Last month, The New York Times Presents released a documentary titled “Framing Britney Spears,” which focused on Spears’ life, career and several controversies, including her conservatorship overseen by her father, Jamie Spears.
The documentary brought new blood into the #FreeBritney movement, which seeks to end Spears’ conservatorship. It also brought on a trend of reexamining past comments and actions toward Spears, bringing backlash to celebrities like Justin Timberlake, Diane Sawyer and Sarah Silverman, who had made negative comments toward Spears in the past.
While some of the celebrities involved have apologized for their actions, others have doubled down, and several have refused to comment at all.
Kathy Griffin, who insulted Spears while on “Larry King Now,” said “we didn’t know what we didn’t know in those days.”
Silverman, who called Spears’ two children “the most adorable mistakes you’ll ever see” while presenting the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, said on Twitter that “I wish I could delete it but I can’t” and “Art changes over yrs as we know more & the world changes (sic).”
Timberlake said in a notes app apology on his Instagram that “the (music) industry is flawed. It sets men, especially white men, up for success…Because of my ignorance, I didn’t recognize it for all that it was while it was happening in my own life but I do not want to ever benefit from others being pulled down again.” Timberlake dated Spears briefly before they broke up in 2002. In subsequent interviews and music videos he seemed to demonize and blame Spears for the end of their relationship.
What all three of these apologies have in common, and what bothers me the most, is that they all hold this sense of “I didn’t know any better.” Sure, maybe public perception of Spears was different back then, but surely human decency and morality toward other suffering human beings didn’t just now come into vogue?
Perhaps it did. Spears wasn’t the only female celebrity to get treated terribly in the early 2000s. Megan Fox, Amy Winehouse, Janet Jackson, Whitney Houston, Kristen Stewart, Monica Lewinsky, Paris Hilton, Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie are all prominent female celebrities who faced intense scrutiny and backlash from the media. Mocked for any weight fluctuations, substance abuse issues or even dating certain male celebrities, these women, who did next to nothing to deserve this treatment, were hounded by the media and tabloids who refused to give them any sort of break. Making fun of these women became a cultural norm.
This phenomenon can still be seen in modern female celebrities. I’m not a fan of Taylor Swift, but it’s undeniable that she gets made fun of by the media more than she should be. Recently, Netflix show “Ginny & Georgia” came under fire for joking that a character goes “through men faster than Taylor Swift.” Swift clapped back on Twitter, saying that “2010 called and it wants its lazy, deeply sexist joke back.”
It’s not like male celebrities don’t ever get made fun of, but it regularly seems to become a cultural norm to make fun of famous women. I was a small child when most of the women mentioned in this article faced their scandals, but the jokes about them were everywhere as I grew up. Even “Hannah Montana” made a Spears reference in an episode in its third season, “Welcome to the Bungle,” which reenacted the infamous “Leave Britney Alone” video from 2007. It’s strange how long these scandals stayed in the cultural zeitgeist, and the adults at the time normalized the mockery of these women and passed it on to us children. It’s even stranger that it took us children calling out the abuse these women have suffered and raising Cain on social media to get people to finally publicly apologize to women like Spears.
Why does it take a documentary and a hashtag to get public apologies? Why does it take a social media movement to bring justice to women harmed? Why are celebrities like Timberlake and Silverman, who were adults when the Spears scandals were going on, only just now being faced with consequences for their actions, and why are those consequences primarily backlash from Britney Stans? There’s no quick answer. Perhaps they were just going along with the accepted behavior at the time, not wanting to rock the boat. Perhaps they believed that Spears really did deserve her treatment. But that still doesn’t make any of what happened OK.
Hopefully, the growth in support for Spears, fueled by her documentary, will help her cause as she continues in her legal battle to remove her father’s conservatorship and finally earn her freedom. But we, as a society, should seek to learn from our mistakes, lest we put someone else in a situation like Spears’ again.
Categories: Opinion
Leave a Reply