The Way We Treated Britney Spears Was a Sign of What Was to Come
The misogyny that took the down pop icon more than a decade ago still affects countless women to this day
Britney Spears is a contemporary myth. She’s the Girl We Wouldn’t Leave Alone, the all-American blonde who became the greatest train wreck of her generation. We remember her in a series of deteriorating images: She was the teenager dancing in a sexy schoolgirl outfit, who became the madwoman shaving her own head and whaling on a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella, who was, finally, the exhausted woman barely getting through her new single at the VMAs, culminating in her being placed under a strict conservatorship by a father she had previously described as “emotionally abusive,” and whose control she resists to this day.
That conservatorship is the subject of a New York Times documentary, Framing Britney Spears, which has seemingly inspired legions of people to rethink Spears, and the misogyny that shaped her media narrative. Spears likely does have a mental illness — she’s undergone psychiatric hospitalizations — but a woman who can raise two young boys while holding down a demanding full-time job as a pop star is not incapacitated to the point that she requires an adult guardian. Labeling Britney a madwoman seems to have been, in the…
