On Britney Spears, Aging, and the Lure of Female Pain
"I typically find, when I resent another woman, that I'm attributing power to her that she does not possess. It was easy for me to hate Britney because I thought she was in control the whole time... And, as a high-schooler, I didn't understand that Sexy Virgin Britney Spears, as manufactured by her record label and managers, might not be the sole creation of Britney Spears, Person - that she, actually, might feel powerless in the face of the Britney Spears Media Machine too.
We were both eighteen once. And I'm really glad that my early twenties were not broadcasted to the world at large... How over the top can this woman get? How out of control? And so on, and so on. It's when you realize that you're having fun watching another person's life fall apart that the sick feeling starts to kick in.
Why do we like our female stars to suffer? There's no question that we do; consider - God knows I do, in dark moments when there is nothing else to post -Spears is a source of interest just because things happen to her - big, exciting, terrible, painful things - and people like to watch stories that are big and exciting for them and painful for someone else. Women, more often than not - women we can paint as crazy, or slutty, or bitchy, or stupid, or out-of-control, women we can use to scare other women, women we can point to and say, look! That's who not to be.
A a certain point, Britney Spears lost her worth, in the public eye. When she had children, gained weight, lost the fascination of the new. When she became a grown-up; when she became publicly known as a flawed, suffering person instead of a cartoon; when she stopped pretending to be a fantasy. And, of course, now she's in the "comeback" stage of the cycle. Which was inevitable. Every sacrificial victim gets a comeback, if she doesn't die first. And that might simply be because, after you've torn someone down far enough, there's nothing else to do but build her back up. We love women when they're too young and too inexperienced to be anything other than vessels for our desire. We love them when they're spiraling out of control and giving us a chance to opine about what Good Girls Don't do, to scare other women into line. And we love them even more when they let us welcome them back into the fold - when they demonstrate, for us, the benefits of repentance."
