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Vogue: Let’s give the star space to find herself


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13 minutes ago, ColdAsFire88 said:

The Fashion Bible: Vogue,  has added their two cents on the #FreeBritney movement. They highlight a lot of important points on the movement itself but also Britney’s career and her as a person. I didn’t see this coming from Vogue, but I love the angle and I’m glad more publications are bringing awareness to Britney’s situation. 

Check it out:


Performing is so much more than singing and dancing and giving good sound bites in interviews. We like our pop stars eccentric and left of center. We don’t want their flamboyance shed at the stage door like a custom gown; we want them to have fully formed peculiar lives. Michael Jackson’s baby dangling, Bowie hiding his own urine in the fridge to protect it from wizards, Gaga fretting about losing all her creativity through her *******. Rumors of Elton John’s temper are delicious. As audiences, we cling to the idea that megastardom is abnormal, the purveyors access some magical realm of ingenuity beyond mere biology. It’s a bit boring when performers consistently nail their performances, or exercise regularly or live off salad. We don’t need our pop stars to hydrate. We need them to soar as close to the sun as Icarus.

Britney Spears has been creating a patchwork quilt of eccentric behavior since asking us to hit her one more time in 1998. Her live performances were immaculate, with the most memorable boa constrictor in the MTV Awards’ history. Her private life was fraught with paparazzi-documented idiosyncrasy. The annulled marriage. The British accent. The knickerless “Bimbo Summit,” a night with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan lusting for a life beyond the bubble of her Lolita marketing. But the streams of public performance and private turmoil crossed one fateful night in 2007 when Britney fully broke down and shaved her head. In the aftermath, as the image of a shorn Spears became synonymous with severe mental distress, her management (father?) seized complete control. It’s never been handed back.

The Free Britney movement has been gathering momentum as her strangling conservatorship approaches review. I’ve read the most conspiratorial moon-landings-were-faked tweets about how Spears’s natural singing voice is a zillion octaves lower than her recorded output. Some of the fan theories are farfetched. Is she really spelling out “Call 911” with yoga poses? But the harmless idea that she sings like Jabba the Hutt speaks to a woman who’s never been allowed to take the helm and captain her own ship.

I get frustrated when I can’t leave the house because I’m waiting on FedEx, so it’s hard to imagine the ramifications of the court-enacted agreement that dictates Britney’s movements, her social interactions, her finances, and her career. The 12-year conservatorship is restrictive like a gastric band strangling her autonomy. According to the courts, she’s too mentally unstable to do anything that doesn’t instantly convert into cash for her guardians—moneymaking albums, public appearances, and that Vegas residency are all kosher under its terms. The makeup of the conservatorship shifted significantly in March when her attorney, Andrew Wallet, resigned his role and her father stepped down, possibly temporarily. (A “care manager” replaced her father.) It’s a legal spaghetti and our pop princess is the meatball. Britney truthers seek to Berlin Wall the conservatorship and see the “real” Britney emerging from her mansion like Mandela leaving Robben Island ready to record a soul-baring acoustic album. But it’s impossible for outsiders to differentiate between who she “really” is and how much of her personality and mental state is reactive to 12 years of conservatorship. Taking away adult decisions is inevitably infantilizing.

How can anyone reach adulthood without independence? The rampant speculation about her virginity in those early years has calcified into a stagnant never-ending girlhood under the male gaze. We all engaged with the perverse display of a hyper-sexualized teen who’d never actually had ***, as purity and chastity were expertly packaged to keep us interested. Midriff, obligatory. At once the girl next door and the illicit spectacle. This icky push and pull between the provocative and the unobtainable surely played its own damaging role in her development as a woman.

So, who is the Britney that the world is so keen on freeing? What would we find if we cracked open her court-sealed thermos? Who is the adult who is finally the master of her finances, her body? Will she shut herself away? Maybe she’ll promote peace like John and Yoko. I wish there was something to be gleaned from the current situation. Some clue to the woman she could be. But the court order suppresses her expression and there’s no way for us to read between the lines when they’re all written by external authors. Hopefully, the courts will grant Spears the space to find herself, to put one note in front of the other and move forward. In the meantime, give the grown woman a smartphone. Let her vote.

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you should link the article so that they get the clicks

https://www.google.de/amp/s/www.vogue.com/article/free-britney-the-space-to-find-herself/amp

 

and maybe some of us can write them a thumbs up and thank you?

 

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