Cortney at A Feminist Response to Pop Culture wonders “why the feminist bloggers that I read are not writing more about Britney Spears?” and I have to agree with her.
Thea has previously touched on the demise of Spears’ popularity as a feminist issue, but now that Britney’s bad VMA performance has been eclipsed by the loss of her children, I agree with Cortney when she says the need for some feminist blogging on the subject is nigh. She reports:
A few days ago one of my very close feminist friends informed me that Britney Spears had lost custody of her children and what a good thing that is. It was more than a bit disconcerting to hear someone for whom I have a great deal of respect so openly revel in the pain and suffering of a woman who lost her children.
News broke today that Britney has regained her full parental rights, but I think it might be time to reflect of whether or not the feminist community has a responsibility to support, defend, critique or ignore the constant flurry of news that is “the Britney Spears.” Is our analysis of her iconic downfall merely adding fuel to media frenzy, or can it pull some positive insight about women in the media gaze out of an otherwise destructive machine?
Cortney gives us a great starting point:
…I think that her body politic is extraordinarily problematic especially since she is simultaneously marketed to young girls as an idol and to men as a masturbatory fantasy. But note how I write that “she is marketed” as if she is no longer an independent entity but a piece of public property. Not long ago one of my friends and I got into a debate about whether Spears’ chose this life path. My friend argued that she deserves what is happening to her because she chose to become a part of the public domain. But remember, she was but a child when she made that choice and she hardly could have anticipated the hyper-sexualization and invasion that would come along with that “choice.” Further, does anyone really deserve that kind of dehumanization?
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eight comments
I always wonder if media would be so hard on her if she had just managed to stay as thin as she used to be.
Posted by Steffi
October 24, 2007, 5:07 AM
Amen, Steffi. It would seem that they're much more sympathetic to those who refuse to eat and become dangerously thin when upset as opposed to those who, you know, like food.
Posted by babysinblack
October 24, 2007, 10:23 AM
I can see why feminists would defend Britney - for the great reasons you've brought up Stacey May, and for the reasons that I did in September. I can also see why they wouldn't - despite her downfall, Spears continues to be an incredibly successful, powerful, immensely wealthy women who has a great deal of privelege. In the sense I'm not so sure she needs my protection.
I guess it's this idea of protection that I find curious - I've heard the argument that Spears was thrust into the limelight but an overbearing mother and didn't really know what she was signing up for (I guess no one, except people with crystal balls, knew what she was signing up for). To an extent I agree with that because she was really young, and a lot of the time she does come across as surprised and manipulated (yes, even from way before she sleepwalked her way through the VMAs). And these days, it really appears to me like she's battling some serious mental health and addiction stuff, and as if she hasn't been quite in control of her behaviour for the past little while.
On the other hand, she's now an adult woman with children of her own. It's been pointed out that celebs who are so dogged by the media must be at least a little complicity in the dogging - after all, there are plenty of megastars out there who are quite apt at keeping their lives private. It's not so much that I take the "she's stupid and she's only got herself to blame" line, but that I wonder if characterising her solely as this media pawn takes away her agency and paints her as being powerless and lost in a way that is very inaccurate.
This is what worries me: if one of the most influential and powerful women in pop culture can be thought of as so helpless, how does that bode for everyday women who have nowhere near what Spears has?
In fact, calling Spears out on her mistakes, recognising that she has to take some responsibilty for her actions, and that it isn't feminism's duty to protect her may be a more feminist thing to do - because it's acknowledging that Spears is powerful.
I really loved what Rebecca Traister (who I adore, in case you haven't guessed it yet) had to say about Spears shortly after the VMAs, because I felt like she showed compassion for Spears, but also the expectation that Spears should - and can - pull herself together:
"...Spears embodies the disdain in which this culture holds its young women: the desire to sexualize and spoil them while young, and to degrade and punish them as they get older. Of course, she also represents a youthful feminine willingness -- stupid or manipulated as it may be -- to conform to the culture's every humiliating expectation of her."
Full article here: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007...
Posted by Thea
October 25, 2007, 11:48 AM
Poor Britney. On one hand I don't think she's as artistic as, let's say, Madonna or Gwen Stefani. But she is a person. Nobody in the media seems to like her, they all make fun of her. Personally I find that very mean.
Posted by Sexy Sadie
November 1, 2007, 5:03 PM
I agree that Britney is a feminist issue.
The question of Britney's responsibility for her demise is extremely interesting. On the one hand, she is a biological adult, who had made extremely bad choices, and we should hold adults responsible for their choices. On the other hand, we when we say that we should hold adults responsible for their choices, I thinkw e mean that we should hold "autonomous persons" responsible for their choices. It is not clear to me that Britney is an autonomous person.
It seems likely to me that Britney's "market worth" may be really significantly confused with her "moral worth," not only by those with a financial interest in her and the public, but by herself. Her situation is complicated because it may be that everyone in her life (especially her mother and her ex-husband) has stood to benefit from increasing her market worth.
People need to develop a sense of moral worth, they need to be valued as persons (as opposed to being valued as marketable products) in order to develop into autonomous persons. But it is not clear to me that Britney has been in a position to develop a sense of herself as someone whose moral worth is separable from her market worth.
The suggestion that she has been complicit in her own exploitation is interesting. I think it is evident that she has been complicit, but I question whether this complicity is relevant to the question of who is to blame for her current demise. If she is not really autonomous, it doesn't seem to me to matter that she has had a hand in her own exploitation.
I also agree with the point that the public and the media would probably not be giving her such a hard time if she had not gained weight. The point is relevant to the issue of Britney's autonomy (or lack thereof). Has anyone ever supported Britney's development into an autonomous person (an adult)? As suggested above, it seems likely that her market worth has always been tied to her being simultaneously infantalised and sexualised.
Britney seems to me to be a feminist issue, because she may reflect a culture that will resist a young woman's development into an autonomous person and then blame and demonise that woman for not becoming an autonomous person.
Posted by Khadija
November 3, 2007, 3:58 PM
Khadija-- awesome breakdown, I totally agree. "Blaming the victim", anyone?
We bribe people with celebrity. Celebrity culture is the new religious culture-- we assign the same abstract ideals to celebrities as we used to assign to God. But it is an "attainable" godhood, marketed to consumers. What makes it comfortingly "attainable" are the human flaws of celebrities. It's a trap. We have MySpace, Facebook, and other "friend-finding" profile sites which encourage a further blurring of celebrity and identity, the next step from reality television. We bribe people with popularity, celebrity-- how many peoples' "15 minutes" have been a trade with the "devil" of invasive cameras? Look up "Tila Tequila" if you have any doubt about this!
And then we watch them fall, their lives allegories, fables, lessons to us all.
Thank you, Thea, for the Salon.com article link. And for the emphasis on her agency. But I agree with Khadija in that Spears does not appear to be an autonomous woman. She appears to be lacking a sense of self the way many survivors of abuse do.
We're always looking for the next person to come and acheive that perfection; but when their lives become too inacessible/ perfect, they lose their fascination. (See Jennifer Lopez.)
I also wanted to mention the interesting contradiction of racist, sexist and ageist beauty ideals (blonde, blue-eyed, white, impossibly thin and busty at the same time, young woman) (with access to expensive clothing and accessories) with the "dumb blonde" stereotype. That body type is literally impossible-- you can't be tall and THAT thin and have breasts THAT big. You can be tall and thin with small breasts, or curvaceous with big breasts, but not both at the same time.
Women who manage to acheive this by hook and crook are then silenced by the image. We don't want the person, we want the image. And we want to break the image (if we can't become it). It's sick.
Posted by Amory
November 10, 2007, 11:59 AM
I thought that this piece on salon.com, written just after the VMAs, was both timely and important: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2007...
Posted by tenderhooligan
November 19, 2007, 2:02 PM
Ooops! I hit 'submit' too soon. I find this sentence particularly close to the truth:
"Spears has come to represent something -- something important enough that it keeps rearing its head. As has been pointed out before, she embodies the disdain in which this culture holds its young women: the desire to sexualize and spoil them while young, and to degrade and punish them as they get older."
Posted by tenderhooligan
November 19, 2007, 2:04 PM
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