Britney Spears and I are about the same age, a fact I realized while listening to The Woman in Me (Gallery Books, 2023). I did not have cable growing up (there is a family story about the death of a goat related to a cable guy, though like many of my family’s stories it is likely punched up for tragedy and guilt-induction) so I wasn’t aware of the Mickey Mouse Club or Britney’s presence in it. She first came into my consciousness with the video for “Hit Me Baby One More Time,” because we did have cable by the time that was a huge hit, and although she was dressed like a schoolgirl in the video I assumed she must be older than me, because I could not project my sixteen-year-old self into the body I saw fulfilling men and boy’s sexual fantasies on MTV.
When she pops into my memory again, it is through a poster on the wall of the apartment of some sleazy guys in Gainesville. I was visiting my best friend and remember the poster on the first floor, in a room that would have been a dining room if it weren’t the home of several 18-year-olds. She is wearing her schoolgirl outfit, staring unsmiling out of the poster. Fast forward to 2005, and to me she is a shaved head and a gross husband, a joke for whatever bits of pop culture I was following then, when I was back in Gainesville as a law student.
Given how little I thought of her, I was surprised how moved I was by her memoir. I didn’t understand the depth of her confinement under the conservatorship, or her tragic, unpredictable childhood, or the true misogyny she endured at the hands of people she trusted (OMG Justin Timberlake!), and hearing it, as read by the flawless Michelle Williams, who brings a grit and slowness to her voice that hints at Britney’s without imitating, I got so angry. At the adults who thought a sixteen-year-old should be treated this way. At her father and her complicit family members for making her perform while also acting as though she were incompetent. At all of us, for dismissing her, for making her a joke. At time itself, for aging her up to the point that when I was sixteen and being a teenager, she was masturbation/ridicule fodder for old men and comedians.
I’m sorry, Britney. I hope you can grow old like the rest of us.