This post as well as others is now available on my new podcast, I’ll Come Back to This Later! If you prefer to listen instead of reading, this is for you:
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I’ve gone back and forth on how I wanted to talk about this. I’m a huge Britney fan that has quietly been following the goings-on of her life since she first emerged in 1998. I was nine and fell into that group of kids that thought they were too cool for Britney. I was not cool in the slightest and would have never conveyed how much I wanted to be Britney Spears doing backflips across the basketball court while hype boys egged me on. Hell, to this day I still strive for her 2001 ab game. I maintain Britney and Janet Jackson had the best abs we have and will ever see. It was the perfect combination of toned without looking like I could shred the cheese I shouldn’t be eating off of them.
As the years passed and I learned to not give a fuck about some little bitch who can’t even tie her shoes despite being in the damn third grade thought, I became more open in my love for Britney. She was incredible and didn’t deserve one drop of the hate she got. Publicly, she has always been a relatively unproblematic celebrity, which isn’t a claim we can make for too many famous people. I watched her story unfold and for a while, it was a lot of fun. The peak Britney era gave us some iconic moments. But as is the case for any celebrity we shoot that far into the stratosphere, the inevitable fall was coming. Boy, did it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but we were bearing witness to a Hollywood scandal on the level of Marilyn Monroe or Judy Garland playing out right before our eyes. I mean it’s still going on!
Originally, this was a completely different #FreeBritney piece. I was geeked that after 13 years everyone was finally realizing that what is happening to Britney Spears is completely ludicrous. The atmosphere was finally ripe to talk Britney and this insane conservatorship. To even begin to try to understand everything that’s happening to her requires some degree of belief in the unimaginable. It’s that convoluted and insane. I mean, Britney Spears was the biggest pop star in the world.
I avoided mentioning Britney’s situation in polite company because it’s one of those things that makes you sound deranged just by trying to explain it. The #FreeBritney movement felt and sounded like yet another internet conspiracy about two notches under anti-vaxxing on the “this bitch done lost her mind” scale. Imagine trying to explain how a 39-year-old woman who headlined one of Vegas’s biggest residencies, toured, released several studio albums, and was even a judge on the X-Factor can’t even get in her car by herself and go buy tampons without getting it approved by her father to someone not in the know.
“Um… ma’am this is the Cheesecake Factory. I just asked how you’re doing today? I didn’t really mean it…”
“Beth, how can any of us be doing fine when we’re literally watching Britney be trotted out like a show pony to make everyone wealthy but herself??? She’s not ok! No one is fighting for her rights! Doesn’t that rip you apart, Beth???”
“I’m going to give you a little more time with the menu.”
Clearly, that didn’t happen.
I would never eat at the Cheesecake Factory.
Gross.
Needless to say, I’ve waited a long time to discuss this. Before you dip out thinking this is yet another deep dive into her conservatorship and everything illegal and suspicious that’s going on there, let me stop you. While I and other Britney fans have been stewing in this for over a decade. This isn’t that. There are a lot of great resources out there replete with receipts that can catch you up on that aspect of the #FreeBritney movement way better than I could. There are even more think pieces filled with retrospective regret about how horribly the media treated not only Britney, but many women in the aught 2000s. I don’t have anything new to add on that front except some giant cosigns.
One glaring omission I’ve noticed from the entire discourse surrounding everyone’s renewed interest in Britney, however, is the lack of conversation about why we let this go on for 13 years. Granted, we’ve learned a lot since 2007 when we all saw Britney’s public cries for help result in her losing autonomy of her person and finances. At the time, many of us, me included, figured it was probably for the best. We didn’t know Britney was essentially set up for this by several people. We didn’t know Britney had her civil rights stripped from the onset of this scheme. We didn’t know her dad and his business manager, Lou Taylor, have been allegedly funneling her money into other businesses that they own for years. We didn’t know her dad has run several businesses into the ground, filed for bankruptcy, is an alcoholic, and harkened Britney to a racehorse and treats her as such. We didn’t know Lou Taylor allegedly had her eyes set on putting not only Britney but Lindsay Lohan and Courtney Love into conservatorships. We just saw a woman spiraling and her family coming in to help by utilizing an archaic form of control many of us hadn’t heard of and didn’t understand the extremeness of at the time. But why is it that after 2 years, 5 years, 8 years, 10 years, more of us didn’t question why this was still going on?
It’s not like Britney ever left the public stage. She was always right there, releasing banger after banger and doing the old shimmy and shake we love. In fact, she seemed better. Up until 2018 or so, the debilitating mental illnesses we were led to believe she had didn’t seem to be affecting her ability to be the Britney we knew. She may have been a little more reserved and anxious, but who wouldn’t be after years of being humiliated and scrutinzed by the media. Why weren’t more people asking why a conservatorship was still necessary for a young woman who seemed very capable?
Ever since our culture began to really embrace and idolize entertainers, we have willingly turned a blind eye on some truly heinous activity. R. Kelly’s affinity for underaged girls and the accompanying physical and emotional torture was something most spoke about in whispers until the 2019 documentary, Surviving R. Kelly, put a glaring spotlight on how much of a monster Kelly is at his core. Yes, we knew about his marriage to a 15-year-old Aaliyah and the pee tape video that allegedly includes an underaged girl, but did you hear Ignition (Remix)?
Chris Brown beat up his girlfriend causing her to get a five-year restraining order against him. No, I’m not referencing Rihanna, who he beat up in his car in 2009. Then, later proceeded to get a neck tattoo of a battered woman who bared an eerie resemblance to Ms. Fenty. I’m talking about Karrueche Tran, another ex of Brown’s, who accused him of punching her in the stomach. While Brown was initially the music industry’s pariah after the Rihanna incident, he still gets nominated for major awards and sells out arenas which tells me his popularity wasn’t really impacted. Not to mention, the weekly 3am blastings of his Drake collaboration, No Guidance, from a packed bar I used to live above. Who even needs to sleep on a Saturday night? Am I right?
Turns out that the Hollywood casting couch we all heard rumor of was very real with Harvey Weinstein. But Silver Linings Playbook was amazing!
We don’t have to harp on famous people that have seen jail time for their crimes. There are some that are just good old-fashioned assholes too!
Long ago, I fell out of love with Justin Timberlake after realizing he was actually a dick-in-a-box. Needless to say, I was thrilled to find that the world also came to that realization as well thanks to Framing Britney. It’s a shame that God-awful beatboxing he used to do didn’t tip more people off. I mean, we let this man walk around with fucking cornrows! Has there ever been a white man that wore cornrows that wasn’t a piece of shit?
Rumors that Ellen DeGeneres didn’t heed her own advice to “be kind” had swirled around the internet for years and were finally confirmed last year after several members of her staff came forward and revealed the talk-show host is actually a bully behind the scenes. Not Ellen with the dance moves of the math teacher who is chaperoning the middle school winter formal!
Let’s take it back a little bit further to someone that doesn’t get mentioned as much anymore, but was huge during his heyday: Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. Tyler convinced the parents of a 14-year-old groupie to give him custody of their daughter so he could take her on tour and have sex with her even though this dude knew she was barely a lady. The last time most of us saw Steven Tyler he was guiding young talent on American Idol and playing Aerosmith’s greatest hits in Vegas.
Hell, we even let the biggest joke of them all, Donald Trump, make it all the way into the White House without nipping his presidential bid early on because we were too busy making jokes about him online (to be fair, he made it extremely easy to do). Meanwhile, there were people that were actually taking him seriously. How foolish we were.
Don’t even get me started on Michael Jackson.
You get the point.
Granted, Britney doesn’t fit into any of the groupings above. We haven’t seen her commit heinous crimes aside from that denim dress she rocked to an award show and it’s hard to find any stories portraying her as being anything but a truly genuine and sweet person. I, unfortunately, have to bring up these assholes in the same breath as sweet Britney because there is a common denominator– all of these people entertained us no matter what was going on offstage and we were more than happy to ignore the glaring personal issues.
We don’t want to believe that someone that makes us smile might be a predator or a bully or a prisoner. We want to be entertained, not think about what is going on just behind the curtain. Take my money and make me forget about the bad things in my own life! Sometimes we need reminding that celebrities are people too and we can’t be willfully ignorant.
Yes, this person is on stage singing three nights a week in Vegas and the show was amazing but at the end of the night, Britney returns to her room and has to get permission to call her kids and tell them good night while you go off and blow your money at the Venetian. By the way, if you make more than $65,000 a year, you saw more money than Britney as she’s restricted to an allowance of $1,200 a week in spite of raking in millions for her slavemasters–excuse me, “management.”
We see Britney with the headset mic telling us we “better work, bitch” while she flips her ponytail on stage. It’s business as usual. As long as she’s up there giving us a show and not bumming us out with her complaints about lack of personal freedom and being illegally forced into an unjust conservatorship, we don’t care. We’re going to enjoy the show. Nevermind the fact that we all saw her enter a conservatorship and never heard of her getting out of one. No way something darker could possibly be going on behind the scenes. We can’t ask questions if we’re dancing til the world ends.
I’m not saying any of these people need to be perfect. They’re human, but just like with any of us regular peons, we have to ask questions when we suspect or even have confirmation of wrongdoings we wouldn’t let our friends get away with. Why are we continuing to give singers that abuse women number one songs? Why are we watching a talk show host who hired non-union workers to avoid paying her staff? Why weren’t we questioning why a pop star was deemed incapable of deciding how to spend her own money but fine to judge a national singing competition?
There’s always the argument that the personal lives of famous people should remain private. And I agree. They deserve privacy just like the rest of us. However, as people that have elevated these individuals onto platforms, it’s also our duty to not look away when disagreeable aspects of their lives are made public. There is such a thing as separating art from the artist but if that art comes from the suffering of others, it’s wrong to support it.
Personally, I have struggled with removing a lot of these people from my entertainment rotations. It’s hard! Chris Brown and Justin Timberlake had some bops, but what does it say about me continuing to reward shitty people with my dollar? Britney was especially hard since her situation is more of what’s being done to her instead of something she did. In fact, this only makes me want to listen to her music more, but I can’t possibly stream her music in good conscience knowing she may never see a dime of it. Thank God for fan uploads and remixes so I’m not completely devoid of her music. I STILL have yet to completely let go of Michael Jackson’s discography although I did go through a period where I couldn’t listen to his songs. It’s hard to give up things we have loved for so long.
When we get a whiff of smoke, we have to follow the fire. Don’t get distracted by the showmanship. A lot of people give cancel culture flack and for good reason. Sometimes, we’re too quick to want to end someone’s career without getting all of the information, but at the same time, we can’t let celebrities maintain profitable careers for years without addressing major issues. It shouldn’t have taken 20 years for people to realize Justin Timberlake exploited women and Black culture to further his own career. It shouldn’t have taken a documentary filled with dozens of women detailing the abuse they experienced at the hands of R. Kelly for us to finally put him in jail. It shouldn’t have taken 13 years for the general public to finally start questioning what is going on with Britney Spears.
The signs were always there. We just had to stop being blinded by the stars.