Britney Spears Revisited

Posted on July 25, 2003 in Celebrity Folly Watch Privacy Sexuality

I owe Britney Spears an apology for what I said the other day. She did not deserve to be called a whore.

No, no one yelled at me about this. Not even Lynn. It was just as I discussed related issues (here and here) that something sank into me: just because you’re getting paid good money for your appearance, doesn’t mean that you’re not a victim.

In an email to a friend about this, I wrote:

I’m feeling like I’ve attacked a well-paid victim of the same mindset [that fuels sales of the Hunting Bambi videos]. I’ve long understood that rape victims, for example, often turn promiscuous. For this reason, I use the term “whore” very guardedly: that gnarly barfly you meet might have an awful history she is working out. What is needed is compassion, not contempt and not using her sexually.

….now I am asking “maybe I missed something when I wrote that piece. Maybe there’s a kinder, gentler approach. Maybe it’s the people who published the story and made an issue of her virginity who should be ashamed.” That Britney felt pressured to come out and declare the status of her hymen now strikes
me as tragic.

Britney Spears starves herself because thousands of men want her to be thin, a subject for their fantasies. Her comments about her not having sex until after marriage may have been an attempt to protect herself from mass lechery: “look but do not make me into a fetish object. Do not think for a moment that because I am Britney Spears and appearing in hundreds of Pepsi commercials on millions of television sets that I live for your sex thrills. This is how I make a living, how I strive for future security. My being Britney Spears gives no man the right to grope me. I retain my rights as a person, my right to control my body.”

The press held her to her promise of virginity. They watched, like amorous carrion eaters, for signs of her failure. She thought that her words would end the curiosity. She miscalculated. They inflamed the passions of the men and women who decide what is news and what is not. They made it a sport to see if Britney Spears would hold true to her promise or not. The readers and writers of celebrity magazines skulked in the shadows, waiting and watching until Justin Timberlake came along.

Someone stole a home video from the beach house she shared with Justin Timberlake. The police who recovered it viewed it and declared it “boring”. The video showed

footage taped inside a car while driving through Alabama, and scenes of people playing on the beach. In other words, nothing that would compromise Britney’s reign as America’s most famous virgin.

The article said that she also wanted to marry Justin, that he was “the One”.

Recent events have proved that he probably wasn’t. Last November, Timberlake released a music video showing a Britney Spears look-alike getting into a car with another man. He breaks into her house and leaves a tape showing himself making out with another woman.

When pressed, Timberlake said “The video is not about her. The video is about me.”

In that statement, we may understand what happened there. Justin Timberlake thought only of himself.

Timberlake’s warmaking forced Britney to come out of the closet on the issue of her virginity. He told all about their relationship, about oral sex and intercourse. The pundits, the talk show hosts, and the journalists ate it up. They played the story and pressed Spears for her side of the story.

I still don’t care what passed or didn’t pass between the portals of Britney Spears’s maidenhood. It’s none of my business, none of the press’s business, none of your business. No human being gives up her or his rights to privacy when fame raises them to popular attention and simultaneously dumps them into the Second Circle of the popular imagination. Right now many people are cackling because Britney Spears has been shown to be a liar. I don’t think that she should have been questioned in the first place about her sexual relations with Justin Timberlake. I think that as soon as Justin Timberlake began talking about matters which should have remained private between them, he should have been dumped from the talk show circuit.

But we watched and we talked, not about Justin — he attained a perverse godhood for his role in deflowering and betraying the lovers’ secrets of Britney — but about Britney. I joined in. I called her “whore” and I was wrong to do so.

It’s disgusting how we exalt a boor who tells all and deprecate a woman who changed her mind. But then there is increasing evidence that marketing favors the sexual interests of young men over the dignity of young women.

It’s all too easy for us to take potshots at the famous when they fail in these small things. No California cities slid into the sea. No soldiers or civilians died because in the moment of passion, Britney gave herself to the man she thought she loved enough to marry. Yet the state of her vagina became a subject for intense discussion: we wrote about it, we paid for the magazines, we watched the CNN reports. Men drooled and women turned green with jealousy. It became all the rage to hate Britney Spears, a person that none of us really knows.

I still dislike the commercialization of her body. As is usual, however, the American public has heaped the blame entirely on her. It analogizes to the way we release the johns and make the prostitute serve time in jail: we may reach for her and grope her, but we blame her for what we do. No one shames Pepsi Cola for making her into a dancing puppet. No one castigates petty journalists and pundits for not showing more compassion.

So I apologize to Britney Spears. Her sex life is her own to have and to cherish. Screaming at her because she failed to meet the standard we expected her to keep for ever is a wicked thing. Many of us have changed our minds about who we will sleep with and who we won’t. Britney is a young woman, growing up still in a world of decisions being made and remade. She, like everyone else, has the right to change her mind and she, like everyone else, deserves the right to privacy.

Again, I was wrong. Britney Spears does not deserve to be called a whore. She’s a famous young woman with a free mind and a struggle to face. Some people think that makes her a target worth shooting at. I don’t.

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For an earlier article on the issue of Anorexic Actresses, click here.