We're All to Blame for What Happened to Britney Spears

We didn’t cause Britney Spears’ downfall, but we funded it. And we can try to make up for it—and do so much better.

We're All to Blame for What Happened to Britney Spears

The tragedy of Britney Spears unfurls like a whodunnit. Who can we blame for the young girl with the big voice becoming the soft-spoken woman who has been legally declared unable to care for herself?

Framing Britney Spears, a new documentary now streaming on Hulu from the New York Times, poses the question: Whose fault is it? The list of suspects is long, the evidence damning, and the motive obvious. Anyone in proximity to Spears stood to gain money and power.

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Was it Justin Timberlake? After their breakup in 2002, his music videos and interviews made her out to be a villain, boosting his profile and making him a more bankable star.

Was it her father Jamie, always in the background, who controls her conservatorship and thus her massive wealth?

Was it Diane Sawyer? She had a then 22-year-old Spears watch a clip of a public figure saying the singer deserved to be shot on network TV. Or Perez Hilton, who built a personal industry mocking Spears and her peers? Or Matt Lauer, now a known sexual predator, who implied during a TV interview that the crying 25-year-old mother of two was a bad parent?

Or was it the men who drifted in and out of her life—often older, greasy, almost typecast versions of men who prey on vulnerable women? Or the paparazzi, who harassed her?

In the 90-minute documentary, friends, lawyers, label workers, agents, papparazos, and critics chart Spears’ rise and apparent downfall. The result: viral status, support from stars like Sarah Jessica Parker and Miley Cyrus, and huge buzz on social media. Of course! It combines several of Americans’ most beloved institutions—celebrity, nostalgia, flashy docuseries, and true crime. But as social media begins to fill with personalized apologies to Spears, it’s not clear that we’re really ready to examine how this happened.

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Take one step back—the framing of The Framing of Britney Spears is that Britney Spears is still a product that sells. The rise and fall of a famous woman is an infinity loop of content; and at no point do the makers of the documentary acknowledge that they, too, are in the business of Britney. There’s no doubt that the film will be a moneymaker for the New York Times, who has written hundreds of articles about Spears. (The docuseries does not analyze them, despite its focus on media coverage of the pop star.) By writing this, I also can’t divorce myself from the system that wants to make a buck off Britney.

I strongly believe that we can be so much better about the way we relate to woman celebrities without giving up our love of drama and gossip and sparkles and pop music. It’s easy to think we’re in a better place now that the tabloid culture of the 2000s has diminished, but social media's just given us a much more direct route. Let's evolve our standom past the extreme, awful categories of “I hate her” or “I would die for her." Let's hold media companies and networks accountable for misogynistic coverage. Let's shut down our own baseless hatred of celebrities. Not because famous people are charity cases, but because the way we treat them informs the way we treat people who we do not think are pretty and important.

We have this responsibility, because as we probe into the mystery of Spears' downfall, we prove that the answer is: us. The decades of pap photos, the horrifying interviews, even this documentary, exist to meet the demand of an insatiable public. 

Individuals and major media figures are responsible for the exploitation of Britney Spears. But we’re responsible for funding it. You and I did not follow Spears day and night, climbing on the hood of her car, terrorizing her and her children with a constant state of surveillance. But we bought magazines to see photos that we knew could only have been obtained if the subject was being terrorized.

Our desperation to exalt and destroy young, beautiful women has no limit. We supported Justin Timberlake after his Britney-themed music videos, his Britney-themed radio interviews, his bits about having sex with her on SNL, as recently as 2013. We tuned into the Sawyer interview, laughed at the jokes by (mostly male) comedians, read Perez Hilton’s coverage. 

The documentary is very good, and maybe even necessary. But entering my banking information into Hulu to watch it, logging on to Twitter to read the horrified takes, writing this one—it’s all very “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” hotdog meme.

We did this. The bargain America strikes with celebrities is this: We will give you more fame and money than you could possibly wish for. In return, you will serve us. For celebrity men, “serve” usually means a few blockbusters, a public fling, the occasional thirst-inducing red carpet appearance. For women celebrities, it means being physically and personally flawless, living as the perfect blend of every existing fantasy, letting us see inside your kitchen, your purse, your panties. (Unsatisfied with round-the-clock images of Spears, paparazzi snapped upskirt photos of her.) 

To me, it seems darkly funny that anyone is surprised by what she has endured. In the last year—in the woke, post-MeToo 2020s, Chrissy Teigen and Meghan Markle were mocked for losing pregnancies. Billie Eilish, an 18-year-old, was body-shamed for walking outside. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was ridiculed for sharing that she is a survivor of sexual assault.

I’m just an armchair psychologist—who was dancing on a chair to Spears’ “Stronger” choreography at age seven—but it’s obvious that the way we treat public figures, especially women, reflects a deep cultural neediness. Life under capitalism is sad. We’re overworked, undereducated, abysmally stressed, and often impoverished or steps away from it. Art is rarely accessible. Politicians and institutions have worked hard to make sure that holding them accountable is insanely complicated and exhausting.

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The existence of a social class of celebrities and major media figures gives a public face to wealth and power. It distracts from the fact that those people actually have a fraction of the money and resources of studio heads, CEOs, and elected leaders. If we changed the way we relate to fame culture, we could free up space to interrogate more serious power structures. We would also live in a kinder world. 

The Framing of Britney Spears was made in response to the growing “Free Britney” movement—the push by fans to release Spears from her father’s conservatorship. “Free Britney” is a worthy ambition, but it’s not really a social movement. A social movement is something that aims to liberate a large group of people. The “Free Britney” movement clearly comes from a place of deep love, but it takes a gigantic problem—the exploitation of women—and presents a solution that only frees one woman. It’s still just a way of relating obsessively to a single (white, rich) woman.

We’re going to have to be a little more ambitious, if we want to set ourselves free.

Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter. 

This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Jenny Singer