Britney Spears Documentary #1 - (Beginnings) - Therapist Reacts

hey deserving listeners a lot of you have been asking me to watch this new documentary on britney spears and react to it so let's get to it my name is dr kirk honda and i'm a therapist and a professor and i'm going to watch this documentary and see if anything of interest comes out of my face hey i shaved my hair off too because i didn't want nobody touching me and they still didn't get it britney is in the midst of a legal battle right now she's been in a conservatorship for the past 12 years all right so that's interesting i've heard people talking about free brittany and i don't think i ever knew what it meant but we're hearing here that britney spears has been under conservatorship for the past 12 years usually it's because the law has determined that someone is incompetent to take care of their own affairs if someone had dementia for example we might want to help them out by taking control of their finances and paying their bills because if we didn't do that then the person wouldn't pay their bills and then they'd be evicted and they'd be on the street and there'd be all sorts of bad things and so conservatorship gives someone else the ability usually a family member the ability to take care of someone and what i'm guessing is is that brittany was deemed incompetent because of her mental illness which i find to be interesting because the little bit that i know about brittany was that there were times maybe most of the time where she is competent where she's able to take care of herself the other possibility is that brittany actually well i was going to say the other possibilities that brittany wants to be taken care of in this official way but they just said that britney's fighting it okay so that's interesting so maybe i'm guessing we're going to get data on that which will be interesting to learn about her dad has been in charge of her money for the last 12 years and a few months ago britney's lawyer said brittany wants someone else to be in charge of her money and wants jamie her father to step down brittany's father so far has refused to step down okay so presumably there's a lot of money at stake here so there's a matter of motive when it comes to a fight like this is the father truly interested in helping brittany or is he in it to gain money for selfish reasons like i said most conservative conservatorships involve people that don't literally have millions and millions of dollars and that raises a question which i'm guessing will get some answers to understand where britney is now we should understand how she got here yay for those of you who watch my channel know that i always appreciate getting the background and the childhood of the people that we're talking about gives us a lot of insight into maybe where they're coming from so let's watch i noticed last week you had the most adorable pretty eyes do you have a boyfriend no sir why not they're mean boyfriends you mean all boys you mean i'm not mean how about me well it depends [Music] so i'm old i remember so many jokes like this on television and i remember ed mcmahon making jokes like this it was so normal back then and through today's more enlightened more intelligent more wise eyes this definitely is not okay why would you ask her one if she has a boyfriend she's ten two why would you offer yourself up as a 65 year old creepy man it's based on a whole set of assumptions about gender and sexuality and power that wonderfully we are moving on from and it just makes you wonder in another 30 years what kinds of things are happening today that we will also look back on and cringe when i watch this that's my reaction is i'm glad that we have graduated from this but boy were we in a bad place before and what are we in a bad place right now and we came up with a plan lynn and brittany would come to new york for a period of time so this raises all those questions that i've been mulling over as i watch reality tv with children on it can children truly consent to being an entertainer on this level can they really know what they're signing up for when they're signing on the dotted line that says yes i want this career i'm guessing a lot of kids and adults said when they look back on their childhood performance career don't regret what they went through but certainly we know that a lot do and are there proper protections my layperson take on the laws state by state in the united states is that there aren't enough protections for children in situations like this oh y'all like so pretty this is my mom right here and this is my brother's girlfriend is my little sister jamie brittany's father wasn't around very much when britney was growing up we know that jamie was struggling with alcohol and he later goes to rehab he drifts in between construction being a cook tries to open a gym business that didn't work out all right so we've learned a detail that the father struggled from alcoholism according to this documentary by the new york times and that he worked a lot so that could indicate some pretty awful things abusive angry things it could also indicate just distance and we'll hear maybe some detail about how it affected brittany lynn supported brittany i want to say lynn because i never talked to her father the only thing jamie ever said to me was my daughter's gonna be so rich she's gonna buy me a boat all right so we're getting a little bit more detail from someone that worked with britney spears that is basically saying that the father wasn't very close and wasn't very interested in brittany's life and on one occasion mentioned that he was excited because he'd be able to buy a boat [Music] the video shows up quite famously she is in a school girls uniform she owns the hallways at this school and the song is is obviously sexual in nature so in 1998 when britney hit the scene i was a very young therapist i just graduated the year before with my master's degree before i got my doctorate later and i was a therapist working with adults and i was working with couples and i was working with teenagers and children and families and of course a lot of the teenagers were very much into britney spears and i was actually doing a lot of in-home therapy at that point and so i would see the family homes and i would see the bedroom posters with britney or i'd hear them listening to britney spears and it was really quite a thing and of course i remember as a young person hearing all the older people than me complaining about how sexual she was and all of the talk and i just remember thinking have we not learned from the past we because when i was a kid it was madonna and everyone's freaking out about madonna and you know clutching their pearls and wringing their hands and it's like calm down it's just art it's always you know people freaked out about elvis moving his hips have we not learned from the past i always just hope that parents will someday learn like remember when i was a teenager and everyone was just flipping out about this particular artist well as a parent when i grow older i'm not i'm not going to do that but they always do and i get it there's worry that you have for your kids and you should be worried you should be concerned for your kids but a music video doesn't usually ruin children's lives see that brings up the age-old question for guys who do you watch the nice girl the pretty girl you can take home to mom or the chief slender girl you know puts out everybody goes for monica an exponent of that interest in that relationship bled over into our interest in britney spears in some way yeah the monica lewinsky story is filled with sexism and [ __ ] shaming just awful again when we look at the jokes and all of the rhetoric at least through people that know better today which a lot of people do particularly younger people they can see it for what it is but at the time no one said anything no one very few people saw it as problematic it was just taken for granted that well monica lewinsky had sex with the president it's not the president's fault it's this this you know [ __ ] girl's fault it's all her fault and she's gross and disgusting and all these kinds of things not him it's not it's not a the president of the most powerful country in the world it's not his fault he's much older and obviously massively in power and her employer by the way she was an intern at the white house now of course bill clinton got fried in a lot of ways for that but a lot of the jokes were about about monica lewinsky i guess one of the things that i think we can learn is we're still in the midst of sexism and [ __ ] shaming today for sure but it's pretty clear we've come at least some ways down the road because the kinds of jokes that we're seeing jay leno and other people say i don't think those would actually be aired on say colbert or jimmy fallon i don't think he would be saying those kinds of jokes today or at least i don't think so so we'll say that's progress we have a long way to go of course i think a lot of people were like uncomfortable with you know her sexuality a lot of talk about your sexy lolita look especially after the rolling stones uh story well i think we're all girls and i mean that's a part of who we are you would be lying if you said you didn't like to feel sexy you don't mean you're a girl now it does raise a question she's still a minor at this point so what do we think about that is this condoning the sexualization of teenagers before they should be sexualized is it condoning abuse of teenagers saying that they can be you know they're asking to be objectified or their their fair game to be objectified and controlled sexually or looked at through a heterosexual male gaze as a sexual object and that's their only value that's what often is happening in a lot of contexts like this i'm not saying brittany was doing this consciously or unconsciously i'm just saying that when people would look at brittany instead of seeing her as a performer and as a powerful pop artist it was how does she come across as a sexual object to men and not for her intelligence or her agency or maybe the messages that she was trying to say i don't know that does raise some questions as to the ethics of a family that allows this to happen and of an industry and a society that condones it everyone's talking about it why well your breasts you seem to get furious when a talk show host comes up with this subject mike i mean is she still in my it doesn't matter if she's a minor but if she is a minor then my goodness but so let's just break that down now i don't know the context of that dude's question but he's like you know well let's rewind that because i want to get the wording correct everyone's talking about it right well your breasts you seem to get furious when a talk show host comes up with this everyone's talking about it she's like what he says your breasts she's like and the you hear the reaction from the crowd oh and then he's you seem to get furious when people ask you about your breasts so one why are you bringing that up what is wrong with you two you're flabbergasted that she gets upset when people ask her about her breasts what if britney spears sat down and asked him about his genitalia just casually like let's talk about your genitalia um oh you're upset well it's kind of strange you're getting upset when i ask you about your genitalia yeah this is a double standard in our society it is we're getting better at least in my neck of the woods but we have a long way to go this doesn't surprise me at all this is just one example of what britney had to go through and what women have to go through in entertainment and women have to go through all the time you know it's interesting because i was too old to really pay attention to britney spears but this is interesting to see i you know i saw a similar thing with the paris hilton she got different kinds of attention but a similar i didn't pay attention to pierce paris hilton either when she was famous because just not my cup of tea back then but seeing the the footage you just really see in stark contrast how horrible people are treated particularly women in entertainment particularly young women in entertainment i don't know subject i'll say this you know i worked with all the boy bands all of them not one of the boys was ever under any scrutiny it certainly is a paradox isn't it the way she works and and the way she dresses she doesn't seem that innocent right so that was all the talk that we heard where it was she's trying to come across like she's innocent like she's a teenager and we saw this with christina as well it's like oh she's trying to be innocent but then she's also being very sexual and and this this blaming it was always this rhetoric of she's there's something wrong with brittany because she is asserting her sexuality now again if she's a child at this point then we do have to wonder about everyone you know it's not unusual for a teenage girl to want to dress in a certain way or to want to express themselves in a certain way but it's another thing when we have a whole industry and a society and a family that profits off of that effort that the child is wanting to express that's there's a big difference between that if a 16 year old says you know i want to wear a bikini and go to the beach and that's what i want to do because that's the sort of person i am and that's how i want to express myself and that's how i like to dress then a lot of us depending on your family values would okay that's fine but for everyone to participate in and then to evaluate it with such scrutiny and to blame her for it i'm just like she's up to no good and there's just there's that attitude right of that because she's asserting her sexuality trying to ex you know express herself that way there's something what evil about her there's something immoral about her there's something wrong with her and we have a lot of values in our society around gender and this sort of thing if justin timberlake at this age had shown up without a shirt on and he was you know like when i was growing up as a teenager was marky mark and the funky bunch he marky mark had these very famous i think calvin klein um ads with underwear i don't remember anyone [ __ ] shame shaming him or i don't i don't i don't remember anyone clutching their pearls when he was sho when he was literally doing these famous ads with him just in underwear at least i don't remember it and so it's this concern now i'm not saying because there is again she's a child at this point at least i think she is we do have the right as a parent about our children and concerned about i hope that they don't get exploited i hope that they don't get harmed i hope that they aren't attracting an element of a predator to harm them that is normal and that's good that we would worry about our children so i i think there's a lot going on here when when we're watching this denise spears has upset a lot of mothers in this country starting with the wife of the governor of maryland really if i had an opportunity to to shoot britney spears i think i would because of the example for kids and how hard it is to be a parent yeah i mean okay it is hard to be a parent blaming britney spears for the difficulties that you go through as a parent doesn't make any sense and this sort of stuff happens in every generation and every time it happens 20 years later we look back and think it's so quaint but i'm i don't know what lightning rod is happening today britney spears was a lightning rod in 1999 i wonder who their lightning rod is today i don't know but you know there's someone and we just have to be smarter than that we just have to say yeah parenting is hard and if there's something we want to blame and attack it's sexism misogyny racism as a whole there are individuals who will exhibit those kinds of attitudes but really we have a society that over sexualizes children and over sexualizes teenagers and we need to attack that at all levels attacking one artist as if that's going to solve the problem doesn't make any sense plus when you're an artist you have the freedom to express yourself within the law as you want to are you responsible for that for sure but you know dressing up in certain kinds of clothing and and and singing songs with certain innuendos i mean you know pop artists have been doing that for decades and it's sad for me to think that britney had to endure just constant questions help her handle it i've had a year that would test a lot of people it was pretty rough yeah um oh my goodness hello ew strong britney um yeah it was a weird [Music] time so as my youtube channel has gained notoriety over the past 13 years i started to see the effects of being just a tiny tiny little bit famous and when you get that sort of notoriety there are a lot of good things but a lot of bad things you become the target of a lot of hate and a lot of trolls and a lot of people who they just want to hurt somebody and i deal with this every day and i've been dealing with this for years so if i have to deal with that and it and it really gets to me it gets to me to the point where there have been times you know briefly where i've thought about just throwing the whole thing in and saying i don't want to do this anymore i cannot imagine what someone of britney's level of fame has to go through on a constant basis the amount of of good things you get obviously there's a lot of fan mail the thing i like to say as a way of explaining this is that let's say that one in a thousand of the people that follow you want to hurt you one in a thousand individuals that follow your career they hate you they want to hurt you and they will do things to take you down with the purpose of trying to make you suffer maybe they're going through a bad time in their life maybe they're literally a psychopath there's a fair amount of people in the world a small percentage but a you know sizable minority of people one to two percent of the population who don't have any empathy any even might take pleasure in harming other people so let's say one in a thousand of your fans want to hurt you and will do things to hurt you well if you have a million fans you now have a thousand people who want to hurt you that's a thousand people every day who are determined to ruin your life now it's only one in 1 000 of the people that know you who want to hurt you it's a pretty low percentage but again if you have a million fans and if you have 100 million fans or a billion fans then we're talking about thousands of people who on a daily basis are trying to hurt you are trying to tear you down are they enjoy thinking about you suffer and they will do a lot in their power within their power to scare you and to tear you down it and i've experienced a little bit of that if i have say 2 000 fans then i have two people on a daily basis who are trying to ruin my life it actually isn't that bad but you get the picture so imagine what britney was going through me becoming again having a tiny bit of notoriety makes me realize how hard it is for them and for them to come out and say things like uh you know the paparazzi are attacking me or a lot of times then that causes people to want to attack you more they'll say like well you're famous you deserve it you know if you don't want it then you shouldn't be famous because people are jealous or they don't understand or i don't know what's going on but just because someone has some notoriety and some fame doesn't mean they deserve to be attacked and humiliated and made to feel afraid so i think what the documentary is trying to show us now is the mounting emotional toll that britney was going through not only from being a famous person but incurring a lot of sexism and misogyny and [ __ ] shaming and blame so i'm guessing that's what they're building up to all right well that does it for that episode of psychology in seattle tune in next time when we continue watching the documentary and everyone out there please take care of yourself because you deserve it you really really do

Channel: Psychology In Seattle

Views: 115,054

Rating: 4.9580212 out of 5

Keywords: Britney Spears, Framing Britney Spears, documentary, therapist reacts, analysis, Psychology, Therapy, Counseling, Self-Help, Education, Wellness, Relationships, Culture, Dr. Kirk Honda

Id: PQpZim_CvCI

Length: 22min 7sec (1327 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021