At first blushing, it’s a little weird that the New York Times documentary “Framing Britney Spears,” which aired for the first time on FX and streams in Hulu, did so much to capture the national imagination. The show does a great job of presenting the case, advocated by the #FreeBritney movement, that Jamie Spears, Britney’s father, exploits the misogynistic and exaggerated coverage of the star’s otherwise treatable mental health issues around her falsely as inappropriate portray and thus become legal. control over her life and money. But it is also true that this is a unique situation that affects one person throughout the world, and not least on the face of it a widespread social problem affecting people who are not called “Spears”. Why did it inspire so much fascination and so many thoughts and social media conversations?
The easy answer is that we live in a culture of celebrity where ordinary people relate too much to famous people, a phenomenon that psychologists have coined a term for: ‘parasocial relationships’.
However, I think it runs much deeper than that. People are related to Spears, not because they are also run under conservatories by domineering and greedy fathers, but because her story is such a deep symbol of what has been done to her generation in general – especially the women and strangers from whom the #FreeBritney movement. The voyeuristic, sexist, domineering, judgmental abuse that the press inflicted on Spears for the first decade-plus of the 21st century was clearly the first shot in an overall sexist attack on millennials. It started with ‘abstinence only’ and played all the time through the election of a creepy old boomer who bragged about how he ‘grabbed the women of the Spears age’ by the pussy ‘.
I was 21 when Spears’ first album, “…. Baby One More Time” appeared, and my memory of the whole Britney phenomenon was mainly that it strange. The 90s were hardly perfect, but it was a time of great progress for women in music. Tori Amos, TLC, PJ Harvey, Bjork, Missy Elliott, Hole, Salt-N-Pepa, Liz Phair and Lauryn Hill all made a huge impact, often with songs that tell women’s stories from their own, sex-positive perspective.
At the end of the decade, there is suddenly an interest in the virginity of this sexy young star. The Britney Virginity Watch – which was soon accompanied by the Jessica Simpson Virginity Watch and the countdown to the Olsen Twins’ 18th birthday – has become a national obsession. It wasn’t just a weird pop culture thing. The hymen statuses of the emerging millennial generation soon became a political fixation.
Following the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the newly empowered religious right waged war against young people. Education that preached only against abstinence preached against the use of contraceptives and told children to “wait” until marriage. Purity rings and virgin promises have become trends, especially in red America. Sex-shameful myths – that sexually active women cannot fall in love, that women are ‘naturally’ modest, that contraception by women is ‘abortion’ – spread wildly. Hysterical and often false stories about juvenile sexuality have caused a national panic about ‘hook culture’. The Bush administration has continued to block the legalization of emergency contraception.
It may have started with religious law, but the sex panic overwhelmed the country in the early 21st century.
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In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense, because it all happened when the millennials came of age. Unlike the relatively small generation X, millennials had the numbers – there are more than boomers! – and they are expected to have real social power. Moreover, the girls were raised in an era of ‘girl power’, and there was real reason to believe that this generation could become more egalitarian and feminist than before. Remember, the average age of marriage and first childbirth has risen rapidly in the 21st century. Women had fewer than men on university campuses.
Unfortunately, such social advances often lead to an ugly setback – and the abuse of Spears in the public eye predicted what would come for millennial women who wrote largely.
The virgin fixation and shame of premarital sex was a big part of this. It has been very clear about trapping millennial women with unplanned pregnancies and early marriages, as well as discouraging the use of birth control, an important tool that young women need to complete their studies and get off to a good start in their careers. get. The perfect encapsulation of this, at least until Trump ran on his misogyny platform, was the way Rush Limbaugh – the personification of the worst kind of right-wing boomerang – waged war against Sandra Fluke, a millennial law student who spoke out against him. for insurance coverage of birth control. Even by his usual standards, Limbaugh’s lazy sexism was not on the rags, which unleashed 46 separate personal attacks on the young activist, calling her a ‘slut’ and a ‘prostitute’ and demanding that she make sex tapes for his personal enjoyment. All this because she has advocated for birth control, 99% of women who have sex with men will use it at some point.
But while sex was central to this war against millennials, it was hardly the only front to be fought.
The first few decades were the rise of an entire anti-feminist industrial complex aimed primarily at preventing millennial women from gaining access to the profits promised in their youthful girl power. Anti-feminists – who were often older women who exploited sexist fears – such as Christina Hoff Somners and Caitlin Flanagan wrote down well-published signs declaring that it was boys who were the ‘real’ victims of sexist oppression, how ‘girl power’ destroyed young women , and how women are secretly happier to be housewives. This era also saw the rise of the “men’s rights” movement, which quickly expanded into all forms of sexist hate communities, from the increases to the Jordan Peterson supporters to the Proud Boys.
This setback worked to a great extent, at least on many millennial men. In polls, it appears that millennials, especially white men, are more likely than gen-Xers to agree that men should be the primary authority in the family. Millennial men tend to reflexively view women as less intelligent than men and they still expect their wives to do most of the homework. Although millennial men and women are both less conservative than the older generations, there is a persistent gender gap, with 44% of millennial men being Republican, compared to only 31% of millennial women. No wonder the working mothers, and not fathers, got the bulk of the economic hardship when they struggled after childcare when the coronavirus hit.
It is therefore not surprising that Spears’ press treatment draws up a template used to abuse women who are far less well-known than she is, especially in the age of social media. Gamergate, in which a vicious and mostly male group of social media users unleashed ruthless abuse on anyone considered ‘feminist’ in gambling circles, is the main example, but the problem extends far beyond. For example, women are twice as likely to experience harassment in a dating app as men.
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The good news is that, just as Spears resists her father’s conservatory over her, millennial women do not have two decades of pressure to abandon feminism. A strong majority of millennial women say they are feminists, and it was millennial women who spearheaded the anti-rape movement and now the #MeToo movement that saw much of feminism in the first two decades of the 21st century. And it was millennial women who helped push the pussy digger out of office, with 65% of them supporting Joe Biden in 2020 before the election, compared to only 45% of millennial men.
In the end, it makes a lot of sense for Britney’s story to resonate. Hair is an extreme situation, but one that reflects a lot of pressure on millennial women. Like her, they grew up hard-working and ambitious, only to find out that society is far more interested in managing and suppressing their sexuality than in celebrating their talents. Yes, the #FreeBritney movement is about helping this one woman whose music clearly means a lot to people. But it is also a symbol for those in her generation who are fed up and ready to claim the equality and independence they were promised as their birthright.