The public consumption of Britney did not stop at her figure. The media and those of us who consumed it were obsessed with her sexualities, with a particularly pathological focus on her claim to be a virgin. Though Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit most crudely detailed exactly how she was not a virgin on The Howard Stern Show, even the most sophisticated critics couldn’t help but indulge in Britney hymen mythology. A profile of Britney by Chuck Klosterman that appeared in Esquire in 2003 is now downright painful to read. In it, not a single song or album name from her catalog appears, while no less than seven references are made to the fact that she was not wearing pants at the photo shoot where they met to interview. It is a labored but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to make the case that Britney is “not so much a person as she is an idea, and the idea is this: you can want everything, so long as you get nothing.” Obviously, “Britney is the naughtiest good girl of all time.” But what makes her so different from previous incarnations of jailbait purity—Tiffany, Brooke Shields, Annette Funicello, et alia—is her “abject unwillingness to recognize that this paradox exists at all.” He recounts asking her why she dresses provocatively, noting her present attire reveals “three inches of her inner thigh, her entire abdomen, and enough cleavage to choke a musk ox,” but not reminding readers that they’re at a photo shoot that doesn’t involve pants. It is a cloying interview where she protests at his questions about her feelings about starring in men’s sexual fantasies but he pushes her on it anyway, dissatisfied with her refusal to be salacious.4 Britney does not own the truth about her own feelings, nor does she own her own body from this vantage point, because the public mistakes their all-consuming need for Britney as her desire to be consumed this way.
For the first several years of my adult-sized life, I was an American size 4. It is a size that sounds small but means average and felt huge, especially among peers whose size 0s casually hung off them throughout college. Though my envy migrated from teen pop stars to couture models, the specters of Britney’s former perfection and her fall from grace remained in my periphery. It still does. When I shrank to size 0 and later a 00 and then to a 000 when J.Crew introduced the size in 2014, I looked at all of these famous bodies with a different set of eyes, both literally and figuratively. My already large hazel eyes had been made more prominent on a face lacking fat, where they protruded more hungrily and took up more real estate. Figuratively, I look at the bodies that were considered so perfect and realize the precariousness of that perfection as I struggle to maintain a size that is attractively delicate without being repulsively bony.
I have been called “perfect” far more often when I am below a healthy body weight than when I am at a normal one. I have heard and read the word “insane” to compliment my body and am driven mad by it. I have heard my body referred to as a “buffet of bones” and a “little rib buffet” by two very different men. The idea of being actual meat is at once thrilling and infuriating: Being eaten bears the promise of no longer existing physically at all. It is when I am caught up in these feelings that young Britney is instructive. Though it was the 2000 performance at the VMAs that cemented Britney’s body in my mind as the most aspirational, a perhaps more famous display of her figure was on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1999. She was a rising teen sensation giving what seem to be safe, canned answers about ambition and music in her childhood home, but there is a single moment that feels especially off script. In response to questions about romantic rumors, her reply is printed as “‘I have,’ she says, ‘no feelings at all.’”5 I read those italics and see the heart of the story, the crack in her voice well before she cracked. It is a well-rehearsed girl who has been all but mandated to be consumed without biting back, not to cause a fuss so that people will fuss over her. It is a sad surrender but one that makes her queen in the country of popular culture. I wonder now if she knew just how heavy that would feel.
Run the World
Amber Rose in the Great Stripper Imaginary
OH, I LIKE TO DANCE to everything!” is a lie I’ve told many times but that I regretted telling only once. It was a canned response I’d give to men in VIP rooms as they edged closer to asking personal questions. We would be halfway into a conversation that I wanted desperately out of, often about a shrill and unreasonable wife at home (she was likely neither) or a half-formed treatise about how he understood the complexities of my emotional labor and erotic capital (he definitely understood neither). A new song on the speakers was a welcome reprieve from indulging this nonsense to change the subject to topics more favorable to maintaining my composure. The undiscerning but somehow charming musical tastes of the impossibly buoyant persona I inhabited in those darkened rooms was such a subject. There was no way to talk more substantively about the music playing in the club without betraying that I was thinking about these songs not as external units of sound to be consumed but as stories to inhabit more perfectly.
I would halt a moment and shift my eyes upward, that strange human habit whereby we think we can look in the direction of surround sound to better recognize melodies whose names elude us. “Oh my god, I love this song!” I would declare, conjuring enthusiasm and changing to a position less conducive to his sharing untoward or uninteresting secrets. It would be impolite for him to completely redirect the conversation back to his tale of domestic adversity and so he would attempt to direct it back to me, asking my favorite song to dance to. “Oh, I like to dance to everything!” I would report with a shrug and a grin. I would wrap my legs tighter around his middle, lean toward his body, and refuse eye contact, not as a matter of detachment but because my focus was now elsewhere, on the song I purported to love so much.
In October 2014, I told this lie to the DJ at a strip club in midtown Manhattan. The declaration was less an exclamation point than a shrugging politeness for which there is no punctuation. I was about to audition for their night shift. It was a reluctant and defeated return. It always is for me. In August, my ex had launched a brief but terrifying scorched-earth policy against me and my reputation. The social worker with whom I’d spoken told me that it was possible he would show up at the club where I worked in order to humiliate me and instructed me not to go in to work if I could avoid it. I stayed home from a few shifts, he fortunately left the state. I just never went back. It was the fourth time in my stripping career when I was truly convinced that this was it, my last night was really behind me.
Then I found myself with a $900 prescription to fill and no insurance to soften the blow. I have fallen victim to memory lapses during manic episodes that make me think I can live without antipsychotic medications, but I was blessed to be in a depressive state at the time. Another winter approached and I was sad to stubbornly be living the life into which I was born. I felt death lingering near the ends of my own fingertips. And with an in-box full of rejections and silence from the seven hundred jobs for which I had applied in the previous year, I knew that the shortest distance between me and $900 was the length of a hot-pink nylon-and-spandex minidress covering a quarter of my body.