Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (19 page)

In the mid-twentieth century, confessing to an abortion or an affair with another woman would have been no less
shocking than, say,
xoJane
writer Cat Marnell’s notorious admission that she sometimes used Plan B as birth control. In fact, the shocking nature of those confessions was probably why there were rules about not yelling at the other women in the group. But in the commodified, hypercompetitive and (let us not forget) globally visible world of online media, firm rules about how to respond to a woman’s story cannot possibly be created, let alone applied. And when a woman shocks us, it’s easy to fault her story for not fitting into a prescribed and virtuous narrative of feminist womanhood. It’s still all too tempting to evaluate a woman based on whether or not she is a “nice girl.”

And then, there’s the audience. The promise of consciousness-raising groups—community; a place to speak safely and freely, and to be heard—is both offered, and, in some ways, utterly denied in the new online world. There was a time, not long ago, when it was common to claim that blog comment sections were the consciousness-raising groups of the twenty-first century. I know women who forged deep and lasting friendships in the comments of
Jezebel
. But, though those gathering places fostered connection and understanding, they too wound up feeding the Internet’s eternal need for quick-burning scandal.

In 2014, a woman left a comment on
xoJane
implying that she had been raped by Bright Eyes singer Conor Oberst. The comment—which she’d left under her real name—was publicized across the Internet, as was the content of her
social-media presence, which was picked through for inconsistencies and signs of mental illness. Oberst himself sued her for libel. The woman retracted her claim. It’s less a story about “false rape allegations” than it is about the trouble with building a community in a glass house: No matter what a woman said in her consciousness-raising group, she could say it without fear that she’d see it in tomorrow’s headlines.

And so we’re back to self-defense. As if we could ever really get away from it. “Something in Common” didn’t really help Houston, in the long run. It read like defense, or denial, rather than romance. And the nation’s eyes stayed on her marriage to Brown—often, eyes aided and abetted by reality-TV cameras—until it did, in fact, implode.

As for Britney—the boldest girl in a trainwreck year, the girl who had no defense but offense—she was the easiest player of all to knock out of the ring. When
Blackout
was released, on October 25, 2007, no one was talking about the music, or the lyrics. They were talking about the preview: A performance at the VMAs two months earlier, on September 9. Spears had refused to wear most of her costume at the last second, going out in a bra and panties. She’d stumbled a bit, been slow with her dance moves, apparently had trouble keeping up with her lip-sync.

In retrospect, it seems merely lackluster, a phoned-in performance by a visibly exhausted woman. In 2007, it was national news, and a potentially career-ending disgrace. It
overshadowed
Blackout
’s release, overshadowed its lyrics, overshadowed Britney’s statements—overshadowed everything, in fact, until she was taken to a psych ward in December, and finally gave us something worse to say. After that, what Britney Spears had to say about her own portrayal in the media counted for very little. She could talk. But who would listen to her? Who would believe some insane girl?

We do live in an unprecedented age of women’s speech. Once again, social progress was matched by technological progress: As we pushed through the end of the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, we got social media and smartphones. Surveillance went up again (nearly everyone you see is carrying a fully functional tape recorder, video camera, and publishing platform) but so did the ability to broadcast. It’s not only common for women to leave public records of their lives, it’s almost mandatory: Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and LinkedIn are all essential parts of having a social or professional life. The lesson of the twentieth century holds: As people become more visible, women become more visible. And this is especially true now that everyone, whether they realize it or not, is in the process of writing their memoirs.

So if speech were itself a cure for oppression, we would be living in a utopia. But it isn’t, and we’re not. Speech can do a lot of things—uncover a problem, refute a false narrative, provide a means of self-definition, leave a legacy—but
the one thing it cannot do is shut up anyone else. No matter what you say, people will still be able to say whatever they like against you; the question is who people will believe. And, historically, in a clash of personal and cultural narratives, the winner is not likely to be female.

A two-hundred-year-old problem can’t be ended with a slightly different mode of transmission. As long as the basic, underlying assumptions of what women “ought” to be remain the same, and as long as punishing “bad” women is acceptable, all of this marvelous technology will still only provide us with new ways to make women look like assholes. We can do it to ourselves now (oh, how I wish there was some kind of breathalyzer test I had to pass before I could use Twitter) but we can’t stop doing it. Or at least, we haven’t yet.

The journey from silence to speech—and from powerlessness to power, from unchallenged patriarchy to gender equality, because these are just different names for the same long road—is only halfway complete. We can tell the world who we are. But the world still doesn’t have to listen. As long as the trainwreck industry keeps on rolling, all this liberating speech will tend to devolve into women trying to shout over or past their attackers.

The answer isn’t to shut up. And the answer isn’t simply to speak up individually and separately. It’s to use our speech, while we have it, to ask why we keep doing this to each other—and to change what it means, not only to be a
“bad” woman, but to be a woman at all. It’s to keep asking the old, hard questions:

What is a nice girl?

Were you a nice girl?

Was anyone?

Who?

And for how long?

Part III

THE TRAINWRECK: HER ROLE

7

SCAPEGOAT

Every page of this book—of any book or story about celebrity trainwrecks—is haunted by Britney Spears. She hovers over every page, always looking to insert herself in there somewhere, always seeming like the right person to mention. It’s impossible to think about trainwrecks for more than three consecutive seconds without landing on Britney: The Great Wreck, a woman whose suffering was, for the first decade of the 2000s, unavoidable. Every unflattering detail of her weight, her sex life, her mental health, her family discord, was broadcast twenty-four hours a day. We know almost every awful thing that has happened to Britney Spears since this glorious century began, and we usually don’t know it because Britney Spears chose to disclose that information.

Though some part of this may simply be a matter of perspective—the Brits, for example, found their own Great Wreck in Amy Winehouse, or possibly Diana—Britney
Spears was, at the very least, the end of American pop-star mystique. There was more public information about her life, provided through more channels, than there had been for any other celebrity in history. She was the great test case for the hyper-invasive, rule-free, often amateur-run celebrity-gossip blogs which began their ascendance almost exactly when she did, in the early 2000s; she was the first great star whose narrative was defined as much by
TMZ
and
Perez Hilton
as it was by MTV or CNN.

The mainstream press, though bound by journalistic ethics in a way that Internet outlets were not, followed the blogs’ lead. In 2008, the
Associated Press
released an internal memo instructing staffers that
“now and for the foreseeable future, virtually everything involving Britney is a big deal.” And that did mean
everything
: going to gas stations, eating a bag of Cheetos, walking her dog. But Britney’s dedicated press corps was usually hoping for worse than that; her “shocking” downfall was a large and extremely profitable industry, wherein, as one anonymous photographer wrote for
Defamer
in 2013,
“one shot of Britney slowly spiraling into insanity, one video of her shaving her head, or, the just one clip of her going fucking umbrella-attack crazy, could be your mortgage payment for the next year or a new car.”

And yet, for all that, it’s still hard to say exactly what Britney Spears did wrong. Mainly because Britney Spears did
everything
wrong, all at once. Certainly, sex was part of it. The fact that she’d lost her virginity to her live-in boyfriend
was a national scandal; that he claimed she’d cheated on him was worse; photos of her crotch circulated through the tabloids as quickly as the kiss-and-tell confessions from her various unsuitable and scuzzy boyfriends, marking her irrevocably as a dirty girl, a contaminated and freakishly available female body. But Britney was also said to be ugly, undateable. She had children, gained weight, wore sweatpants, had break-outs, not that this prevented literally anyone from looking up her naked body online. And Britney was a crazy ex-girlfriend—she was supposedly never the same after Justin Timberlake left her, supposedly descended into madness largely as the result of her divorce from Kevin Federline—or maybe just a crazy girl, a
“habitual, frequent and continuous drug user” deemed legally unfit to raise her children, a madwoman who sometimes believed that her cell phone charger was taping her thoughts. Britney is an event horizon: Sex and mental illness and rejection and even death are drawn in and devoured, turned into one churning, inescapable mass, by the One True Wreck, the all-consuming, monolithic spectacle of impermissible womanhood that was Britney.

So, at a certain point, analyzing the trainwrecks for what they
do
is not enough. You also have to ask why we need them—how a twenty-four-year-old woman’s weight gain, or divorce, or occasional street-barf after a night of drinking, can possibly come to be such a massively profitable and popular source of entertainment, and what it is that we gain
from collecting all these stories of female suffering. This is true, particularly, if we are women ourselves. And let’s be clear: The primary audience for celebrity blogs, tabloids, and reality TV shows is not straight men. Women are the ones who buy these stories. We’re the ones who enjoy them. We’re the ones these narratives are shaped for and aimed at. We’re the reason they exist. But what is it, exactly, that we’re enjoying?

To begin to answer that question, it’s worthwhile to go back, to a time before Crazy Britney. To ask ourselves, not how she “fell,” but what she fell from, and not how “bad” she was, but what exactly we meant when we called her “good.”

“Britney Spears extends a honeyed thigh across the length of the sofa.” Thus begins the April 1999
Rolling Stone
cover story about Britney Spears, published when she was seventeen years old.

Britney was a role model, that year. She prayed every night on her tour bus, because she couldn’t get to church often enough; she dealt with stress by writing in her prayer journal. She was a virgin, and she intended to stay that way until marriage, because sex was sacred. In the
Rolling Stone
piece, she told reporter Steven Daly that she couldn’t watch
South Park
because it was “sacrilegious,” and couldn’t drink anything other than the occasional glass of wine, supervised
by her mother, because she didn’t like to feel “out of control.” She was a proud conservative, raised to believe that women ought to take pride in being homemakers; years later, at the height of the Iraq War, she would tell Tucker Carlson that Americans shouldn’t question the president. In that first profile, the one from 1999, she said that she didn’t understand why there had been such an uproar over the pigtails and Catholic schoolgirl outfits in the “… Baby One More Time” video—despite coming up with the idea, Britney was supposedly too sheltered to realize that they had been lifted directly from the iconography of “barely legal” porn, in which adult men fucked teenage girls—and her bedroom, Daly reported, was full of dolls.

“You want to be a good example for kids out there and not do something stupid. Kids have low self-esteem, and then the peer pressures come and they go into a wrong crowd. That’s when all the bad stuff starts happening, drugs and stuff.” That was how a typical Britney Spears quote ran, in 1999.

But, in between visits to Britney’s bedroom, Steven Daly made sure to note her thighs and what she did with them. He made sure to include lines like
“Spears’ pink T-shirt is distended by her ample chest, and her silky white shorts—with dark blue piping—cling snugly to her hips.” On the cover of the magazine (her first cover, shot by Dave LaChappelle) Britney was shown reclining in underpants and a bra, cradling a stuffed Teletubby doll. She was shot from above—the
same angle you’d have if you were the horny track coach or the well-endowed grown-up neighbor in one of those barely legal fantasies, descending onto her prone body—and her crumpled satin bedding called to mind the satin Marilyn Monroe had lain on in her own famously leaked nudes. Inside the magazine, you could find her posing in a cheerleader outfit, coyly pulling the skirt up toward her hips, or posing in that doll-stuffed bedroom in underwear and high heels, or shot from behind, walking a pink tricycle, wearing short-shorts with the word “BABY” emblazoned in rhinestones on one ass-cheek. Men were supposed to want to sleep with Britney, that was clear enough. But they were supposed to want it specifically because she was a child.

I was also seventeen, the year that
Rolling Stone
cover came out. I had a subscription. And, on the basis of that story, and the “… Baby One More Time” video, I truly believed that I hated Britney Spears.