[This piece was originally posted at Feminspire.]
“What do you call Britney Spears in pigtails?”
“A blowjob with handles.”
This joke appeared on a Britney Spears hater site back in the late ’90s, a site that looked amateurish and pathetic even by the decade’s standards — back when geocities was still a thing. It was one of my favorite websites, one that I visited every night when I finished my homework. Filled with jokes about the singer’s alleged boob job and alleged promiscuity, and numerous essays about why she was generally terrible, the site was a Britney hater’s dream come true. One time, I even contributed a parody song called “Oops! I’m Pregnant Again,” in which Britney was a “dumb slut” who kept sleeping with guys who knocked her up and left her. It was accepted and published on the front page.
[Read the rest of this piece here.]
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Interesting article. I was never into Britney, Christina or the million other poptarts but I also wasn’t a hater. I just never found them remotely personable or relatable. I felt distanced by Britney, Christina and the other poptarts in a way that I wasn’t by actresses such as Sarah Michelle Gellar, Claire Danes, and Reese Witherspoon.
Britney and Christina are not accessable to girls. Most 13-16 year olds are not allowed to dress like that, and if they were wouldn’t have the confidence to. I was so far from having a boyfriend at that age that I really couldn’t begin to relate to their extremely sexualized image and lyrics. They also don’t project a very pro girl friends personae in the way that even The Spice Girls did. And I think that’s where a lot of the hate came from. Their main fanbase was composed girls and yet they never seemed to act like they even liked other girls because so much of their image was centered around impressing men.
I’m not defending the slut shaming, I just think it came from girls feeling ostracized from them in a way that we weren’t from many of the other female celebrities of the day. 13-15 is such an awkward age and to grow up where you had girls with near perfect bodies, dancing on stage with extremely sexual moves and dressing with so much skin showing being thrust in your face everywhere you turn was not exactly good for our group’s self esteem. It was really hard to escape that if you were in that age range and I can’t think of any other group in recent decades that had such sexualized “role models” that were targeted so specifically at our age group (they had Britney and Christina dolls with the toddler toys for crying out loud). Even the poptarts that the pre teens and teens listen to now (Hannah Montana, Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez) have a softer more girl friendly persona.
For me at that age, I couldn’t have cared less what Britney or Christina had or hadn’t done in their personal lives or if they had had plastic surgery. I cared that their image was being thrust everywhere as something that I should aspire to be. Because even though they said a million times they didn’t want to be “role models” when you market yourself specifically at an age range under 15, that’s what you are, like it or not. And as an awkward homeschooled kid who dressed exactly like Willow (Season 1&2) I certainly couldn’t connect.