“Sometimes you hear that statistic about how if Barbie were a real person, she would fit the weight criteria for anorexia and her boobs would be so disproportionately big that she wouldn’t be able to walk upright. There’s a less fantastical version of that idea, though, that a generation of girls like me saw play out in Britney Spears: If you did everything you were supposed to do to become the Perfect Girl — did just enough sit-ups and cooed just so and showed just enough skin and kept up the lie that you were born only to make someone else happy — it all just might send you completely over the edge. I hear a strain of this idea in the macabre of Lana Del Rey’s music, which blurs the borders between life and death, between the American dream and a nightmare: “Will you still love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful?” But Britney’s music explores this deep a darkness in only its subtext; her sad songs like “Lucky” and “Everytime” strike me as so intensely devastating because even in their darkest moments, they still put on the façade of pretty, like the girl who early on learned that trick of how to blot away tears without smudging even a smidge of mascara. Britney’s meltdown happened when I was in college, learning to hate the game more than the player, finally able to see larger and more systemic threats to my liberation than the feigned innocence of a pretty girl from Kentwood, Louisiana. Still, something about her breakdown felt too traumatic to fully process it at the time. Only when she managed to miraculously come out the other side of it could I acknowledge the terrible pain she must have been going through, could I admit that I didn’t know how Britney Spears didn’t die of it, of being a girl.”
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