{"id":110373,"date":"2020-11-11T22:07:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-11T19:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/free-britney\/"},"modified":"2020-11-11T22:07:00","modified_gmt":"2020-11-11T19:07:00","slug":"free-britney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/free-britney\/","title":{"rendered":"#Free Britney"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Free Britney<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n
\n

We tell ourselves Britney Spears wants our attention. From the very outset of her fame, the idea that Britney wouldn\u2019t put it out there if she didn\u2019t want us to look made her audience feel better about gawking at the exposed midriff of a 17-year-old girl. But the three-note opening hook of \u201c…Baby One More Time,\u201d the song that would launch her to an almost unfathomable level of closely studied celebrity, is ominous, oddly funereal for a teeny bopper pop hit. It posed a question: \u201cOh baby, baby, how was I supposed to know\/That something wasn\u2019t right here?\u201dAnd with her introductory line as a solo pop star, Britney was already pushing back against the idea that she was asking for whatever her audience gave her.<\/p>\n

Britney the teenage pop star seemed to descend upon the world <\/strong>pre-fabricated: molded by the Disney corporation <\/strong>and gift-wrapp<\/a>ed by the Jive Records fame machine\u2019s marketing department, she was the perfect blonde package of a pretty icon, one that late-\u201990s America needed in order to collectively fetishize and punish its teenage girls. From the vantage point afforded by 22 years of hindsight\u2014including Britney\u2019s much-photographed 2008 mental health crisis and a subsequent 12-year conservatorship which has left her with no more right to autonomy than a child\u2014it\u2019s clear that Britney\u2019s celebrity has always been foundationally not right.<\/p>\n

But the captivating packaging marketers relied on to build her brand, along with audiences\u2019 almost religious devotion to the product, also served as a snare, and in the mid-2000s the world watched Britney\u2019s horror in real-time as she came to terrifying odds with the fact that there was no escaping herself. So many of Britney Spears\u2019s live performances involve a team of dancers releasing Britney from a cage to writhe and dance to a catalog of songs that are largely focused on feeling alone in the spotlight. Over the course of her more than 30-year career, the media<\/a> has loved, hated, and been concerned for Britney. <\/p>\n

Millions of fans have also loved, hated, and been concerned for Britney, just as I have since I was about 14 years old, though not usually at the same time as the headlines. In fact, Britney\u2019s figure\u2014be it \u201cMiss American Dream\u201d teen idol, skin-headed and furious, or sweetly blonde again\u2014has long been a graven image I use to mark time in my own narrative, caging my understanding of who Britney is with my own bullshit.<\/strong> Just like countless other fans, reporters, and paparazzi attempting to pick at the cracks in her persona to prove the \u201creal\u201d Britney mirrors whatever effigy they have made of her. Both lovers and haters at the altar of Britney make, tear down, and rebuild her in their own image, over and over again, ever confusing what is there with whatever it was they expected to see.<\/p>\n

\n

The first time I saw Britney\u2019s matching pink maribou scrunchies, I hated her fucking guts. She and I are from the same place: born two years apart to working-class families in tiny, perpetually economically depressed Louisiana towns with just a couple hundred miles between. We were both raised Southern Baptist and were both crowned alumni of the child beauty pageant circuit. We would both move on to become princesses, though admittedly, our paths were dissonant. <\/strong>She was America\u2019s pop princess with a TV and Broadway career to boast by the time she turned 14, and I was only ever the crowned sovereign of my high school gymnasium and once given the title of Little Miss Black Bayou, which some older boys shortened to Miss Swamp Thing and would yell at me when I was in my front yard.<\/p>\n

As a 14-year-old girl, I ran into Britney Spears\u2019s image everywhere I went, like a magnified funhouse reflection of the self I was both compelled to and punished for presenting to the world. In particular, I came of age in the overblown and ubiquitous cast of Britney\u2019s much-discussed virginity. It was splashed across the pages of teen fashion magazines, speculated about in whispers among my classmates, praised by the youth minister at church. The \u201cpurity pledge\u201d she\u2019d taken was similar to a Wednesday night youth group meeting in the gymnasium of my church\u2019s youth building, where we were asked to stand in front of our peers and promise Jesus we wouldn\u2019t fuck until legally having signed a paper allowing us to do so. Women were born white roses, we were told, but every new sexual partner browned a petal; even one bruise blighted the flower and too many meant handing our future husbands a rotted, crumbling mess soiling the entire wedding bouquet.<\/p>\n

My grandmother, a former town beauty, romance novel connoisseur, and ardent fan of Jesus, was of two minds about Britney. She hated the fact that such a pretty little girl wouldn\u2019t put some clothes on, but she loved the idea of a child telling reporters she hadn\u2019t fucked yet. \u201cI lived like a normal Southern girl,\u201d read Britney\u2019s 1999 Unauthorized Biography,<\/em> seemingly in response to my grandmother\u2019s concerns. \u201cI keep a prayer journal and I write in it every night.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

The team of adults who mapped Britney\u2019s success, including \u201c…Baby One More Time\u201d director Nigel Dick, have long maintained that both the sexiness and the proclamations of innocence were always Britney\u2019s idea. In fact, Dick has said he was against the modified schoolgirl costume, a relatively tame combination of thigh-high socks, miniskirt, and white button-down tied at the ribs over a sports bra, that Britney wore to dance down the high school hallways. His recollection intimates that he was practically bullied into letting the child have her own way:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Are you sure we should be going down this route with this young lady?\u2019\u201d Dick remembers himself asking at the time<\/a><\/span>, according to a recent oral history of the video. \u201c<\/strong>And the people who were in control, the record label and whatnot, said yes, this is the route we want to take.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a 1999 interview<\/a><\/span> with Rolling Stone<\/em>, Britney echoed the adults\u2019 alibi while also passing some of the blame off on other teenage girls: <\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018All I did was tie up my shirt!\u201d Britney defended herself to the grown man asking in a roundabout way what responsibility she bore for his and other adults\u2019 reaction to her body. \u201cI\u2019m wearing a sports bra under it. Sure, I\u2019m wearing thigh-highs, but kids wear those \u2014 it\u2019s the style. Have you seen MTV\u2014all those in thongs?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The year \u201c…Baby One More Time\u201d debuted was the same year my parents were so apoplectic at having discovered the white Calvin Klein thong I\u2019d bought with my allowance money in the laundry basket <\/strong>that I had to lie and say a friend left it behind. That was also the year my father showed up drunk at an amusement park <\/strong>to collect me and the same friend I\u2019d blamed for the thong, and raged from the front seat about the length of our shorts. <\/p>\n

\u201cYou look like whores,\u201d he told us. <\/p>\n

\u201cAre you sure you\u2019re not just drunk?\u201d I asked him.<\/p>\n

He pulled the car over to the side of the road and got out to reach for a door I simultaneously locked shut before he could pull me from the car,<\/strong> for what I\u2019d judged would most likely become a roadside beating. My stepmother got out and, illuminated by headlights, acted a silent movie conversation that ended with him getting back behind the wheel and wordlessly delivering us back home. I was wearing the same homemade Levi\u2019s cutoffs the night a boy from school unceremoniously shoved his hand into them and began to inexpertly claw around. I didn\u2019t like the hand, but I did like the attention. That year my stepmother, yet another former southern queen of various realms, also began to suggest highlighting my naturally dark brown hair a bit closer to a blonde that might \u201csuit me better,\u201d though I understood what she meant: make me prettier, like Britney and the countless other Louisiana girls who looked just like her. I did it out of some suspicion that life would be much simpler as one of the disconnected Barbie heads I\u2019d played with as a child, a pleasant face framed by a halo of fluffy yellow hair with nobody to draw attention or invite scandal. <\/p>\n

\n

In his 1961 polemic on the \u201cprocesses by which fame is manufactured,\u201d Daniel Boorstin complains that \u201cthe hero created himself; the celebrity is created by media.\u201d And from that first time Britney Spears led a squadron of high schoolers down the hallway in a cheerleading competition dance routine, the complaints began, explicit in punchlines and implicit in think pieces like the Rolling Stone <\/em>interview\u2014Britney\u2019s main talent was being telegenic. Britney couldn\u2019t sing, they whined, while simultaneously accidentally admitting that they couldn\u2019t actually hear her singing over the rush of blood to their giant boners. <\/p>\n

\u201cShe came out, and she was singin\u2019 about Pepsi. But you don\u2019t know what she\u2019s singing because she can\u2019t sing,\u201d comedian Louis Black yelled about Britney\u2019s Super Bowl Pepsi commercial in a 2002 standup special: \u201cTitty, titty, titty, ass, ass, ass! Titty, titty, ass, ass, more ass, titty, titty, titty, titty, ass, ass, ass, titty, titty, ass, ass!\u201d<\/p>\n

She was a product manufactured by suits in a boardroom, not an artist who deserved an audience, the joke went. But in her 2019 book<\/a><\/span> The Drama of Celebrity<\/em>, Sharon Marcus argues against the idea that media attention and clever marketing are the only ingredients for concocting a star: \u201cIf relentless publicity alone created celebrity, then every one of the many songs that ever benefited from payola would have become a major hit, and every heavily promoted actor would be a star,\u201d Marcus writes. Audiences create celebrity every bit as much as media, marketing teams, and the talent of the celebrity themselves, according to Marcus. Stars rise and fall by their usefulness to the narrative an audience projects onto them.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s the antichrist,\u201d I told my mother about Britney, unwittingly joining the media in creating a symbol on which to project the meanness that so often goes hand-in-hand with America\u2019s collective desire. I didn\u2019t yet have the vocabulary to explain that I was furious at her managing to get famous off perfecting the beautiful clueless virgin act when I was still trying to navigate how to pull it off without getting clawed at and beaten. But I can see now the bars of the cage in which her jailbait image, and how my participation as a hate-follower of it, locked Britney into the performance.<\/p>\n