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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
And she's responding in kind -- publicly grabbing his crotch, trolling around Los Angeles in a top that reads "I'm a virgin, but this is an old T-shirt," and telling a British talk show host that the last thing she put in her mouth was "a dildo." God bless her, she's 22 years old. She's doing a version of what many of us do at 22: She's showing off her sexual precocity for real, not because someone pushed her onto a stage with a python wrapped around her shoulders and told her to strip. Right now, Spears probably thinks those blow job pictures are a hoot. Give it a couple years, honey.
But that's OK. This is what youth is for, falling for bilious jerks that your mama doesn't like. Feeling the thrill of being wanted, desired, feeling the power of turning someone on, knowing how to have sex. Her obviously misplaced affection for this dude is the first sign she's ever given that she and I might share some DNA. Not that Federline was ever my type. But at least I now know for sure that Britney and I are both Homo sapiens, female.
And that means we have a lot more in common that I had previously believed. I was oblivious to Spears when she first appeared, a 16-year-old chickadee strutting around in pigtails and Catholic-school duds, urging her baby to hit her one more time. She didn't show up on my radar screen in any lasting way until 2000, when the "Oops I Did It Again" loop began to trill endlessly in my head. I became curious about her then -- what was this pink fleshy creature? Her toned little body looked so smooth and seamless that I was always surprised to see it marred by a belly button. And when this little thing would grind away onstage, it was somehow hollow, as though she were imitating moves she didn't actually understand with pitch-perfect clarity. It turned out she didn't understand them; she was one of those dastardly millennial preachers of virginity.
Perhaps it was my own recognition of her pedophilic appeal that leads me to feel such enormous cultural guilt about what's happened to her. She was playing a devilishly destructive role, talking about her virginity at a register audible only to the kids who idolized her. Sex is dirty, sex is wrong unless you are married, she was telling girls who might have had a shot at guilt-free sexual liberation. Meanwhile, she was winking at their fathers, suggesting, in horrible ways, that she was dancing for them. But she was doing all of it without the conviction of a woman who understands even a little bit about what her powers are. She was a teenager who was being rewarded -- with money and fame and adulation from millions of fans -- for gyrating and praying and keeping clean and singing dirty. Her handlers dressed her in flesh-colored body stockings, while her mother -- cheerfully reaping profits from dirty old men -- proselytized about their shared mother-daughter love of Jesus.
And then Britney grew up a little, behaving in her life as her creators had asked her to behave onstage: shying away from purity and heading straight for men, cigarettes, booze, junk food. It coincided with her becoming legal and thus much less interesting to her pedophilic public. As soon as Britney grew up and began to break the fembot patterns her handlers had set for her, we as a culture stopped fetishizing her, and behavior that had been labeled coquettish and flirtatious in her youth was now filed under "slutty" and "cheap."
