Female Pop Stars & The Media: Double Standards
If you type the words #freebritney into Twitter or Instagram right now, you’ll be overwhelmed with the feedback of fans asking for the “freedom” of celebrity and former teen sensation Britney Spears to be released from the conservatorship she’s been under for nearly 13 years. But the truth: most of us are not fully versed on what a conservatorship is. And while we never would intentionally take a mocking tone, most don’t know that there are possible human rights violations going on. We didn't and still don't really know the gravity of the situation. What we DO know is that these ongoing trials reveal the shameful misogyny pervasive in our society. We sexualize our girls then brutalize them for it. And if Britney had been a man, would control of her life been taken away and handed over to her father?
The fan-driven campaign, which started in 2017, is a through-line in the much-discussed documentary “Framing Britney Spears.” Part of FX’s “The New York Times Presents” documentary series, the film traces the pop star’s rise to fame and the controversial conservatorship she was placed under after suffering a public breakdown in 2007-08, and which she is currently battling in court.
The tabloids have been obsessed with Britney since her days as a teenage pop sensation, but the coverage reached a new level of intensity during her mid-20s. There seemed to be a vicious cycle at play: The relentless paparazzi that followed Spears nearly everywhere left her exasperated and helped fuel public displays of frustration, which magazines then covered aggressively, interviewing a host of characters, including the owner of the hair salon where she shaved her head and a psychologist who had never treated her.
“Her story hit at a time when print magazines were hunting for the story of the week,” said Jen Peros, a former Us Weekly editor, “and when you found a celebrity — I hate to say it — spiraling or acting abnormally, that was the story. And we knew it would sell magazines.”
The movement took shape after two fans released a special podcast episode in 2019 featuring a troubling voicemail from someone who claimed to be a former paralegal for a lawyer who worked on Spears’ conservatorship.
As a female creative in the music industry, I can’t deny the invasive media and paparazzi — and its built-in misogyny — that surrounded Spears and continues to surround her struggles.
When Britney first emerged, I was a diehard fan, and I grew up as much as she did alongside and right behind her. As she became more sexual and came into her own embracing her womanhood, so did I. And, the media and tabloid system reacted in a less than favorable way, and zeroed in on her struggles. I feel as though we can all look at her story as an example of how we’ve failed her and failed a lot of women who are in the limelight. Paris Hilton is another example of this struggle, and she even directly called it out. You see the people who consume the information about her, and other female megastars, only now in the post-me-too world, feeling a sense of responsibility and a sense of a need to apologize to Britney. Think about the memes: “If Britney survived 2007, we can survive this.” Did you find yourself reflecting on, “Wait, what is my role in all this?” I sure did, and have.
Fourteen years after Spears’s most publicized crises, some see the hypercritical fixation on her mental health, mothering, and sexuality as a broad public failing. I ask myself, why is it ok for us to berate her, publicly? Has it ever been ok?
Some are now asking for direct apologies from people who made jokes at Spears’s expense or interviewed her in ways now viewed as insensitive, sexist, or simply unfair. On social media, there have been calls for apologies from prominent media figures, including Diane Sawyer, who, in a 2003 interview grilled Spears on what she might have done to upset her ex, Justin Timberlake; Matt Lauer, who pointed to questions about whether she was a “bad mom”; and the comedian Sarah Silverman, who made off-color jokes about Spears at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards.
These demands are encapsulated in another phrase spreading on social media: “Apologize to Britney.”
Silverman, who had joked on MTV that Spears’s children were “the most adorable mistakes,” did just that on an episode of her podcast that was released on Thursday, saying that, at the time, she had not understood that big-time celebrities could have their feelings hurt.
“Britney, I am so sorry. I feel terribly if I hurt you,” Silverman said. “I could say I was just doing my job but that feels very Nuremberg Trial-y, and I am responsible for what comes out of my mouth.”
And on Friday Timberlake issued an apology to Spears on Instagram, writing that he was “deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn, or did not speak up for what was right.” (He also apologized to Janet Jackson, with whom he appeared in 2004 at the Super Bowl halftime show.)
In an interview, Samantha Barry, the editor in chief of Glamour, said of society’s treatment of Spears, “Hopefully we’re in a place where we won’t do that again, where we won’t lift up these celebrities — in particular women — and then proceed to rip them down.”
At the end of the day, as Ideaison, we always advocate for all people, including women, to be treated equally, and just as that, people. Britney needs to be treated like a human being who deserves to be able to walk down the street and not be hounded. Whether that’s by the media or fans. I hope that it leads to another conversation about just letting people live their lives. We’re in the post-me-too era and I hope we can all acknowledge learnings from the Bill Cosby and the Harvey Weinstein situations. Those are not movements and reactions that happened overnight. Those were things that had whisperings for years. And that’s where we’re at with Britney.