It's Britney Bitch! Reflections on The Woman in Me
Britney Spears' autobiography is both conversational and shocking. She tells us what abuse she suffered but leaves us to ask ourselves why.
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CONTENT WARNING - This piece contains descriptions of psychological abuse
The most successful people in any field have two essential qualities: a huge natural talent and a focused ability to work harder than anyone else. Britney Spears has consistently delivered on both of these.
I have just finished reading The Woman In Me, Britney Spears new autobiography in which she demonstrates a wonderful storytelling talent and recounts a tale of hard work, huge success and the most unbelievable abuse from the media, her family and, especially, the men in her life. Her father, Jamie Spears, and her exes Justin Timberlake and Kevin Federline come off very badly in this book and rightly so.
Britney employs a conversational style to tell us the story of her life. It feels as if she is sat opposite us after the kids have gone to bed, sharing a glass of wine and loading her tale with appropriate adult observations and profanity - kind of like a normal person! The chapters are all short and perfectly formed with no rambling or self indulgent prose - it is as if she has taken the perfect structure of her perfect pop songs and translated it into a writing style.
This friendly, conversational tone is what caught me out. I was inwardly smiling at teenage Britney’s earnest hard work to get into showbiz before I realised that I was reading a tale of abuse. In the same way that abuse often happens in life, so it is explained in the book: gradually, insidiously the abuse inveigles its way in and then creepingly, imperceptibly, it builds its own version of reality that the victim finds themselves trapped inside like an insect in a spider web. In this case the tale is made more horrific because the abusers were those closest to Britney: her father, her mother and her former husband.
We all know the stories of how teenage Britney was packaged up as some kind of Virgin Princess who was then blamed for sexualising the youth of America. Many of us were complicit because we never questioned it at the time. We never considered if it was appropriate for major network news anchors to cause a young female pop star to break down in tears. In The Woman In Me Britney talks about an interview she gave to Diane Sawyer on ABC’s Primetime in 2003 and how it became a breaking point for her mental health. Watching the interview back now is painful and makes you want to reach through the screen and remind Sawyer that she is talking to a 21 year old female pop star not the leader of a nation!
Sawyer has never responded to criticism of the interview but she should, even if it is just to explain that maybe she was under pressure to ask Britney about her love life or that she was told to say ‘what happened to your clothes?’ Maybe we have progressed since then because it is hard to imagine anyone putting these questions to Dua Lipa or Cardi B? Sawyer’s line of questioning was typical of the world’s attitude towards Britney: “You can be sexy but only in the way we tell you” Reading the book you discover that Britney was actually quite a normal young person who had been drinking, smoking and having sex since her teens - Yay Britney!! But the duality and pressure that went with playing the private and public roles demanded of her, took its toll.
This interview (and others like it) was a sign that the abuse had began. The shame on the rest of us is that we never tried to stop it and the bigger shame is on her family, her management and all the media whores who feasted on bringing down her talent. It sounds Gothic and it is. She got pregnant by Justin Timberlake but while she was quietly lying on a bathroom floor aborting the pregnancy her team were earning millions from her work and continuing to sell the myth of her as a virgin - JT just strummed the guitar to soothe her (!)
The last virgin in America thing never made sense as a marketing strategy anyway because pop music is about sex, so why would you remove that element from the equation?
When Timberlake (who Britney say had been serially unfaithful AND insisted she have the abortion) released his own solo record, Cry Me A River, he told the world that the song was about how Britney had broken his heart by being unfaithful! Nobody in Britney’s team went to bat for her in the press but they went to the bank for her money! Money plus misogyny was equalling misery for Britney.
Her ill fated marriage to failed rapper and dancer Kevin Federline seems like a Dirty John story now. And again nobody was protecting Britney. From a talent management perspective the first thing you do when your client is being attacked is protect them. You close ranks, you fight back and you change the narrative. In Britney’s case she was attacked by someone with less profile but got punished and lost control of her life and, more importantly, she lost agency. Her body was controlled by the ultimate abuser - her father who had her forcibly taken to a psychiatric hospital on more than one occasion. This was followed by the 13 year conservatorship during which time, Britney reveals, she could not drink alcohol, she had to go to bed at a certain time and, she could not even have private access to a cell phone - she was a woman in her 30s!
In the book Britney destroys the premise of the conservatorship which was that she was incapable of looking after herself, by reminding us that even though she was not allowed coffee she still wrote and released multi-million selling albums, she still did an extended Vegas residency and she still paid her father $6,314,307.99 - according to court documents filed by her lawyer Matthew Rosengart. The money was a percentage of her earnings. So despite being described as a mentally incompetent person she could still make a lot of money for a lot of people! (Talk about motive!)
That Britney has been treated badly is without doubt. The book made me think about how complicit so many of us were in letting it happen. When she became a Celebrity, it was as if she were an object in human form like Bladerunner’s Replicants. They look like us but they are not us, and they are built to serve a purpose which, in Britney’s case, was to be a sexy, asexual Pop Princess. Diane Sawyer can have multiple relationships but still find the nerve to question Britney about hers. Justin Timberlake can screw his way around the world but still make millions by crying a river of crocodile tears about what Britney did to him.
Britney was designed to arouse desire but never be aroused, designed to command attention but not be in command of her own life. In 2003 Diane Sawyer asked Britney about her relationship with Colin Farrell. Sawyer asks in the tone of a Catholic junior school headmistress and says ‘What was all that with Colin Farell, all the kissing?’ And, stupid us, at the time we all went ‘yeah why did you have to kiss him so much’ But when you stop to think about it - in 2003 Britney and Colin Farrell were both young, hot and horny! Of course they couldn’t keep their hands off each other - what’s up Diane? Don’t you remember how it felt when you had a fling with Warren Beatty? It is so positive that Britney speaks about this in the book and about how much her and Farrell were sexually attracted to each other. In fact Britney is very open about her sexuality which must be cathartic after being forced to spend so long pretending that she had the genitals of a Barbie doll!
Like many abuse survivors, Britney talks about the times during her conservatorship when she gave up and gave in. She knew if she questioned what was happening, she would either have her children taken from her again or be marched back into a psychiatric hospital - which she also knew would be publicised in the latest ‘Mad Britney’ headline. It is a well known story that the abused feels that resistance will lead to more abuse but in reality this act of taking the blame for your own abuse is, itself, another form of abuse. So how brave, how strong and how wonderful it was when Britney gathered the courage to dispute her conservatorship and, ultimately, have it overturned.
Britney Spears has been dehumanised on so many levels: professionally, personally, artistically. When she finally found the support she had been denied she was able to blossom and now she can also start the healing process. It is a mark of how strong she is, how focused and how hard she works that she has broken free and is able to now fully enjoy being an adult woman.
Maybe we all owe an apology to Britney? Maybe we need to listen to the obsessive fans who insisted all along that something was wrong. There is nothing that I could have personally done that would have changed what happened to Britney. Except..what if I had been a little kinder in my opinion of her, a little more questioning and thoughtful about the stories that were released - could I have affected one other person’s point of view and they could have done the same in a chain of sanity?
We admire people who have talent. We celebrate their talent and pay to enjoy it whether through music downloads, live shows or buying posters for our bedroom wall. These talented people become our Gods of Mythology striding over the world like Rod Stewart’s Atlantic Crossing album cover, garnering applause and screams from us, the unworthy public.
But behind the facade, beyond the persona there is a person. A human being with immense talent and a capacity for hard work that has successfully connected with us. Machines can’t connect with us in the same way and if we recognise that the humanity of art and creativity is what makes it so special then we need to recognise the humanity of the artist and creator.
I think that The Woman In Me is an important and valuable book that shows us in graphic and gory detail the conflict between the human and the Celebrity. It gave me new and deeper respect for Britney Spears as a person which gave me a new found respect for her work as an artist.
Britney got herself to the top of her profession, she got taken prisoner and she fought her way out of jail. She speaks of the moment she realised that she was going to start fighting her conservatorship and uses a phrase that sums up her and her journey.
“You can’t fuck with a woman who knows how to pray”
Britney Spears has always been a mix of the sacred and the profane
The Woman In Me by Britney Spears is published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Schuster and Schuster
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If you are or have been affected by the issues in this article then please remember that help is available.
In the Republic of Ireland https://www.safeireland.ie
In the United Kingdom www.nspcc.org.uk
In the USA https://www.childhelp.org
I’ve been meaning to read the book. Definitely moving it up the list after this read. The whole thing infuriates me.