FEMALE SPEAR GIRL TV

The result is a documentary eager to characterize Spears’s early image as an expression of female power rather than the corporation-sanctioned sexualization of a 16-year-old. By suggesting she once had complete control, the documentary fuels the sense of injustice when that control is then taken away. The central drama of Framing Britney is the conservatorship Spears has lived under since 2008, which allows her father to control her finances and personal life. This argument serves a narrative purpose.

If you, the viewer, share in that discomfort, you are just another misogynistic cog, using the veil of concern for your own puritanical need to control a young woman.

FEMALE SPEAR GIRL TV

Spears is the one who had to go on TV and defend this image, but the women who helped cultivate it cling to the narrative that, in the words of her stylist, Hayley Hill, “people were, like, uncomfortable with, you know, her sexuality.” If I felt suspicious of Kim Kaiman, the marketing executive who argues that Spears simply had a gift for divining teen girls’ innate desire to act sexy and mirroring it back to them, overtly misogynistic news coverage would swoop in to provide a clearer target for my rage. If I wondered what kind of say Spears had in the “sexy” Rolling Stone photos taken in her childhood bedroom, I was soon reassured that she was never just some puppet. If “Baby One More Time” made me feel queasy, I was soon reminded that America is sexist and sexually repressed. The filmmakers achieve this by alternating between footage of Spears and her collaborators asserting that she made her own decisions and sexist news coverage that shows how much the world hates women who make their own decisions. But before I could think too hard about it, Framing Britney Spears was making a compelling argument: Spears’s teen image was an expression of her sexuality, and questioning the kind of agency she had in it is misogynistic. It’s the control and command over herself and her space that seems cool.” I felt unsure that younger-me could distinguish the control from the sexiness. To make sense of the video’s popularity, the Times’s Wesley Morris suggests that to the 12- and 13-year-olds watching the video when it came out, “it isn’t the sex part that seems cool. I had not seen it since elementary school and was unsettled, as an adult, to watch a 16-year-old embody a schoolgirl fantasy. I am thinking specifically of the stretch that chronicles Spears’s rise as a teen idol, starting with the “Baby One More Time” video. The New York Times’s Framing Britney Spears documentary casts a spell.

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