Britney’s saving grace, it would seem, is that she’s aware that her life has been spent caught between a rock and a hard patriarchy, even as that fact has slowly crushed her spirit. At its core, The Woman In Me is effectively Spears calling us – all of us – on our bullshit.
We were outraged, we insisted in the mid-Aughts, by the casual sex and the alleged drug use and the lack of a car seat for Sean Preston – Spears’s public breakdown representing nothing less than a tear in America’s moral fabric. Except, of course, having some sort of mental health issue was almost a prerequisite fo a female celebrity in the ’00s, only serving to increase a girl’s allure as something fragile, delicate, in need of protection. Britney’s true crime was that her breakdown wasn’t of the “glamorous” variety. She wasn’t starving herself until her ribs were visible, subsisting on Marlboro Lights and black Starbucks filter coffee; she was being papped at McDonald’s drive-thrus, sipping Big Gulps. She betrayed us not with her partying or her divorce but by letting the effects of that partying show, by being visibly run down by having to raise two babies on her own. We weren’t offended that she was exposing herself in a nightclub; we were offended that she was exposing herself in a way that felt sloppy rather than titillating.
“I never knew how to play the game,” she writes. “I didn’t know how to present myself on any level. I was a bad dresser – hell, I’m still a bad dresser, and I’ll admit that. And I work on that. But as much as I’ll own my flaws, ultimately, I know that I am a good person. I can see now that you have to be smart enough, vicious enough, deliberate enough to play the game, and I did not know the game. I was truly innocent – just clueless. I was a newly single mom of two little boys – I didn’t have the time to fix my hair before I went out into a sea of photographers.”
To be clear, Britney Spears is not “every woman”….
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