The whole Reframing Britney Spears special and the subsequent conversations around it is reminding me how absolute vile early millennium celebrity gossip culture was, and how it completely dehumanized Spears and other women until it literally made them ill or even killed them. And how much that probably fucked with my-and other millennials’- heads and perceptions of fame and the world, and how women should be treated in the media.
Like, there’s two clips going viral right now about the whole thing that I think sum that whole time period up- the first is an interview Spears had with Diane Sawyer where Sawyer just tears into this obviously struggling woman like she’s a politician or a criminal or something. She’s a pop star, not a member of congress. And Sawyer’s doing shit like reaming her out for ‘breaking Justin Timberlake’s heart (which- that aged well, huh?)’ and justifying the then first lady of Maryland saying “Really, if I had an opportunity to shoot Britney Spears, I think I would” at domestic violence prevention conference with “ “It’s because of the example for kids and how hard it is to be a parent.” Like, are you kidding me?
(This is nothing to say of Sawyer’s other infamous celebrity interview around the same time-Whitney Houston- another woman who was clearly ill and needed treatment, not a tv piece with an interviewer who could barely restrain the contempt for her. “Oh well Houston was clearly lying about not doing drugs!” Yeah? Who gives a shit? That doesn’t mean Sawyer handles her with the same gloves she’d handle a member of the Bush Administration about it. At what point does a journalist decide the “newsworthiness” of an interview is less important than the mental wellbeing of its subject?)
And then there’s the clip of Craig Ferguson that’s also big right now where, three days after Spears shaved her head, he says ‘I’m not gonna make fun of this young woman who is clearly ill and neither should you, because we all helped make her sick through our consumption of her.’ In it he mentions the recent death of Anna Nicole Smith, and people in the audience laugh. They laugh at a woman dying and leaving behind a 4 month old. And Ferguson kind of catches it with a look, but keeps going on with his monologue, and it just made me so sad for all of those women that the only person in the media who openly took pity on them and supported them was a comedian who’s in recovery himself. That no one else extended any empathy or reflection about their role in making Britney Spears, Whitney Houston, or Anna Nicole Smith sick (Or any of the other women they chewed up and spit out- Lindsey Lohan and Mischa Barton come to mind.).
I know there’s a lot of hand wringing about social media and how vicious the internet is to women-both famous and not-but I actually think it’s better now than it was then. Demi Lovato and Selena Gomez are both bipolar, and Lovato’s also struggled with drugs. Can you imagine if they’d gone through that in 2005? Or if Taylor Swift had her anorexia and paralyzing chronic anxiety when US Weekly was the most powerful piece of PR? One of them would probably be the new Britney Spears or Lindsey Lohan.
I don’t want to minimize the effect social media and celebrity culture has on young people, especially young women and girls, now. I think there is a danger in the fact that it’s always available on tap and that anyone can be famous so we should all try to look like famous women. But there just isn’t the same industry dedicated to rapturously following every move of, then shifting into judging, before finally absolutely destroying famous women for entertainment and then selling that destruction to regular women as both entertainment consumption and a morality warning. I’ve seen a lot of people in their late teens/early 20s tweet stuff like “How did Diane Sawyer get away with that interview???” or “Why didn’t those paparazzi get arrested for trespassing or being really dangerous??” and it’s like, babies. We cheered them on.
Truly, the end of that era is one of the good things brought about by the internet. An absolutely wretched decade.
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