I never cared about Britney Spears growing up – never replicated the …Baby One More Time pigtails, failed to do the 1,000 crunches a day required for Oops! I Did It Again abs. I missed her TRL appearances, skipped her songs when they came on my Groov-e Boombox, declined to enter the frenzy for tickets to see the Dream Within A Dream tour.
All of which is more or less beside the point. For those of us whose consciousness was formed in those unholy years on either side of the millennium, Britney Spears was not “a” celebrity, someone whose influence you might opt into by way of cineplex viewings of Crossroads while wearing mall-bought acid-wash denim. She was the celebrity, a paragon wrapped in a paradox, the Platonic ideal of a girl-becoming-a-woman who managed, with a gymnast’s poise, to navigate the tightrope between being too virginal (Jessica Simpson) or too “whoreish” (Christina Aguilera) to the tune of millions of dollars worth of record sales and a fanbase rabid enough to purchase her chewed gum. “Everything about Britney’s image asserted her innocence,” writes Sarah Ditum in Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties, published by Fleet today, “and everything about that innocence’s ostentatious performance encouraged at least one part of the audience to imagine its despoiling.”
Until, of course, she couldn’t hack it anymore. And we hated her for it.
I suppose it’s natural to enjoy a certain schadenfreude when the yardstick against which you – and an entire generation of young women – are being measured breaks in a spectacular fashion. I can still recall the cruel hilarity in our voices as we sat around a table in my Connecticut high school’s cafeteria, picking at iceberg lettuce and laughing at the latest Spears scandal on Perez Hilton – our sense of mob justice echoed and validated not just by a blogger whose signature move was drawing semen around female celebrities’ mouths but by every tabloid lined up at the…
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