Content warning: Mentions of sexual assault
Have you watched The New York Times’ doc Framing Britney Spears? My partner and I have talked about it a bunch since we watched a few weeks ago. Conversations about the doc and Britney’s music has traveled through a Zoom hang to the group-text with some of my friends. I’m reading about it constantly. After reading Tavi Gevinson’s “Britney Spears Was Never in Control” (cw: rape, coercion, intimate partner violence), published yesterday by The Cut, I’m thinking a lot about the meaning of the word “framing” in the title. If you haven’t read Gevinson’s piece, which is part-cultural criticism about the doc, part-personal essay about Gevinson’s experience as a teen creating teen media and surviving abusive relationships, you should read it, especially if this discourse has been in your orbit.
Gevinson makes a lot of great points about the fatuous declarations of early Britney’s sex-positivity in Framing. They really do shove it down your throat, this belief that Britney was autonomously expressing and exploring sexuality. In the pop culture landscape of the late ’90s, everyone was selling sex. This is the era of Wild Things and Rose McGowan walking the VMAs red carpet, essentially, completely naked on the arm of then-beau Marilyn Manson (more on that motherfucker later). But Framing Britney tells us that every bare midriff was a choice made by a forward-thinking young woman in full control of her sexuality. That this was a paradigm shift, not the same old commodification of the young, blonde, and white. They show clip after clip of Britney talking about the agency she has over her career. It makes the inversion of her control, through substance abuse and partying and, later, the conservatorship she’s been in for over a decade, all the more vexing.
I’m not saying it’s #FreeBritney propaganda or anything — seriously, please get James Spears out of her pockets right tf now — but I think there is a real possibility it’s suffering from Buzzword Feminism Revisioning. The popularity of feminism as a cute identity instead of militant belief in equality has turned sex-positivity from het-women’s potential for pleasure in the confines of rape culture to another way for women to compete with each other to win nothing; to position or make art about promiscuity as a form of radicalism (*cough* Fleabag1 *cough*). Sex is taboo. Talking about something taboo is not inherently political but maybe people feel that way because a lot of us are part of extremely rigid, binary-obsessed cultures.
Buzzword Feminism Revisioning luuurves the binary and the portrayal of Britney in Framing is very rigid. As Gevinson writes:
Everything was Britney’s choice, and therefore she was always a sex-positive feminist or Nothing was Britney’s choice, and the evil adults made all her decisions. Both assertions sound desperate to protect her respectability — another version of her purity, in fact — as a prerequisite for compassion. They remind me of how readily conversations about abuse and assault focus on the moral character of the victim in order to confirm that they have indeed been victimized.
Teens and tweens are prescribed moral character early. There are sweet, good girls. There are queen bees and bullies. The first time I was a victim of sexual assault, I was only eleven. My moral character was questionable, I guess. I had lied in fourth grade about getting a dog and when my friends came over to see it, I presented a brand new Pound Puppy toy and all of my dignity. One was furious, the other didn’t blame me; she thought the furious friend had misunderstood, so was at fault for blowing it out of proportion. Why would I invite them over at all if I hadn’t meant a toy? was her thinking. The angry friend and I eventually patched things up but I lied to her again that school year about having started a band with people in the other fourth grade class, as if news could not travel across the playground. A cavalcade of our peers, including my not-band members, one who was not even our friend but the grade’s heartthrob (Claire, seriously?!?! How stupid!).
These are not things my parents knew about. Even at 8 and 9, I was so withdrawn from family life and given so much freedom by my parents that I spent most of my solo-time trying to be somewhere else, intensely daydreaming or attached to IV drip of pop culture. These were extremely good skills to have in the aftermath of my first rape, which I kept to myself for year.
Music was already everything to me but a cocktail of Fiona Apple and Lil Kim (whose collective guardianship of my trauma I’ve written about before in a piece that is sadly no longer available) and stuff much more vicious made me feel less alone. I don’t remember when or how Marilyn Manson (who makes a brief appearance in the aforementioned essay) started speaking to me but I knew his presentation was not meant to scare me, it was the manifestation of a wound caused by people who did scare me — teachers who hated me for no reason, the dismissive peers who used to warn that I might “do a Columbine” and called me an n-word lover. Manson spoke to all of us who felt denied and invisible everyday2. “It’s not your fault that you’re always wrong,” he sings on “The Beautiful People.” “The weak ones are there to justify the strong.”
When Manson and Evan Rachel Wood started their relationship, I was 22. In the past few weeks, she and other women have come forward with allegations of abuse by Manson. It’s infuriating and it feels like a betrayal, in a way. I don’t remember thinking his relationship with Wood was gross, only that I thought she must be so brilliant to be so young and dating such a smart artist3 and provocative thinker.
That’s fucking insane!
It’s insane!
I hate that I thought that!
I hate that I thought it because for many years of my life before then, I literally could not walk unaccompanied on the same side of the street as men. I could not walk two blocks from my orthodontist’s office to my mom’s car without taking a convoluted detour if I were to walk by a man. I knew men’s capacity for violence on young girls’ bodies. Why did I think all of the things he wrote in his memoir about telling girlfriends he was going to kill them was some kind of fiction, some kind of symbol I was too young to understand yet?
Maybe it’s because I hope for symbolism in everything. The thing that struck me most in the first quarter or so of Framing Britney Spears with this enveloping sense that I was being shown the mechanisms of a pop machine that had an ambient influence over my entire teendom. I still don’t know how to articulate it. I still don’t know why she remained alluring to me as I developed my messy, complicated sense of anti-establishment-ness. What I do know is that I was obsessed, obsessed with her first Rolling Stone cover because of that compulsion to find meaning in symbols, to find secret messages.
Gevinson writes about this cover and photo spread in her essay, relating it to an experience she had being photographed on her own childhood bed the summer between high school graduation and moving to New York to act on Broadway.
She writes:
In the photo, I am lying on my side with my head propped up on my hand and wearing a vintage houndstooth romper my friend had just given me, my arms and legs bare. My head is tilted down, and I’m pouting, with heavily lined eyes and straightened blond hair. I don’t remember feeling uncomfortable in the moment; I don’t remember how the location or pose was decided; I don’t even remember what the photographer looked like. If anyone who was there told me the whole setup was my idea, I would believe them. I remember that the romper had symbolized, for me, my new life starting, and it’s very likely I was eager to update my public image as a sexually active being after extensively documenting an adolescence where I favored bulky layers and granny glasses.
Unlike in LaChapelle’s photos, there are no silky sheets or stuffed animals. Still, when I see the photo now, I just see another thin white able-bodied blonde girl being sexualized.
Ugh.
The Britney cover is obviously extremely sexual. I don’t remember how I registered that side of it when it was published. I don’t remember wanting to be her in those images, I do remember wanting to be creative enough to wield visual language with such cleverness and cultural criticism.
Months earlier, famous evangelical Jerry Falwell condemned the children’s program Teletubbies, its main players comprised of a nonsense-babbling collective of plushy aliens, because he perceived its purple member, Tinky Winky, to be gay. With Tinky Winky cuddled in Britney’s arm, I saw this Rolling Stone cover sending a very specific fuck-you to conservatives — the ones criticizing Britney, the ones so hateful they were looking to discriminate wherever they could — and I thought that was delicious.
Now I see more in this image. Now I see a kid with a kid’s toy. I see a child being sexualized, snuggling with a stuffed animal that has been sexualized4 because the humanity of teen girls and queer people is deemed not worth recognizing. To do that would devalue heteronormativity and its benefit to capital and Christianity. Marilyn Manson was supposed to be the enemy of both of these, but he’s just a rich rock star whose capital comes from a performance of castigating Christianity and conservatism. He only thrives when those systems do, so he is complicit in them.
It’s no wonder that Britney totally lost her shit. Even as she “bedeviled” her audience with her body, she had to be perfect. She had to defend her body and its perfection. You can’t be perfect. It’s not possible to sustain. The harder you try, the more susceptible you are to finding yourself refracted into a garbage version of yourself: you think no sees you as complicated, so you show them the complications. When these complications don’t ease your burden, you make them worse.
For Britney, it seems, the wrong people have come to her rescue and now she is stuck. It hurts my heart to see someone who clearly needs real help trapped by greed under the guise of help.
My fave Britney, at the moment. It was, and had long been, “Till the World Ends” but that’s produced by Dr. Luke. Fuck that fucker!!!
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Don’t drag me!! I really like this show it’s just not feminist, no matter what the very smart and talented Phoebe Waller-Bridge says!!
There is a conversation to be had about Marilyn Manson and alternative music writ large w/r/t othering within the context of whiteness.
Later in my 20s I understood that he was cheesy and just as much a pop star as anyone else.
Let’s be real, when conservatives talk about homosexuality, they’re not thinking about individuals with lives and community and autonomy, they’re thinking about anal sex and disease.