EXCLUSIVE: Lucinda Smyth, 28, is flexing her long, slender fingers as she types this article from the comfort of her £650-a-month London home. With her tresses tied up in a bun, her fingertips caressing the keyboard, she is poised to offer you the scoop. Using her bubbly and flirtatious writing style, she is eager—some would say gagging—to fill you in on the gossip about the, er, depiction of women in celebrity culture.
Since the New York Times’ documentary Framing Britney Spears aired last month, the media have faced a reckoning. You might have heard about it. Everyone is very sorry. Glamour magazine, Perez Hilton, all the movers and shakers of the 2000s: they are truly remorseful about how women are—sorry, have been—represented in the media. Directed by Samantha Stark, Framing Britney is about Britney Spears’s conservatorship. Since 2007, following a public breakdown, Spears’s finances, career, and medical information have been under the control of her father Jamie. This is despite the allegation by lawyer Adam Streisand, who was originally considered for Britney’s legal team, that she had specifically requested not to have her father as her conservator, and a court case in 2020 in which she attempted unsuccessfully to end the arrangement.
While fans continue to petition for “Britney’s freedom,” the press reaction has shifted away from legal particulars to a broader interpretation of what the Spears story represents. Some have seen her position as a metaphor for the way in which patriarchal systems operate. But others have fixed more specifically on what it says about the media’s treatment of people, particularly women, who live in the public eye.
It’s not hard to see why this has happened. One of the most shocking aspects of the documentary is the nineties archive footage. Jay Leno’s bouffant quivering as he scream-laughs at his own joke about “cheap slutty girl[s] who put out.” Justin Timberlake bragging to a radio host about how he took Spears’s virginity. In one clip, a geriatric TV presenter asks a ten-year-old Spears if she has a boyfriend, and offers himself when she declines to comment. Then there’s the way she was handled in interviews: weirdly blamed for her break-up with “nice-guy” Timberlake. Interrogated over how she “feels” about governor’s wife Kendal Erlich saying she’d shoot Spears “if I had the opportunity.” (This question is particularly curious: what would they expect as a reasonable response? “Please forgive me for the fact this woman is threatening to kill me?”) It’s entirely unsurprising that this level of scrutiny and illogical scapegoating led Spears to have a mental health episode. What is surprising is that she came back from it, even after the media universally decided to have her cancelled.
Cancel culture is often associated with Millennial and Gen Z grievances. It is a knee-jerk reaction generated and enabled by the conditions of the internet, we’re told. Or by the temperament of snowflakes who—when they’re not melting in a pool of their own tears—are puncturing the sacred cows of western culture out of a sense of spiteful entitlement. This is an interesting idea. It’s true that the current “cancel culture” is different to its previous incarnations: for one, its subjects are not as easily erasable, which has made it a matter of public debate rather than something which just happens. (It even has a name now: cancelling.) It’s also true that, while it can effectively draw attention to previously ignored issues of social injustice, cancelling people may not be the most effective or humane method of solving the root problem. But the idea that it is new is palpably ridiculous.
If this documentary shows anything, it’s that being “cancelled” isn’t a remotely new concept for women, who have been subjected to it since at least the beginning of tabloids, and arguably since the beginning of time. When a woman achieves a degree of success, the media, which is to say patriarchy, have a tried-and-tested method for bringing her down: congratulate, overexpose, question motives, reframe as manipulative or insane, cancel. Repeat. It is such an effective method of discounting credibility that we often don’t notice when it’s been implemented.
Spears’s career trajectory is one example. Here are some others: Meghan Markle, Rose McGowan, Jennifer Lawrence, Greta Thunberg, Princess Diana, Anne Boleyn, Olympe de Gouges, Oprah Winfrey, Cleopatra, and Eve, wife/former rib of Adam. Jameela Jamil, who is frequently lambasted in the press, was among the first to identify this process. “When a woman steps up and speaks out,” she wrote, “she’s taken out of context, her tone is exaggerated by media to look hysterical and violent, her integrity is questioned and society tries to slander her into silence.” Taylor Swift, another bounced-back cancellee, has also highlighted a public double standard: “a man does something, it’s strategic, when a woman does something, it’s calculated.” (While we’re on the subject, it’s worth pointing out that Swift’s 1989 album, for which she wrote the songs and lyrics, was not reviewed by Pitchfork. They did review the cover album by alleged serial abuser Ryan Adams. Gotta love the tastemakers.)
It can be hard to highlight truisms about modern sexism without sounding like a fridge magnet—more on that later—and this is perhaps partly as a result of a 2010s brand of commodified feminism. Since the rise of social media culture—in which an appearance of authenticity and political engagement are valued, in both senses of the word—women’s opinions are expressed more freely online and, in some cases, listened to. It may even be reaching a stage where the pressure has flipped: if you’re a female celebrity without an opinion, you’re called into question and therefore subjected to the same process (see above) in a slightly different way. This entails its own set of problems, especially since the parameters for what counts as a valid opinion are still very narrow. But at least women can have their own thoughts now, sort of, as long as they aren’t too angry-sounding and only express them in the short term. Framing Britney Spears shows us that 20 years ago, things looked very different.
For all the perks of being a boomer, I feel extremely privileged not to have been an adult female in the 1990s and early 2000s. This was a demented period of history, one that saw the widespread ridicule of a 22-year-old intern for a #MeToo incident with the most powerful man in the world (Monica Lewinsky), the cancellation of a respected country band for saying they didn’t support the Iraq War (The Dixie Chicks, or according to Bill O’Reilly, “callow foolish women who deserve to be slapped around,”) and the proliferation of conspiracy theories around the wife of a man who committed suicide following a long history of mental illness (Courtney Love). Fair play to Lorena Bobbitt. It’s easy to see how this culture evolved into the misogynistic, voyeuristic sadism that was 2000s celebrity. The fact that those who grew up in the noughties internalised this voyeurism and now freely advertise their private lives on platforms like Instagram? Not really a shocker.
Which brings us to the present day. Since her 2007 episode, Britney Spears’s life has been repeatedly appropriated for political and publicity purposes. As a journalist, I am part of a system which trades off the exploitation of people in the public eye. When celebrities are not being superficially idolised, made fun of or criticised, they are used as stand-ins for concepts and arguments. This is a regrettable practice which is to some extent unavoidable—both this article and this headline make me complicit in this system—but it means above all that we have a responsibility to handle this information with a high degree of empathy, and to be on alert for hypocrisy and malpractice within the industry.
It’s all very well wringing our hands. Weren’t the nineties crazy! But retrospective remorse is an easy way out. The exploitation of Spears felt normal at the time, so much a part of the established cultural fabric that it was impossible to question it and still be taken seriously. Look around now. What is considered normal that is, in fact, extremely weird? What will constitute the embarrassing archive footage of the future? Calling women who don’t adhere to body stereotypes “brave”? Casting size 12 women as plus-size models? Running stories about how or why pregnant people hold their baby bumps? Frequently depicting women of colour, like Beyoncé and Rihanna, as demanding “divas”? Analysing the body parts of female political leaders like it’s worthy of a front-page headline?
One good place to start would be to look at the language we employ when speaking about women. It’s striking how much celebrity culture employs a different lexicon on this front. Going outside becomes STEPPING OUT. Legs, those long things dangling off the bottom half of your body, are STUNNING PINS. Wearing clothing is FLAUNTS SHAPELY FIGURE IN [INSERT GARMENT PLUS PRICE TAG]. No one talks like this in real life.
The function of this kind of language is to associate women with frivolity and irrelevance, and to class them in a different category to “serious” men, the ultimate effect being that—irrespective of what they are talking about—we always see them as cocooned in a sickly pink gloss. The other function is to overload readers and consumers with sensory information about these women in order to make us feel like we know a lot about them. Over the course of the next few years, if a female public figure manages to stick around, it will be easy to let the irritation creep in: I keep hearing about this person. Why do I know so much random detail? I don’t need to hear about the price of her shoes, sofa, loo roll. I don’t need to hear about her at all.
The habit of overexposure isn’t just the preserve of “celebrity rags” and the MailOnline sidebar. A few days after running a story about the press reaction to the Framing Britney documentary, the BBC homepage writ large a headline on Harry and Meghan not returning to the royal family. This was their top story, ranked in importance above the news that Matt Hancock, the UK’s hapless health secretary, has acted unlawfully in his failure to publish Covid contracts online. Meghan Markle may be a “royal story,” but that’s not primarily why people are so interested in her, and the BBC knows this. Like Wallis Simpson before her, the public love the idea of a snaky woman behind the scenes luring an innocent man away. It is part of the role of our profession to question these instincts, not pander to them; to shape public opinion, not roll on our backs and allow abuse to continue. Otherwise we may as well be in advertising, which is still sexist, but pays better.
Hot off the press: Hypocrite elite journalist launches FURIOUS LECTURE against media in UNPRECEDENTED ATTACK. Well, you heard it here first folks. Raise me up and tether me down.
