Britney Spears is free, but still trapped in the same cycle

Despite what some would like to believe, Britney Spears became an officially free woman on November 12, 2021. On that day, the #FreeBritney movement achieved what was supposedly their ultimate goal when Judge Penny of the LA Court Probate Division finally terminated Britney’s almost 14 year-long conservatorship, overseen (for a majority of its existence) by Britney’s father, Jamie Spears, a man she’d been estranged from prior to him taking ownership of her life and estate.

Britney herself was already claiming victory in October of 2021, following Jamie’s official suspension as conservator, when she posted a video onto Twitter thanking fans for their support. She said she “100%” believed the #FreeBritney movement “saved [her] life.”

While anti-conservatorship sentiments had thrived within Britney Spears’ fanbase since 2008 (when the arrangement began), and the #FreeBritney movement took off on social media back in 2019 (when it was reported that Britney had been admitted into a mental health facility against her will), the general public joined the mission to free Britney from her abusive conservatorship in early 2021 after The New York Times released their first of two documentaries on the subject, Framing Britney Spears. Other documentaries followed–another from The New York Times called Controlling Britney Spears, along with content from CNN, Netflix, and a whole bunch of YouTube channels.

As interest in Britney Spears’ legal struggles strengthened across America, so did the empathy and acknowledgement for her past struggles. Much of Framing Britney’s focus had little to do with the conservatorship at the center of #FreeBritney’s cause, rather it relitigated past scandals of Britney’s decades-long career, spotlighting the unfair, often misogynistic treatment Britney had been receiving from the media and public since her debut in 1998. Alongside the desire to free Britney was the demand to apologize for years of abuse–demands being aimed at both the general public for the culturally-accepted misogyny of the 2000s as well as at specific individuals for their personal mistreatment of Britney years prior (people like Sarah Silverman, Justin Timberlake, Diane Sawyer, etc.).

For the entirety of her career, Britney Spears has been trapped within the love-hate-redemption publicity cycle that often dictates the public standing of a female celebrity’s reputation. On the career of Anne Hathaway, Constance Grady wrote for Vox that the cycle consists of four phases. In the first, the celebrity rises to prominence to a dominantly positive response, albeit a slightly problematic one. Grady writes that the acclaim the celebrity receives toward the start of her career “expresses itself in the form of a mildly condescending expression of bewilderment,” spotlighting the fact that a “telegenic young woman” can also be talented; she gives the examples of Jennifer Lawrence being both physically attractive and “so good” in Winter’s Bone, along with Taylor Swift being tall, skinny and blonde whilst also capable of writing catchy pop music.

Britney Spears’ professional solo debut at 16 years-old often evoked the same condescending response. Britney was a talented child-star who’d been honing her skills in entertainment since she was a toddler, having been enrolled in dance lessons since she was three. Once she aged out of being a pretty grade-school-age kid, groomed for superstardom since she was at least eight, into being a conventionally-attractive, often sexualized, teenage girl who somehow hadn’t forgotten how to sing and dance, Britney was acclaimed as a wunderkind of the pop industry: the Next Big Thing.

When she officially became that Big Thing, Britney was in Phase Two–winning awards, selling out tours, charming talkshow hosts, and gleaming on the cover of major magazines. Phase Two likely feels like a great place to be for a while, until the mass adoration of a female celebrity begins to instinctively bother members of the public who can’t quite reconcile the immense success of a young girl with the patriarchal norms that are supposed to prevent such widespread support for young women. From there, there’s nowhere for a woman’s star-power to go but down, sliding into infamy and mass-endorsed humiliation, a.k.a., Phase Three.

For Britney, the major catalyst for this change was her break-up with Justin Timberlake, an event that prompted her to be slut-shamed and vilified across the media landscape, thereby rectifying the success Britney had achieved with the enforcement of norms that challenge a woman’s right to express her own sexuality. Britney’s own unwillingness to succumb to pressures to restrict her sexual expressions exacerbated the issue. In one of her first interviews post-breakup, Diane Sawyer questioned and criticized Britney on her skin-barring photoshoots, lyrical references toward sexual desire and masturbation, and the revelation that Britney, an adult woman, was no longer a virgin. For every admonishment she received, Britney stood her ground in defense of her right to make the art she wanted to make and live the life she wanted to live.

Perhaps to this day, the most scandalous thing about Britney Spears’ behavior was not the actions themselves, but her refusal to apologize for them. When photographers aimed their lenses up her skirt and caught her without any underwear, she called the paparazzi “pervs” in a later music, during the same year that Vanessa Hudgens was apologizing to her own fans when private photos were leaked without her consent.

Coming into adulthood under the looming presence of media scrutiny, the desire of much of the public to chastise Britney Spears developed in direct correspondence with her increasing independence. Every exercise of free-will became more ammo for backlash. A surprisingly candid reality show was called “career suicide;” when she got hitched in Las Vegas wearing jeans and a baseball cap, she was deemed trailer trash, then was continuously degraded on the cover of tabloids whenever she went out dancing with her friends. To this day, the most iconic visual of the “breakdown” era is a collection of photos and videos of Britney shaving her head in a Tarzana hair salon. More people remember Britney’s apparently shocking decision to part with her famous long blonde locks than are aware that she was 5150’d twice less than a year later. Britney expressing autonomy over her body in ways that conflicted with the fetishized ideal of her blonde pop-stardom was always more concerning than anything to do with her medical care.

Considering the direct correlation between Britney’s independence and the public’s distaste for her and her decisions, it shouldn’t be surprising that the “comeback” narrative of her career began the exact year her life officially fell under the control of her father Jamie: 2008, the year Britney’s conservatorship started. According to Grady, Phase Four of the love-hate-redemption publicity cycle can be described by the statements, “Personally, I think it’s anti-feminist to hate this woman. And she’s so pretty and so talented!” The two sentences indicate our cultural inclination to resume admiration of a female public figure once they can pity her as a victim of something, when her reputation is at its lowest and no one can be annoyed by her popularity and power anymore.

While the conservatorship was in place, Britney’s situation aroused little suspicion or concern from anyone but her die-hard fans. Every couple of years, she would release a new album or embark on a new tour/batch of concerts for her Las Vegas residency. Britney’s control over her public image was observably minimal. Journalists would periodically complain of scripted interviews that the singer herself did not seem to oversee; it appeared as though Britney’s team was often preventing interviewers from asking Britney certain questions or, at least on one occasion, allowing Britney herself to speak on certain topics. Even in her musical output, Britney’s literal voice appeared to be absent when her eighth studio album’s lead vocals were reasonably suspected to have been recorded by a different woman entirely. Plenty of people other than just those in Britney’s fandom noticed these peculiarities, yet none of it sparked a significant enough controversy to compare to the scrutiny Britney had once been under for shaving her head. Britney doing things that other people consider odd has always been a more sensational story than evidence that her voice was being stifled by those around her.

That is, until the Framing Britney Spears premiered. As the title suggested, The New York Times documentary’s biggest success was not in exposing the corruption of Britney’s conservatorship, but in re-framing Britney’s public narrative into one people could show pity for. It reminded audiences of how poorly she’d been treated by the media in years passed, then drew a decent amount of attention onto her current circumstances, enough that by the time Britney spoke during a recorded testimony in June of 2021, the entire world was listening to her speak on the abuse she’d faced over the previous 13 years. As an unambiguous victim, Britney would yet again be loved and supported.

By rules of the cycle, it was always inevitable that once Britney regained control over her own life and public-facing voice that that support would turn on her again. There are some key differences, however, between the negative press Britney’s currently receiving and the backlash she faced in the 2000s, even despite some obvious similarities.

Following her break-up with Justin Timberlake, Britney’s sexual expressions were shamed as immoral and she was chastised for her supposed bad influence over young girls. Today, Britney’s sexuality is still a point of contention, with many, including members of Britney’s family, criticizing Britney for the nearly-nude photos she sometimes posts on Instagram. These condemnations are cushioned as expressions of supposed “concern.”

In the year before Britney was placed into a conservatorship against her will, she could be found trading clothes with the dancers at strip clubs, recording music videos topless, or releasing a song literally titled “Get Naked.” Apparently people assumed that the almost 14 years Britney spent under the control of conservative evangelical Christians must have effectively quashed her desire to show some skin or publicly express her sexual desire because now that a freed Britney is using her freedom in much of the same ways she used to back in 2007, her sexual expressions are being labelled “strange” or “a cry for help.”

All of this coincides with continued insistence from a subsection of #FreeBritney labelled “BAnon” that Britney Spears is still not a free woman. The group of conspiracy theorists has been active in the movement and its online communities since 2019 when the movement first started taking off on social media. The larger #FreeBritney community has always been separated into factions with varying degrees of intensity and ostracism. Especially once conspiracy theory TikTok content became heavily involved in the movement’s spread, some “fans” have learned to only express their love and concern for the singer by constantly casting doubt over all of her public output. Every Instagram post has to be parsed for clues indicating Britney’s continued captivity. Any moment she spends out of the public eye has to be used as evidence that she’s being kept prisoner somewhere we can’t see.

There are multiple factors underlying the continued prevalence of BAnon and #FreeBritney conspiracy theories. One is that the pseudo-detective work of online celebrity sleuthing can be addictive. While much of Britney Spears’ fanbase was motivated in their #FreeBritney advocacy by a genuine desire to see her conservatorship end, even those with the best of intentions still likely got a rush from picking through the pieces of evidence surrounding Britney’s case, putting together the puzzle of her post-2008 life as they unlocked new information. That exciting feeling that fans were getting closer to the truth became increasingly futile to seek once Britney was officially freed from her conservatorship and granted the right to acquire the resources to fight for her future herself. Some fans don’t want Britney to be free simply because they miss the activity of trying to free her.

The other factors are perhaps even more emotionally compelling and all-too familiar in their perpetuation of the cycle Britney’s public image has always existed within. Many fear the legitimacy of Britney’s freedom because that legitimacy would require them to accept that they’re idealized vision of Britney will have to adapt to the reality of her post-conservatorship personhood.

From 2008-November 2021, fans who disliked the output of Britney’s social media could soothe themselves with the idea that Britney’s conservators were the architects behind her entire online image. It very much seems that Team Con was restricting Britney’s expressions severely while the conservatorship was in place. Around the time it was terminated, Britney’s Instagram and Twitter posts increased in their candidness as Britney, who for more than a decade had never mentioned her conservatorship publicly, called out the abuse of her family and professional team as well as her anger at the LA Courts which enabled such injustice. She started posting more videos and audio snippets of herself sharing stories from the last 14-15 years, as well as the almost-nude photographs people now call “concerning.” Clearly Britney’s post-conservatorship output has changed, it just didn’t change in ways that everyone liked.

Much of the people claiming Britney is not really free have outwardly based some of their analysis on aspects of Britney’s public image they find disappointing.

Britney can’t be free because her hair looks messy:

Britney can’t be free because she hasn’t granted anyone access for an interview.

Britney can’t be free because she turned down an opportunity to speak in front of Congress.

Britney can’t be free because she wears inexpensive clothes.

All over the Internet, you’ll see new claims of Britney’s continued captivity based in a clear dislike for the decisions Britney Spears, the free woman, has chosen to make.

Prior to her conservatorship being terminated, fans were already expressing their own expectations for what a post-conservatorship Britney era would look like. The predictions often centered on her physical presentation or quality of her social media output, a return to her popstar career, or drastic changes to her inner circle.

Britney’s very consistent and demanding work schedule from 2008 up until the beginning of 2019 demonstrated that she likely never qualified for an arrangement as severe in its restrictions as a legal guardianship, or at the very least, if she did qualify for such an arrangement, her conservators were irresponsible and cruel to ask so much of her. That much has always been clear, but the implication that what made Britney’s conservatorship unlawful and unjust was that she never struggled with her mental health has prompted some to conclude that any struggles she appears to face today must mean that she’s still being abused.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Any expectation for Britney to bounce-back and resume public-facing work–through new music releases or performances, tell-all interviews or Instagram Live venting sessions, and/or appearances at star-studded events OR United States congressional buildings–is unsympathetic to both her trauma and the fact that we, the public, do not know Britney, nor does she owe us anything. Your idea of what freedom should have looked like for her so soon after she escaped her abuse, or amidst any continued mental health challenges she may have been facing prior to the conservatorship, does not mean you’ve earned the right to publicly express “concern” that undermines her agency as she re-adjusts to her new life.

It’d be inaccurate to state that we as a society have made no cultural progress since the extremely misogynistic 2000s, but for all those horrified by Framing Britney Spears’ look back at the media’s cruel treatment of Britney Spears prior to 2008, it may be worth acknowledging that the same patterns still exist in slightly-altered forms today.

Britney may have escaped her conservatorship, but she has yet to escape the backlash which always seems to follow expressions of her own autonomy.