Spears and LaChapelle both say they knew the photo would cause a bit of commotion, but they figured it was worth it. “I said to her, ‘You don’t want to be buttoned up, like Debbie Gibson,’ ” LaChapelle recalls. “I said, ‘Let’s push it further and do this whole Lolita thing.’ She got it. She knew it would get people talking and excited.” Spears proved, even then, that she was going to take charge of crafting her own image. One night while they were shooting, LaChapelle says, Spears’ manager, Larry Rudolph, walked in at 2 a.m. to find her posing in her bra and panties. Rudolph demanded to know what was going on. “Britney said, ‘Yeah, I don’t feel comfortable,’ ” says the photographer. “At first I felt betrayed. But as soon as Larry walked out, Britney said, ‘Lock the door’ and unbuttoned her shirt wide open.”
I didn’t talk about it when we were talking about teenage Britney, baby celebrity transformed so unimaginably fully, so inconceivably fast, because I wasn’t planning to talk about it and I wasn’t planning to talk about it because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to give Dave LaChapelle more attention. I love …Baby One More Time but I didn’t want to dwell on this because it depresses me. It does. That someone, many someones, let this happen, even if by that I also mean let her do this. That we live in a world that made a man think to suggest this to a girl, that made it feel like a good idea, if we can take his word for it, to play along.
All I did was tie up my shirt! I’m wearing a sports bra under it. Sure, I’m wearing thigh-highs, but kids wear those — it’s the style. Have you seen MTV — all those in thongs?
–Britney Spears to Rolling Stone, 1999
I didn’t want to talk about it but I’m stuck on it, tripping over it without piecing together what precisely I want to say. I don’t like, I am very much opposed to, either presuming to know how Britney feels about things or implying I know how she should feel. I don’t know if she looks back and would have done things differently. I don’t even know, really, if it would have changed things in the long run. I don’t know, I won’t say, that being publicly, nationally, globally sexualized at seventeen has an inevitable shaping effect on a person’s development. Even if it’s hard – and it is hard – for me to believe it wouldn’t, I won’t speak about that on her behalf. And yet. And yet. I’m stuck on, tripping over, who allowed this, and why.
In many ways, what Britney was wearing and what she was doing was really quite unremarkable. I think the thing that was specifically remarkable was the way people chose to go straight to the “dirty old man” place. I read an article in Q Magazine about 12 months afterward, which said that Britney was designed by a bunch of dirty old men wearing raincoats in a record company office, you know, that this outfit and this look had been carefully created by a bunch of dirty old guys sitting around a table. But that was absolutely not the case at all. There was an honest discussion between three people at a wardrobe meeting about whether this was an okay way to go. Two of those people were women. Eventually, we reached the conclusion that some people might choose to go there, but most of the people who saw it would say it’s a girl at school being a 16 year old. I think people chose to read a lot into it, but it was not necessarily as overt as they’d like to believe.
–Nigel Dick on directing …Baby One More Time, 2013
What does “sexy” mean when you are seventeen and have never had sex? What does “sexy” mean when you have had sex and you are still seventeen? What does it mean to be young and developing a sexuality, becoming a sexual being, what does that mean between two young people for whom it is new and what does it mean between someone young and someone not? We don’t even let seventeen-year-olds get tattoos. What does “sexy” mean when “sexy” means “adult” and when you are young enough to think that at seventeen “adult” is something you are ready to be?
What’s a fire, and why does it – what’s the word – burn?
–Ariel, “Part of Your World," The Little Mermaid
What does it mean to play with a fire you have never touched, and what does it mean to decide someone chose to play with fire when they never could have predicted all the ways it could burn?
The girl who disappears from the pool
will never return. A woman will return,
looking for the girl she was.
She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,
I was abducted, but it sounds
wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.
Then she says, I was not abducted.
Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted
to escape my body. Even, sometimes,
I willed this. But ignorance
cannot will knowledge. Ignorance
wills something imagined, which it believes exists.
–Louise Gluck, "A Myth of Innocence”
There is the idea of young Britney dressing herself as jailbait, playing a Lolita, the faux-ingenue whose innocence adds an edge to the forbidden sexuality barely locked within, and then behind that, beyond it, so much larger and yet not a place I see people push to when looking at this girl who was so looked at, there is the question: why the fuck do we have ready names for a child grown men want to abuse? And why are they names used to imply there is something this child is doing to make that situation make sense? You know Humbert was the bad guy, right?–but I’m not sure they do. I didn’t want to talk about it and I don’t have any answers but I had to ask the questions because meanwhile they keep watching, and if Britney can train her own eyes back at them – which she does, unblinking, her own intensity rising in time with theirs – it felt, I guess, like the least I could do.
In this business you make a deal with the devil.
–Britney Spears to InStyle, 2013
2087
areudirty
izzy806
gamechangershow
snowghoul
titsay
germansingergirl
