Over the course of Britney Spears’ career, she was repeatedly subject to narratives constructed to disempower her. She was a teenage pop star presented as a virgin then scolded for a sexualised image sold by those same forces. After her breakup from Justin Timberlake, Spears was vilified and forced to undergo a grilling from Diane Sawyer so severe you might have thought she was a war criminal, not a double denim-wearing singer.
It made her suspicious of entertainment’s gendered double standard, she writes in her highly anticipated memoir, though that was nothing compared with the legal disfranchisement she later experienced. She was advised to divorce husband Kevin Federline to avoid the humiliation of him doing it first, only to take the flak for fracturing their young family. Her 2008 breakdown was conveniently framed as a sign of madness, not a proportional response to exploitation and losing custody of her children. Once she was placed under the conservatorship that would rule her life for 13 years, she became trapped further: “If I became flustered, it was taken as evidence that I wasn’t improving,” she writes. “If I got upset and asserted myself, I was out of control and crazy.”
