Albert Schweitzer and Britney Spears?!

Posted on July 27, 2003 in Celebrity Folly Watch Sexuality

I write this knowing that many will not get the point. It’s very clear that I was better liked when I called Britney Spears a whore. When I retreat to a more ambiguous interpretation, panic ensues:

In his anxiety to eliminate any enthusiastic elements from the representation of Jesus, [Schenkel] ends by drawing a bourgeois Messiah whom he might have extracted from the old-fashioned rationalistic work of the worthy Reinhard. He feels bound to save the credit of Jesus by showing that the entry into Jerusalem was not intended as a provocation to the government. “It is only by making this supposition,” he explains, “that we avoid casting a slur upon the character of Jesus. It was certainly a constant trait in His character that He never unnecessarily exposed Himself to danger, and never, except for the most pressing reasons, did He give any support to the suspicions which were arising against Him; He avoided provoking his opponents to drastic measures by any overt act directed against them.” Even the cleansing of the Temple was not an act of violence but merely an attempt at reform.

Schenkel is able to give these explanations because he knows the most secret thoughts of Jesus and is therefore no longer bound to the text….

Recent comments on certain famous personalities, including my own, which purport to know their minds reminded me of that quote (taken from Lynn). When speaking of Britney Spears, all the commentators were guilty of Schweitzer’s mind-reading. With absolute certainty, some accused Britney of being sexually calculating. I suggested that perhaps we might be overwhelmed by an anxiety to eliminate any elements of naivite from our representations of Britney Spears. The fact is that we don’t know what is going on in her mind and a case can be made for an ambiguous figure, innocent in her carnality.

But it brings me back to an “overwhelming question” and you don’t have to ask “What is it?” because I am going to tell you: in all our cultural criticism of sex sirens, what are we doing focusing on what the women do rather than on what men want? Why no talk about how the media invents and pressures women from the heights of stardom to the little girls who show their navels in junior high to be mastubatory fantasies rather than thinking people?

I’m still stumbling on this and both the commentators still heap their venom entirely on Britney, ignoring Justin Timberlake, ignoring the press and the media who fling these stories and these pictures from their pushcarts, ignoring the venom of the petty jealousies against someone they don’t know, and focusing entirely on this one person, Britney Spears. Sure, she grinds her hips. But it’s the old problem: we arrest the hooker and let the john go. We choose to crown the woman with the iron crown of “whore” but have forgotten the word for the man (which may be “rake”). It’s a bad thing to be a “whore” but not a “rake”. In our sexually free society, where women supposedly have the right to make their own choices for their bodies, we still scream at them, still demand to know the state of their hymens. We castigate them for being sexual or asexual. We claim to know what their evil designs are and we say nothing, absolutely nothing about the men, the media, or ourselves.

Tanya suggested that we might desensitize ourselves to the evil connotations of the word “whore”. I countersuggest that we stop reading minds, that we grow comfortable with ambiguity in our pop (and our sacred) icons, that we turn the question back to ourselves. “Why am I thinking this? Why am I reducing this to matters of penises and clitorises? Why when I see the penis aroused and a hand over the clitoris, do I ignore the bouncing ridiculous hardness of the penis and want to talk only about what’s behind the hand, even though I deny that I care? What am I saying about me?” Pop icons appear to be something we run away to when the hard questions of life threaten to upset our conservatism — when it comes to evaluating our own motivations, our own living, our own complicity in the groupthink that buries women and men in absurd and painful roleplaying.