Louise O'Neill: The world set Britney Spears on fire and we watched her burn
Since the Framing Britney Spears documentary was released a few weeks ago, there has been much conversation around our collective complicity in the treatment of the popstar.
Last April, I spoke on an episode of The Vulture Club podcast. Guests are asked to pick a cultural moment they still think about, the obsession to which they constantly return.
I chose Britney Spears and, in particular, her abs. I spoke about the impact the Hit Me Baby, One More Time video had on me as a thirteen-year-old girl, this dazzling star with her white teeth and tanned skin, her shirt tied up to show off her flat stomach.
She was the epitome of beauty; the boys drooled over her and whenever the girls described someone they thought was especially gorgeous, they would say she looked like Britney. And then there were her taut abs in low-rise jeans, so low they were said to inspire the craze for Brazilian waxing. That was when my obsession began.
I didn’t have the straight, up and down shape that Britney had, my waist dipped in, curving out to my hips, but I was determined to change. Rumour was Britney did 1,000 crunches a day and rather than think this was ludicrous, I took it as a reprimand for my own laziness.
I tried on my jeans with a crop top and took photos of myself with a disposal camera, my jaw clenching in self-loathing when I saw how far I was from the Spears ideal. When I went to Spain for a summer, I exercised obsessively, imagining arriving home in August, heads turning as I bared my midriff which would have morphed into an exact duplicate of Britney’s.
It was only when I was hospitalised with anorexia, so emaciated that my handbag strap left my shoulder bruised and I couldn’t sit on a wooden stool without a cushion, that I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and realised that the shape of my body, albeit grotesquely shrunken, was still the same. What I had seen as fat was actually the natural curve of my bones, and barring surgery, I would never have Britney’s body.
None of this was Britney’s fault, of course. She was young and a dancer and her waist, too, followed the natural curve of her bones. But the way in which her body was held up as the ideal for every young woman at that time was harmful.
Since the Framing Britney Spears documentary was released a few weeks ago, there has been much conversation around our collective complicity in the treatment of the popstar, how she had a breakdown before our eyes and we devoured it like it was a soap opera. I agree to a certain extent – I read the blogs, I bought the magazines, I understand my role in this ecosystem. Without demand, there would be no supply.
But we were teenage girls, blindly consuming this narrative, one that was shaped for us by adult men and women who should have known better. And we were hurt in the process, internalising toxic ideas about body and weight, and the assumed correlation both had to our value as human beings. As the tabloids posted unflattering photos of Britney and her peers, red circles of shame around body hair and stomach rolls and sweat patches, mocking the women if they’d gained weight, speculating about drug use and eating disorders when their collar bones began to show, we learned that a refusal to conform to these beauty standards was not only undesirable, it was dangerous.
The discourse around Britney Spears at that time was especially poignant for young Irish woman. Those of us born in the 80s to early 90s were growing up in a rapidly changing country, one that was finally coming to terms with sex and sexuality.
Ireland transformed from a repressed state into one where condoms were sold in pub toilets and Ann Summer shops were opening on main streets, but the transition from seeing sex purely in terms of procreation to something which could be enjoyed for pleasure was never going to be an easy one. In many ways, Britney was the perfect conduit for our confusion. She looked sexy but acted demure, our Madonna/Whore complexes writ large with her writhing hips and her purity ring.
We yearned to inhabit her – to have her body, her face, to be adored and celebrated and loved – and we watched carefully as she was decried as too sexual, a terrible influence on children. Her virginity was discussed and dissected, her ex-boyfriend asked in an interview, “did you f**K Britney Spears?” while the men laughed. And we saw ourselves in that, in how we, too, could be talked about at house parties and in locker rooms, how our bodies and sexuality could be easily made into a joke.
Boys will be boys but girls have to be perfect. And so, we became careful. The world set Britney Spears on fire and we stood back and we watched her burn. We stayed quiet because that is what they taught us to do and we had learned our lessons well. Or maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe we were silent because we were afraid we would be next.
Barb and Star go to Vista del Mar. This is absurd, silly, and I loved every minute of it. Available to rent on iTunes
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters. Three women, trans and cis, want to raise a child together, making for a compulsively readable novel with searing insights into gender, motherhood, and sexuality.
