Excerpt: Did we need Freud to understand that cutting off her long locks, the ultimate signifier of her hyper femininity, was akin to taking a razor to her breasts, to dissociate from the parts that trapped her?
Sometime in the early 1990s, I saw a photograph of Britney Spears who was probably in her early teens, at best, probably younger. She was in her bedroom, which she described as her dream. It was ridiculous: everything was pink, there were frilly pillows everywhere, and toys galore. It looked like the bedroom of someone stuck inside a dollhouse, or someone who had been told that this was what all girls dreamed of having.
Britney Spears is 39 and has been performing since the age of 3. She has been sexualised all her life because this is America, where we constantly police the sexual desires of teens but are fine with making little girls as young as six shake their tiny bodies in front of large audiences and judges while made up to look like live dolls in skimpy costumes. It’s a form of child porn and sex work that everyone seems fine with, even as we continue to manufacture various sex panics around just about every other form of sexual expression and refuse to acknowledge that adult sex work is actually work. Spears is the product of a peculiarly American set of contradictions: sex is bad, we hold, but women must perpetually sexualise themselves in public and private to be counted as such. She’s also the product of an entertainment industry that has, from its inception, relentlessly exploited and abused the most vulnerable, women and children in particular. There aren’t a lot of child celebrities who make it through the system without having their talent and their money used and taken away from them. Jodie Foster seems to be a rare survivor but for every Foster, there are about fifty others who grow up to be broken by some combination of greed on the part of the adults in their lives, sexual abuse, and various kinds of embezzlement.
When I saw that photograph, I turned to a friend and said, “That kid’s being exploited and they’re stealing her money from her.” The room was completely over the top, given over to the hungry desires and demands of an overworked million-dollar pop star too young to understand how The Business of Britney was being run. I can’t have been the only one to look at that photo and realise that her dream bedroom and all the other accoutrements of fame that she clearly enjoyed—private planes, limousines, expensive homes—were just window dressing, a giant distraction. None of that was or is equal to what her family and various handlers have made.
Over the years, we witnessed Spears dissolve in more than a few public meltdowns, including the infamous 2007 incident where she shaved off her hair. This was so clearly a cry for help, a desperate signalling that she wanted out of a life that hemmed her in and forced her to perform over and over, like a windup doll. Did we need Freud to understand that cutting off her long locks, the ultimate signifier of her hyper femininity, was akin to taking a razor to her breasts, to dissociate from the parts that trapped her?
It came as no surprise that she was placed in a conservatorship controlled by her father, and in it she stayed for nearly 15 years. Spears made news this summer when she spoke out about the conditions she had to endure, which included being forcibly placed on birth control and made to work against her will. Today, a judge ended the whole thing. The New York Times notes that Spears is not being asked to undergo a mental evaluation as a condition of her release, which is apparently highly unusual in these circumstances.
But whether or not she is considered mentally fit to be released from her conservatorship is besides the point, since that whole arrangement was clearly designed to benefit her father and the masses of people who made money off her. If she was mentally fit to understand and detail her many forms of confinement (which included having her phones being tapped and surveilled by even her bodyguards, who were privy to all her intimate conversations and information about her medications), she’s fit enough to be freed without further questioning. The much bigger question for Britney and those who claim to care for her is: can she move forward and actually take control of her life and her finances without simply moving in a parallel direction towards a life that might be controlled by yet another lot of avaricious people? Who really are the people who “care” about her, outside of her fans? This is someone who graduated from high school via distance learning and who has never had, as far as we can tell, a circle of friends she can trust and depend on. This is also someone who has never had to worry about financial matters. This is not just how families in entertainment conduct matters, it’s also how wealthy, established families control their female children in particular: Don’t worry your pretty little head about money matters and look, how about a trip to Paris to take your mind off all this silly stuff?
In September, Spears announced her engagement to Sam Ashgari, whose occupations are listed as personal trainer and male model; they met during the filming of her “Slumber Party” music video. It’s very hard to not place quotation marks around “personal trainer” and “male model” so I’ll go ahead and do just that— both are perfectly legitimate occupations but it’s also a fact that “personal trainers” and “male models” in the entertainment industry have long been known for attaching themselves to successful celebrities for reasons less to do with love, whatever we think that is, and more to do with the money that flows around them. Does Spears have a team of people dedicated, for once, to her actual interests and financial stability (and who might insist that she sign a gigantic prenup) or is she finally escaping her conservatorship to flee into the arms of a “personal trainer” and “male model” who might eventually bilk her of her fortune after a messy divorce (which would make it her third)?
As to that fortune: Britney Spears’s net worth is valued at $60 million, which seems like a ludicrously small amount given her astonishing and unrelenting success. That alone is a sign that a number of people have made off with large chunks of her money. Will Britney Spears, whose biggest supporters are the fans she will never know personally, be able to navigate some fairly muddy financial waters?
These aren’t just the problems facing a billion-dollar one-woman industry fronted by one of the most successful pop stars of our time. Everything that Spears has faced—for at least 36 of her 39 years—is a symptom of a set of greedy systems bent on exploiting and, often, breaking the lives and bodies of those who generate massive profits. The overblown bedroom was a way to distract a child from the fact that her growing body and that voice were the objects that made fortunes for a select group of people: Don’t bother your pretty little head about money, dearie, and look! A pink bedroom!
Ashgari announced their engagement in September via, of course, his Instagram account, with a photo that shows the two of them kissing while Spears waved her diamond ring at the camera. Much has been made about the cut of the diamond and its size, as is the norm with celebrity engagements: Don’t bother your pretty little head about a prenup, darling —look, a big, shiny diamond!
The Business of Britney will continue but will it ever benefit Britney Spears? Or will it only continue to enlarge the bank accounts of the sharks around her?
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Image: Glenn Francis.