Britney Spears: The Woman in Me
Britney is a feminist now because that's what happens when you've been through hell
Britney’s highly anticipated memoir The Woman in Me came out yesterday and lord, my heart goes out to this popstar. I knew it had been rough but I don’t really care for media narratives of my girls so I’ve understood the Britney of recent years mostly through her unique approach to instagram (spiritual quotes/nude dancing with knives) and the fan-led Free Britney campaign. It goes without saying that Britney is important to me. She was it when I was a lass. I remember exactly where I was when I first heard …Baby One More Time, a song that has it all as far as I’m concerned: strange punctuation, my spiritual husband Max Martin on no-nonsense production (he survives the memoir, phew), that weird combo of dark and light that defines all my favourite pop music. And Britney had it all too: the dance talent, the acres of flat stomach that defined 90s hotness, and a distinctive voice. She got shit at the time for not being a good singer and (jjeeeeeessussss GOD) not writing her own songs (this the rock I am forced to push up the cultural criticism mountain every day) but a shout-out to the music critic who wrote that Britney is a genius interpreter of material. I’ve held onto that useful phrase ever since. Performers should concentrate on perfecting the gifts they’ve been given.
We don’t learn too much about how Britney came by her gifts, how she honed them or what it felt like to realise she was a star. I would love to live inside the mental image of Britney as the golden girl of 2000, but her book is more about the dark than the light. I have to believe there was a time that she wanted, from the bottom of her broken heart, to be a popstar, to dance and hear the cheers of the crowd and have people know her face. But the early chapters of the book skim quickly over her childhood, defined by generations of abuse and alcoholism by her father and grandfather and where women existed to intercept the flak. Like most music memoirs, with the exception of Mariah Carey’s, becoming a popstar seems relatively easy to achieve. One minute Britney is a cute high school girl playing basketball and having sleepovers, sought-after by boys and destined in all likelihood for early marriage, then suddenly she’s in Sweden recording her first album. Britney isn’t talking to her mum these days, for good reason, but I would love to know how this all came about. Britney’s dad later cottons on to how lucrative Brit could be for him, but in her earlier life, her mum is the one arranging things with lawyers and agents. Just like the gymnastics moms I wrote about a few weeks ago, glittering careers are often wished into being by a mother who has hopes for her kid and also some secret hopes of living through them. Just like the gymnasts, Britney pushes her body to extremes and accrues physical and mental injuries: it’s quite devastating to learn that she was dogged by a knee injury she got while rehearsing for Sometimes, which was only her second single. Was the golden window that narrow? What drives people to make these sacrifices? Money yes, but also for an immortal moment. For Simone Biles, it’s the Olympics, for Britney her platform was the MTV Video Music awards, where she created iconic pop music moments from the Slave 4 U performance to the extremely silly circus around her kiss with Madonna. She tells us that the snake she famously danced with during Slave 4 U scared her and I can’t help but notice the performance opens with her stuck in a cage with an actual real-life tiger. It seems almost impossible to bring sparkle to a situation under these fight-or-flight conditions. I’ve been in a room of snakes myself (haven’t we all ladies) and it’s highly unnerving and exhausting on a really deep human level. You feel like you have to keep an eye on it at all times. Britney says in the book that she never kept an eye out for herself. She comes across as heartbreakingly innocent and happy to say yes and go along with whatever, always obeying video directors, producers, and her parents.
I really wanted to know all the details of the costumes Britney wore on tour, what it was like shooting videos, how it felt to dance that way, and I was disappointed at how detached and lacking in detail the chapters about her career were. It became clear why this is when we get to the meat of the book, the story of how Britney was controlled and imprisoned by her father while under a legal conservatorship, where an adult loses their legal right to decide things for themselves. “Imprisoned” is not hyperbole: the moment that broke Britney was when she was forcibly sent to a rehab facility. She had been sent to rehab before during her decade under the conservatorship but this one was brutal: an indefinite stay where she was put on lithium. This was especially scary to her because her own grandmother had been medicated with lithium for depression and ended up taking her own life, by gunshot on the grave of her lost child. The deep roots aren’t lost on Britney: the major weapon in her father’s arsenal was that he could prevent her from seeing her two sons. It’s this that really broke Britney: after a failed attempt to visit her children, a paparazzo barrages her with questions about how it makes her feel. She eventually gets out of her car and hits his car with an umbrella. This moment became famous for showing her loss of control, second only to when she shaved off her hair, in an attempt to “ruin” her looks that ended up fatally undermining her authority with her family. Her prettiness was her only currency with them and her mother wouldn’t look at her or talk to her without a mane of blonde hair, the ultimate symbol of traditional American white femininity, which Britney identifies as one of her most appealing characteristics – to men.
Britney doesn’t know what she wants, except that it isn’t this. It’s hard to tell if she wanted fame or a performing career at all. Her voice finally comes alive on the page when she’s talking about her children. She’s understandably fixated on them as the meaning of life, the relationships that will save her. Like Mommy instagram writ large, having children gives her purpose and activates some old belief that babies, and by extension her, will be protected: “I wanted everyone to stay away: stand back! There’s a baby here!” In the end, no one protects her. She says she picked Kevin Federline because he “held her and said it was all okay”, and then he lied to her and colluded with her father. She is very pro-sex and physical love in the book and is all too ready to fall in love with every man she likes. In the culture Britney came from, women are required to be small and submissive, with the supposed trade-off that men will be strong and protective. It’s a strangely enduring myth. Women are most vulnerable to abuse when they have the least power, in their teens and around pregnancy and it makes sense that thee woman of the era has these common experiences, blown up to jumbotron size by fame and money. This book would have been a better read if it acted like it was the story of a woman done deeply wrong by her family and the justice system, and didn’t bother with the VMAs and what Justin Timberlake did. However, if you’re interested in how much of a twat JT is and you’re prepare to cringe inside-out, try this sample from the audiobook, for which Michelle Williams should win an Oscar.
Even better than going after Justin, who did unfortunately make one of the best songs I’ve ever heard in pursuit of dissing her, Britney flames the industry and the world for the double standards they applied to her and to her male equivalents. Sometimes talking about the double standard feels toothless because if you know how hateful and depressing it is to be treated worse just because of your external shell, then you already believe; if you think it’s apt and maybe even nice that women get treated differently, the words “double standard” fall softly. What, you don’t want someone to hold the door open for you? The double standard slammed the door on Britney. She worked hard and always said yes, but then she took some energy supplements and faced mental health issues and her children were taken away from her and she was put in a prison she paid $60,000 a month for, where she says she’s still amazed she didn’t kill herself. As she points out, male singers cheated on her, took all kinds of drugs, abandoned their children when they felt like it, and acted unprofessionally in front of important people, and they were rewarded for both the good and the bad behaviour. The question of what real power is repeatedly enters your mind while reading Britney’s story. When I saw pictures of her in 2000, I thought she had all possible kinds of power that money, beauty and fan love could get you. But in reality her father paid himself more from the Britney Spears funds than Britney Spears was paid herself. Her bodyguards went to work for her ex-husband Kevin Federline. When her tiny children were physically taken from her, she couldn’t stop it. She actually had no power, she was just the physical front for the men who did. I really wish this story wasn’t so common in pop.
Britney couldn’t stop her family from using their trust relationship to manipulate her. Her dad walked into her apartments and houses as if he owned them, not her. When he took over legal guardianship of her life, he sat down at her desk and informed her “I’m Britney Spears now”. The family colluded with the press to spread the image of Britney as chaotic and “bad”, which helped to sway the courts and ultimately keep them in control of her and the money she made by continuing to perform even as she was legally made a child. Britney says that she felt like the “bad” kid in the family even though she was the cash cow and celebrity. There was enough second-grade fame to go around, as her mother and sister wrote their own books, scored their own deals and spoke about poor, pathetic Britney on talk shows. The media thought it all made sense. She was considered trashy because her clothes and increasingly unconvincing blonde hair extensions weren’t considered classy. I remember thinking that if I had hair extensions I would want Jennifer Aniston’s long, silky ones rather than Britney’s ratty, overly blonde ones, which had briefly been the dernier cri in hairstyles but turned into a strange, false version before our eyes. Britney describes how she wore wigs and refused to toss her hair, in defiance of her team and what they wanted from her: sex appeal. On every front, Britney was broken down. The completeness of the deception is breathtaking, but there must be a million stories where people feel trapped inside a prison like this, where family is all, the community gossips act as the media, and Justin Timberlake is just your ex-boyfriend who chats shit about you down the pub or on social media. Britney proves another life is possible, but she can’t yet show what that life will look like. A wise friend told me that when you walk away from your life as it was, the ground is left empty. You can’t predict what will grow there, or how long it will take. It’s the definition of a wasteland.
It’s uncertain what kind of Britney has emerged from this trauma. While she was in the facility, a nurse showed her footage of a Free Britney gathering. Because the protest was about Britney, who if you need reminding is a stupid pop singer who doesn’t even write her own songs, the Free Britney movement was sneered at to begin with. Let’s not rewrite history to act like it wasn’t. The people who started and pushed that movement forward are really heroic for pushing against the tide and it’s a golden story in the history of fandom, a phenomenon which is shaping culture behind the scenes even if you aren’t very online. Britney says it meant everything to her to see that from inside the facility, a place so bleak she lost her faith in God. It just goes to show that activism is always worth it.
Things for Britney will always be teetering. The children who define her world say they supported the conservatorship, and have limited contact with her now that they are getting old enough to make their own choices. They didn’t attend her wedding in 2022 to Sam Asghari, who she writes tenderly about but who she’s now separated from, too recently to correct the book. There is life after horror for Britney but it’s not music, not family, not romantic love. She calls the remaining area her “spiritual” life. I think this means her sense of self, which will be hard to craft again without all these things, but I hope for the best for her.
I really liked the new Britney. She’s a feminist and she’s angry, which I think are more worth having than any random husband who will run off and try to be a rapper (Kevin Federline is currently focusing on his DJing). She notes early in the book how people struggled to understand the full woman she was: "No one could seem to think of me as both sexy and capable, or talented and hot. If I was sexy, they seemed to think I must be stupid. If I was hot, I couldn't possibly be talented." It’s almost like these are constructs intentionally designed to limit women! Can women ever have what we’re commanded to have in terms of beauty and desirability but also gain success, and reap the rewards of success, by having talent and being authoritative? Britney sees things clearly now, after having stayed very innocent for a long time. She managed to escape the conservatorship by bringing her mind fully back into her body, after years of effectively being off with the fairies for her own mental protection. She had to turn against everyone who defined her identity and rely on herself. It must have been hard to do when she was so highly controlled: “My body was strong enough to carry two children and agile enough to execute every choreographed move perfectly onstage. And now here I was, having every calorie recorded so people could continue to get rich off my body.”
As the reviews come in and the book is scraped for “most shocking revelations”, I feel aggravated at the news cycle and in particular how publishing treats popstardom, an issue I take very personally. The publishing company is probably right and the majority of readers want dish from behind the headlines more than they want to learn about the experience of going on TRL or what it’s really like to tour (boring, according to Britney). Their marketing campaign includes Britney-themed spin classes (deeply ironic given her comments on being forced to lose weight) and discos with “glitter bars”. I want to go to a Britney glitter bar but as a reminder: this is a book about abuse. Is there a third kind of reader somewhere between those two binaries or will books about women in music always be pushed at an imaginary “spin class woman” who they assume will not tolerate any adult analysis? Fans want to learn secrets so they can get closer to their idol, but even if this was possible, Britney really isn’t that person anymore. Fandom’s demands are shaping publishing, as the industry tries to understand the role of influencer marketing and as “low” culture matures along with the millennial demographic. Gaze into the abyss, publishing!
How about instead of spinning to “celebrate” the release of this book let’s all do a big leap: Britney practises her leaping a lot. It’s really fun to do. Enjoy your body how it is today; Britney does. Listen to her best album, Blackout, and her worst album, Glory, because she’s extremely proud of both. Oh Britney, I’m extremely proud of you.
Super interesting thoughts-- I feel like I don't need to read the book now and appreciate the time saved! Also appreciate the snake joke.