I Killed Britney Spears: My Role in the Downfall of the Virgin Whore

It’s Britney, bitch.

I was unhappy when I heard that she had broken up with Justin Timberlake. I was saddened when she married her hick friend from Louisiana on a drunken night in Las Vegas. I felt troubled when she wed the horrible Kevin Federline. I winced when, barefoot and pregnant, she wept on national television before an audience fixated on the spectre of her decline. I frowned when she was photographed stumbling about Hollywood with Paris Hilton and without her knickers; I worried when she shaved her head. And when I saw Britney Spears stumbling fitfully across the stage of the 2007 Video Music Awards, grabbing the crotches of her male back-up dancers without feeling, mouthing the words to a song that was clearly not coming from her heart, something died inside me.

She’s so lucky, she’s a star / but she cries, cries, cries in her lonely heart

I fell in love with Britney Spears on a cold winter’s day in the December of my 18th year. I was shopping for accessories in a tatty store for teenagers; she was dancing through the halls of a high school in a sexy uniform on a large flat-screen television suspended above a rack of Christmas earrings with flashing red-and-green lights.

Baby, I’m so into you / You’ve got that something, what can I do?

While I had heard Britney’s first earth-shattering single, ‘…Baby One More Time,’ on the radio occasionally before that particular moment of epiphany, the depth of her growling voice had led me to believe that she was a middle-aged African-American woman. Thus, I was quite taken aback by the juxtaposition of the basso profundo and the pink bowed mouth of a blonde pigtailed nymphet.

Oops, I did it again / I played with your heart / got lost in the game

It is not, I will mention here, as a small caveat, that my affection for Britney Spears was ever romantic – or at least not very much. Rather, my worship of her was heroic. Britney Spears, I decided, embodied all of the possibility of my young female life. In my case these possibilities had been trampled over by the ambitions of my parents in a not dissimilar way from that in which Britney’s infamous mother Lynn had guided her daughter’s career with an iron fist. The path my parents selected didn’t involve nearly as exciting a wardrobe though: without consulting me too much, they carefully moulded my life with the ultimate aim being the receipt of a respectable undergraduate degree, instead of a Video Music Award. Adolescent, I necessarily resented it.

Say hello to the girl that I am / You’re gonna have to see through my perspective / I need to make mistakes just to learn who I am / And I don’t wanna be so damn protected

Britney was an apt figure upon which to fixate my girlish dreams because she was (as discussed in the various celebrity magazines which I consumed in shameful secret) the same kind of girl as me: born in 1981, in a small, boring, American town, the middle of three children. At 17, still a virgin, although (as evidenced by the way in which she writhed through the frames of her videos) replete with all the pent-up sexual frustration of a nice American girl who had been strictly forbidden to have sexual relations with her boyfriend… and was probably struggling to understand the meaning of sexual relations thanks to the exploits of her very own President. Except that while these things filled me with secret shame, she made it into a brand: Miss Britney Jean Spears, the whorish virgin, the untouched slut.

I’m not a girl / Not yet a woman / All I need is time

Time has marched on for both of us: for me, the transition into womanhood has been comprised of a mundane string of typical middle-class benchmarks, struggles, minor triumphs: tertiary education, unsuitable boyfriends, a string of chilly rented flats, career starts and stops and missteps. Through it all I’ve kept an eye on what Britney has been going through. At first, it seemed, in contrast to me, that she was going from strength to strength. But then, at some point, the trajectory of her life seemed to go in completely the opposite direction from mine. Where my interest in her was once based on envy and aspiration, it now became all about Schadenfreude: any time that things felt a little tough, I could always check to see how Britney was getting along and feel relieved that at least I still had all of my hair. It was as if our roles had reversed: I couldn’t help but think that maybe if Britney had known about me she would have wished to have my life as I had once longed for hers.

With a taste of poison paradise / I’m addicted to you /Don’t you know that you’re toxic?

Although my fandom was quite half-hearted and cynical, I nonetheless was one of millions who fed the Britney machine. I gave her family and managers a reason to continue bleeding her dry as it became increasingly apparent that she was no longer able to fit in the box that made us all love her, be fascinated by her, want to be her or sleep with her. Flicking through the gossip blogs, I wince when I see the pictures: her bloated, spotty face, her ratty hair extensions, the enormous soft drink perpetually clutched in her chewed fingers, her two unhappy looking children who are the unassailable proof that she, too, has fallen victim to base carnal desire. It’s like the Britney who I once loved is dead. And I can’t help but feel that every time I lurk in a newsstand, flicking through a copy of OK! to glean the latest developments in her tragic decline, I am at least partially responsible.

When I see that dead look in her sad, bewildered eyes, I feel like maybe, in a little way, I killed her.

Posted by Jean Hannah Edelstein in Other | May 29, 2008 8:28AM |