single, “…Baby One More Time,” exploded like a frost bomb on my school campus in 1998, something about her did seem dangerous. I was 13 years old and clumsily going through my second year of high school. She was 16 years old and climbing the charts with a lot of guts, and in the video she was just pretending to go to school.
Spears arrived as the queen of the girls, but it wasn’t just for girls. The boys decided that her music sucked, but that she was beautiful. The girls could have her voice, but the boys would get her body.
Looking back now, of course Spears doesn’t seem dangerous. What was perverse was the attention she paid him. Through her I learned that the bodies of women and girls had a speculative value. Men determined their value.
In 2007, Spears returned to perform at the Video Music Awards, this time a little against his will. She had just had a baby and was fighting with Kevin Federline, her ex-husband, over custody of her children. Her team, she writes, had pressured her to promote her new album and “show the world that she was okay.” She appeared in a sparkly bikini and danced nervously to her song “Gimme More.” “It wasn’t right,” she writes. She was exhausted and lacking in rehearsal. This time her actions were not presented as a danger to American youth, but to her own children.
Now, as I read about the event in Spears’ book, I felt embarrassed and then angry. Now I am, like Spears, a mother of two children, and they are about the age her children were when she was on that stage. Once again I could imagine living in a body like hers, which was presented as sad proof that I had lost her waist, her control, and her courage.
Of course I was exhausted—I had two babies. Of course, she hadn’t rehearsed — she had two babies. When I rewatched the performance recently, it looked like a horror movie. I saw a new mother forced to do a sexy dance for America, and the quality of her performance determined whether she could keep her children.
The most direct portal into Spears’ mind lately has been Instagram, where she posts wordless videos and photos of herself in thongs, crop tops or nothing at all, smiling and dancing. In the book, she explains that after a life of being “pressed and posed,” she no longer cares what people think. Your posts seem unpolished. It seems that he is investigating his new powers.
AMANDA HESS. THE NEW YORK TIMES
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6973962, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-11-07 19:00:07
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