The Times Magazine 5her to be greeted with “Kill the pig” placards
outside the studio when she left. It was the
time of the “Charlotte Church Countdown”
website, which counted down the days until
the child star’s 16th birthday, when she could
legally have sex. It was Amy Winehouse,
clearly in the process of starving herself, being
photographed running barefoot down the
street, bleeding from scratch marks on her
face. It was MailOnline’s Sidebar of Shame
putting a big red circle around women’s “fat”
thighs or bellies – or, in one picture of Cherie
Blair, an “ugly toe”.
It was – most brutally of all, I think
- the paparazzi taking an “upskirt” photo
of Britney Spears’ bloodstained knickers, and
Now magazine running the story that this
“proved she wasn’t pregnant”. In the medieval
courts, women of the bedchamber would
gossip over the state of the queen’s bedsheets- everyone discussing if they were bloodstained
and whether or not this meant she was
with child. With Britney Spears, this was
still happening to a 21st-century woman with
an estimated fortune of $59 million. Why?
Information about her womb was valuable.
At the time, a single, “unique” shot of Spears
was worth $1 million.
One of the earliest memes to go viral
was 2007’s “Leave Britney Alone”. In it, the
young blonde YouTube star Chris Crocker
appears utterly distraught and weeping. “How
f***ing dare anyone out there make fun of
Britney, after all she has been through?... All
you people care about is... making money off
of her... SHE’S A HUMAN!... LEAVE HER
ALONE PLEASE... I mean it... She is not
well right now.”
The video has now been viewed more
than 43 million times and been endlessly
parodied. There’s even a trance remix single
of it. You can, if you wish, dance to Crocker’s
crying. What’s notable about “Leave Britney
Alone”, however, is that, when it came out,
everyone thought it was hilarious – this
young, camp pop fan being upset by what was
happening to Spears. Being so horrified by the
way she was being discussed that he filmed
himself begging the world to be a little kinder.
Back then he was seen as a rather bizarre,
overemotional outlier. Spears being mad was
funny. She was the punchline to a million
panel-show jokes.
Last week, as the world started tweeting
about Framing Britney Spears, everyone
suddenly sounded like Chris Crocker in 2007.
The hashtag #freebritney trended for a solid
week. Former tabloid journalists tweeted their
guilt over her treatment. For the first time,
Spears was being discussed not as a sexpot
or a fallen icon, a plastic doll, a hot mess,
a bad mother or a slut – but as a girl who
just wanted to sing and dance, was publicly
dehumanised for a decade and who became
very, very ill.
The reason that Framing Britney Spears
and the reaction to it are so notable is because
since those toxic years when she – and
Charlotte Church, Jade Goody and Amy
Winehouse – became famous, social media
was invented. And while social media might
be responsible for many, many awful things,
it has also provided the first platform for
women across the world to analyse their
lives. When Spears appeared singing
...Baby One More Time; when she shaved
her hair off; when, swollen with medication,
she appeared on the 2007 VMA Awards,
blank-eyed – we simply did not have enough
words to describe women and what happens
to them. When you told Britney Spears’
story in the language of 2007, she looked
like the showbiz car crash it’s absolutely fine
to rubberneck and joke about.
By way of contrast, when you tell
Britney Spears’ story in the language of
2021, it is with the painfully new lexicon
of the body positivity movement, #MeToo,
gaslighting, mental-health awareness,
discussions of the rampant misogyny in the
music industry, and #bekind. Now, she looks
like someone so deeply traumatised it is
a genuine miracle she is still alive. Now,
she looks like someone who lived through
categorically the worst possible time to
be a famous woman. Now, she looks like
someone who needs to call a lawyer. n