This is the mid-week edition of Men Yell at Me, the newsletter about the people, politics, and places in the middle of America. This week, I am joining the Britney Spears discourse, and writing about what Britney means to an entire generation of women. And if we can ever stop projecting our fears, anxieties, and sense of control over her, and over ourselves.
The mid-week edition of this newsletter will always be free. But don’t miss out on paid subscriber perks like the weekly thread where this week we talked about our childhood ideas of “fancy.” It was a funny, surprising, and fascinating conversation.
I got into a fight about Britney Spears last week. I was heatedly recounting parts of her new memoir to a friend, who voiced some tentative support for Justin Timberlake. Which is fair.After all, Timberlake was also young when they were together, also in the public eye, also experiencing pressure. But that’s not what I was thinking at the time. Instead, I immediately got defensive.
At one point, I recounted how I’d read all the books about Spears, listened to all the podcasts, and seen all the documentaries. I was the expert in this conversation.
In response, my friend said, “I can see she means a lot to you. But I don’t know exactly what she means.”
Spears’ memoir, The Woman in Me, was published last week and has already made a lot of headlines for the revelations about the tightly controlled world of her conservatorship, Justin Timberlake demanding she have an abortion, their breakup over text message, Kevin Federline taking her children away. But beyond those heart-rending moments, the true loss at the center of the book is Spears herself.
The book has been marketed as Spears reclaiming her story and her voice. But its pages make clear that whatever that voice is, whatever that story is, it was taken away from her long ago, never to be returned.
In the book -- which Spears wrote with journalist Sam Lansky — Spears notes that experiencing stress and tragedy causes her to revert to a childlike self. The prose reads similarly childlike – as if the reader is having a very long talk with a 14-year-old who has seen some shit.
The reversion feels in part like reclamation. And yet, it never quite moves past the voice of a girl who just wants to be allowed to grow up. The title The Woman in Me, is a reference to a Spears song and also a promise that remains unfulfilled.
The tragedy of Britney Spears' life is that she so early on became an avatar of our cultural angst about the female body, youth, women’s behavior, and well, everything. It is too much for anyone, much less a tiny woman shoved into the spotlight too soon. She has never been allowed just to be herself – whoever that may be. And because she was denied that selfhood for so long, at 41 she still doesn’t seem to know who and what she is. She knows this. Spears is not unaware. And yet, that doesn’t solve the problem. So in the absence of a self, Spears becomes is a cultural metonym for all the fears and anxieties and of what all we want womanhood to be and all it has been.
Like Spears, American women are only valued as girls. Once the cute, sassy, outspoken little girls become women, have women’s bodies, women’s desires, and a woman’s exhaustion, our culture punishes us and seeks to control us, rendering us less free than we were as girls.
But of course, our cultural projection upon the canvas of Spears’ life has always been the problem. Why can’t we stop?
Britney Spears is almost exactly one year older than me. We both have December birthdays. I’ve known these facts as long as Spears has been famous. And I’ve charted my life in connection to hers. Early marriages. Children. Divorces.
I’ve talked to other women of my generation about this connection too. We all feel it. She is us. We are her and we are all stuck, somewhere in a world that takes everything from us, while demanding we perform ceaselessly.
Raised in a world of ‘90s girl power, we were taught we could be anything. But in reality, everything simply became our fault. Dressing for proactively meant being too sexy. Not dressing provocatively meant being a prude. In this world, Spears was both aspirational and a warning.
Reading through the memoir, I had a powerful moment of recognition, when Spears was talking about performing her song “Gimme More” at the 2007 VMAs. Spears had just delivered two children in two years, was going through a divorce, and was being forced to get back to work. Everyone mocked her for it. Her body was declared fat and disgusting by Dr Phil and made the butt of late night talk show hosts like David Letterman.
I remembered that because that’s the year I took up running. I hadn’t yet had children. But seeing those headlines, I felt that I too had better work on how I looked.
Tabloid headlines are an incredible corrective — point to one woman, call her disgusting, the rest will see and try to avoid being like her. And unfortunately for Britney Spears, that woman was so often her. It was others too — Jessica Simpson, Kirstie Alley, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Hudson, Kate Winslet, Michelle Obama, Kelly Clarkson, Mischa Barton, and before them, Princess Diana. The list is too long.
Like Spears, American women are only valued as girls. Once the cute, sassy, outspoken little girls become women, have women’s bodies, women’s desires, and a woman’s exhaustion, our culture punishes us and seeks to control us, rendering us less free than we were as girls.
But 2007 was the year I laughed when a friend dressed up like Spears for Halloween — as a bad mom having a breakdown. As if that weren’t where we would all end up in a few years anyway. Life had just gotten to her faster. Amanda Hess wrote about this moment in the book for The New York Times and noted that in hindsight, she too had judged Spears; she, too, now felt shame. I’m ashamed. I feel connected and implicated. What did I do to her? And in my judgment of her, what did I do to myself?
What I mean is, when I was thinking I was better than her, how did I learn to put myself and other women into a kind of cultural conservatorship ? How did I mute my own passions, my own desires, my own right to make mistakes?
Spears was later put under control through the court-ordered conservatorship of her father. As Spears points out in her memoir, she wasn’t perfect, but so many people are not. Why her? Why control her? Her family had their own reasons — maybe they really thought it was best for her. Maybe they just wanted the money.
But in the end, the control exerted over Spears has always felt like it was a way of controlling her unruly body. A body given over to performance, to display, a body that loves to move and seems so childishly unselfconscious, so fetishized and fawned over and debated and discussed. A body like that needs to be controlled. She couldn’t take energy supplements, take out her IUD, she had to work out constantly, work constantly, have long hair. She couldn’t drink alcohol or coffee.
She was restricted because she’d been unruly. She’d lashed out at the world that judged, criticized, hounded her, called her an unfit mother. And in response, she was restrained. But even her goodness was never good enough.
She writes. “I was so good, I thought, reflecting on how hard I’d worked in those shows. I wasn’t good, I was great. It was a line that would run through my mind repeatedly over the next couple of years when I thought about the ways in which I had not just met but exceeded the expectations that had been set for me — and how unfair it was that I still wasn’t free.”
Good enough to perform, never good enough to be set free.
It’s no accident that the #FreeBritney movement came during the height of the #MeToo movement — it was a natural outcome for a society grappling with the violence done to women’s bodies. #MeToo started conversations that asserted that women didn’t need to be good to be free from assault and harm, that women deserved to be free. And because we still identify with Spears, that cultural movement helped spark the momentum needed for Spears to finally get herself free of the conservatorship.
While she is now in charge of her finances and life, I don’t think Spears is truly free. Concerned fans still call the police when they see her playfully dancing with knives or when she takes a social media break. Her body and her performances still belong to us, we feel, and it’s still so hard to let go and just let her be.
I can’t even fathom what that kind of freedom would look like for her or for me.
Further reading:
I loved
’s essay on Spears in her newsletter.
“Once the cute, sassy, outspoken little girls become women, have women’s bodies, women’s desires, and a woman’s exhaustion, our culture punishes us and seeks to control us, rendering us less free than we were as girls.” YES!
This is so painful. And it is so much the plight of women throughout the ages. I remember working on a house flip with a carpenter when Sheryl Crow's "All I Wanna Do" came out, and he made the comment that she was coached. I really didn't understand what he meant, but my takeaway was that because it was a woman singing, she clearly didn't come up with that on her own. So if he felt that way about Crow, I can't even begin to imagine his assessment of Spears. I am connecting this to an interview I saw yesterday where Anthony Mason interviewed Troy Savin, who is now choreographing his show and his videos in much the same way that Spears, Madonna, Beyonce, and Taylor Swift are. My question is - have we evolved away from the brutality that Spears faced?
My real wish for Spears is that she gets some time to just sort things out for herself. I don't care if it's messy or not. I think 41 is young, so I do have a little bit of a particular perspective, but I also didn't spend my teens and 20s in the spotlight.