This is the second column I’ve written about Britney Spears in the past 24 hours. The first one, I admit, went way over my word count. It was about how uniquely poisonous the period from 1998 to 2011 was for female celebrities. It mused on how the rise in online pornography at that time influenced how Spears, in particular, was presented (sexy schoolgirl! Kissing Madonna! All the PVC fetish gear!), but primarily it spent a lot of time describing the worst moments of Spears’s life. Shaving off her hair, attacking a pap’s car with an umbrella, being wheeled off to a psychiatric ward on a trolley while news helicopters wheeled overhead.
I don’t think I was prurient or in any way gloating, but it’s compelling to work out exactly which words to use to describe, for instance, Spears’s Instagram feed, where she ― now almost certainly retired, traumatised, from live performance ― regularly films herself dancing around her huge marble mansion, her expression alternating from “little girl, happy just to dance” to “professional, sexy Britney”.
There is a poignancy to someone totally alone and still struggling with mental illness continuing to dance as if they are onstage at Madison Square Garden in 2003. She really can dance like no one’s watching. Except, of course, on Instagram 42 million people are watching.
• The Woman in Me by Britney Spears review: the ‘blind rage’ of pop’s most exploited princess
• Britney Spears: I had an abortion while dating Justin Timberlake
As with all iconic pop figures ― David Bowie, Madonna, Taylor Swift ― you can theorise a lot about Spears.
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Then I took a break and downloaded her already controversial autobiography on Kindle ― it was released as I was writing. And now I don’t want to write about Britney Spears at all. I want to write about the men in her life instead.
Oh, the allegations about the men in her life. Her father, Jamie Spears, constantly criticises Britney for being “fat” or not working hard enough. It’s Jamie who goes to court for the unprecedented conservatorship over Spears, taking control of her money and every aspect of her life. Even to the point of disallowing coffee and insisting she does not remove her IUD, even though she is a multimillionaire mother of two. The day the conservatorship comes through, Spears describes him turning up at her house and saying, like something from a horror film, “I’m Britney Spears now.”
Then there’s Justin Timberlake. In pop lore, it has long been “known” that Spears was the Bad One in their relationship ― she cheated on him and he released Cry Me a River in retaliation, the video for which shows Timberlake breaking into the house of a Britney lookalike by smashing a window and then stalking her as she takes a shower. Even then, as Spears was shamed in front of her entire industry, it was seen as pretty creepy. Now Spears alleges Timberlake was the first one to be unfaithful ― and on multiple occasions.
It is also Timberlake who triumphantly announced on live TV, like some superbro, that he had taken Spears’s virginity. The standout Timberlake story, however, is Spears’s allegation that she got pregnant by him and then, on his urging, had an abortion, which left her in agony on the bathroom floor for 20 hours. Timberlake chose to comfort her by getting his guitar, “and he lay there, strumming it”.
As anyone who has seen Barbie will know, “men playing their guitars at women who really don’t want them to play their guitars right now” has been established as a trope of hopelessly needy boy-men. The scene provoked barks of recognition from cinemas full of women across the world. To learn that the one-time Sexiest Man in the World “did a Ken” while his girlfriend was bleeding on the floor is quite the game-changer in terms of Timberlake’s image. It is an anecdote that makes the whole world Team Britney.
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The reason reading Spears’s account of her life suddenly made me want to write about the men in her life, rather than Spears herself, is because, in this culture, it’s far easier to see and write about damaged women than the men who damaged them.
For classic Troubled Britney ― hair shaved, crying on her doorstep, stumbling around the stage at the MTV Awards ― is merely the visual end-product of the unseen hours, and men, around her. Time and time again, when we see “messy” women ― Amy Winehouse, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, pre-deification Princess Diana ― we think they somehow got messy on their own. That’s all we talk and write about. But just as crime scene pictures don’t show the burglar ― just the broken window ― so “messy women” are not the whole story. They’re the contorted shape that has been left after unseen hands have done their work.
Unseen until the autobiographies come out.
