we all did this to britney spears

so today i don't really fully know where the video is gonna go but i wanted to talk to you guys about brittany jean spears for obvious reasons everybody has been very interested in her plight over the last few months and i am certainly no different as a consumer of popular culture and news i've been consuming a lot of content around the free britney movement in the last few months and honestly i just kind of feel like i need to talk to somebody about this so you guys are going to be that somebody i'm not sure that i have a lot of new stuff to add to this conversation but there were some parallels to pop culture figures from the days of yore that have been striking me that i haven't seen a ton of people talking about and i also thought that this would be a great opportunity to highlight a few books that i think speak to at least how i have been thinking about and interpreting the events of recent days with britney spears so between those things i thought this might be a fun slightly different take on a commentary video from me so we'll see if you guys like it what you think if nothing else i get this off my chest so i consider that to be a win so to start my own history or background with britney spears so i am a mid millennial like mid to elder somewhere in there so i grew up with britney spears i was like the prime age to be a consumer of her career when she first came out one of my friend's birthday parties one year was going to britney spears with a few of us so i got to see her in concert in her oops i did it again tour i definitely have a lot of nostalgia for her early work and like i said it was sort of a teeny bopper pop resurgence of the late 90s and early ops that was like prime time for people my age so i certainly could not escape her in that era and i think part of why i have been so fascinated about her recently is just it helps me reflect on how much i've changed in terms of like who i am as a person and my own i mean some of it's growing up from when you're a kid versus now but just in my own consciousness raising around issues around the patriarchy and around how women are policed and perceived in our society and seeing how i thought of britney spears then and how i was primed to think of her versus how i perceive her now as a woman roughly my age a few years older who finds herself in a situation of radical restriction for reasons that seem specious at best and as time has gone on seem increasingly suspicious at the time however when i was sort of in her perfect fan base this would have been i think she's about six years older than me so this would have been when i was in middle school and she was bare like not even an adult maybe barely an adult i had a level of contempt for her that i struggled to understand looking back some of it came from this pretentiousness that just was characteristic of me as a whole at that age but i had this sense of only just transitioning into more contemporary pop music i grew up listening to music from the 60s and 70s and really feeling a level of uh very annoying superiority about my taste being more refined and classic than my peers oh god i was such an [ __ ] but i did have this feeling that oh well you guys like these kind of ephemeral teeny bopper acts your backstreet boys your instincts your britney spears's and i am you know listening to the temptations and early arab beetles et cetera et cetera i basically just felt like my version of pop music was superior and for whatever reason i felt that way about the boy bands but i really intensely directed the set britney spears i had a level of contempt for her because i felt like she couldn't sing and really the only thing she was bringing to the table was a sexuality that in my very fundamentalist school i was being constantly indoctrinated to be fearful of resist at all costs in my own body and my own self and to have extreme judgment towards in women who displayed any kind of comfort in their own sexuality and portraying that in some way so i remember just hating britney spears and thinking of her as someone a blip on the radar i distinctly remember telling my best friend at the time that she was never going to be like a madonna she was never going to be a diana ross that how could anybody think that she would transcend time and last oh my god first of all what an [ __ ] thing to think but also laughably untrue now while i will still i will agree with you know 11 year old mara that her singing i don't think has ever been like the strongest part of her she is an incredibly compelling performer and an incredible dancer and all in all and a great pop star and just an incredible charisma in her performance persona so i mean as an adult i look back and i'm like well of course she was successful but at the time i was like well at least christina aguilera can sing britney spears can't even say i was just such a jerk and i do look back on that and think that that was a lot of my own projection of the fear that i had of what it meant to be a teenage girl jude doyle a apparently this was not unusual like there were a lot of kind of backlash responses to brittany in this era but jude doyle talks about similar sentiment that they had when they were a teenage girl and how they felt very similar contempt for brittany and how they projected a lot of their own fears onto her at 17 i didn't want any adult men thinking about my chest size let alone my potential honeyed thighs yet somehow i didn't blame the guys themselves the person i blamed and hated was britney the girl who stoked their appetite the girl who was my age tasked with representing girls my age to the world and who let men think we liked the attention somehow in my heart of hearts i believe that if britney spears were not famous i could walk down the street without hearing a single cat call without britney other girls would be safe it never occurred to me to wonder whether brittany herself liked the attention i never stopped to think that she might have been frightened too i hated brittany early on because i hated being forced into the role she seemingly enjoyed playing i wanted to reject the feminine ideal she supposedly embodied and i wound up rejecting her but every wreck is a potential role that women need or want to reject the magnitude of our hatred for them is determined by how powerfully we fear what they represent in brittany's case she represented the end of youth and the corruption of purity she was the pretty good little girl who became ugly and bad when she grew up the queen of teen who was used up and over the hill by the age of 25. she was the wages of feminism the working mother who tried to have it all and wound up nearly dropping her baby onto the sidewalk she was the cost of public life for women or she was the price of thinking for oneself as a woman whose attempts at adult independence had supposedly driven her insane so i don't think that i'm alone in having these kinds of feelings towards her but as i look back i realize that as a society we prime ourselves to both love and to load these kinds of pop cultural female figures as all this has been going down i think of the parallels to a pop culture diva of the 1940s and 50s who is just a goddess to me and for whom i have a tremendous amount of empathy to the situation that she was put through and that is judy garland and this is not a comparison that i've seen enough people making because to me it's so striking maybe it's just because i'm obsessed with judy so anytime i see parallels i'm like oh same situation but as soon as all this stuff has been going down and been in the news more in recent years the parallels between britney spears and judy garland have been very heavy on my mind now if you want to learn more about judy garland's biography i'm going to be totally honest with you i have not been very impressed with any of the books that i've ever read with biography of her there is a really good documentary of her life but i'll try to find the link to it because i think it's a nice summation of everything that she went through but i wanted to tell you a little bit about judy garland's story if you don't know just to illustrate the fact that like this is a thing that we as a culture do to relevant pop cultural teen girls we've done it at least for about 100 years and i'm sure we were doing it before then or we would have been doing it if we had the same sort of mass media to have this kind of figure be so culturally pervasive i'm sure we would have been condemning the teen pop culture girl idols of the 1820s if we had all had tvs to look at them on so let's talk about judy garland's trajectory she starts her awareness in the public eye as what i would describe as a sort of asexual good girl she was in i think she was i'm gonna say she was in probably her mid to late teens when she started getting famous like really famous so let's say like 13 to 15 ish this is pre wizard of oz her iconic role was with mickey rooney in this these series of let's put on a musical musicals where mickey was always sort of like the hometown hero which is kind of funny that he had this role like looking back just not who i would pick as a teen heartthrob but like that was kind of he was he was sort of the boy next door who was always trying to get the girl and that girl was never judy it was always you know lana turner or whoever the like more glamorous girl while judy was pining for mickey rooney and they were always musicals and they would end up with them let's put on a show in the local like community barn or whatever there was always some contrived reason why they would end up putting on a musical so that they could sing and dance together so judy garland and mickey rooney were like an iconic singing dancing duo kind of the same way fred astaire and ginger rogers would have been in this era but for sort of like the teen set and because judy garland was never the sexually desirable one and she was never portrayed as sort of like the one that mickey rooney was like crushing on or into she had this very clean squeaky clean good girl image that was sort of divorced from sexuality and so that was sort of like where her image started you can kind of think of her in this way similar to britney spears or like a miley cyrus where they started their career sort of on the disney channel and then they have i'm not a good girl anymore kind of era judy garland eventually did have that somewhat but it was a very rocky transition and actually vincent minnelli who ended up being her second husband he was instrumental in helping her make that transition just based on the way that he sort of lit and framed her and meet me in st louis that was a very pivotal role in portraying her as being more glamorous more beautiful and really making her feel good about herself so that's kind of what was going on in her early career in front of the cameras behind the cameras things to keep in mind are that judy garland's father died when she was a young girl so her mother was really sort of like intense stage mom it seems like who really wanted all of her girls to be in vaudeville and then in hollywood and her father at least judy's perception was that he was really the one sort of like curtailing that to some degree or sort of providing some level of balance and when he died early on in her childhood she definitely felt that as a profound loss of having somebody who was really on her side of what she wanted to do into that void comes the hollywood studio system of that era she signs with good ol mgm run by infamous lech and all around creeper in my opinion louis b mayer and louis vuimer takes on this sort of like evonucular patriarch kind of role in her life he becomes sort of a surrogate father in terms of like authority figure her mom would say you better behave or i'll tell mr mayor on you kind of a thing instead of like wait till your father gets home and he is the one who is very focused on giving judy this very squeaky clean image he does not want her to grow up he really resists that and he also starts um basically systematically ruining her body and life again in my opinion so there are two main things that i think created issues that essentially eventually killed judy garland one is that he felt that she was fat now if you see her in her kind of like fat period it as a child as a literal child i don't think that a a fair characterization of her body in this era is that of being fat maybe mid-size but i don't even think that honestly i don't know anyway he's convinced that she's fat and he thinks that she's ugly and he constantly communicates this to her he calls her his little hunchback he orders in the canteen that no matter what she orders the only thing that she's allowed to eat is chicken broth so thank you for the disordered eating being imparted to her that's great the other thing he does is that he wants mickey and judy to be pumping out these musicals they're wildly popular and they're trying to capitalize it while this is still a craze and this was in an era where these major studios would have a new movie coming out pretty much every week so that was part of the studio system and to facilitate this he puts her on a series of substances that are basically uppers and downers so he gets her addicted to substances that pepper up get her going and then eventually so that she can get you know four hours of sleep or whatever she's then ordered to take downers so she gets onto this rollercoaster train of uppers and downers uh something else that i think is notable is that as she is making this transition from asexual good girl teen image to adulthood part of what she does is when she is rebounding from major crush on i forget what is i want to say it's like arnie something but he was lana he runs away with lana turner and marries her she is so devastated when she finds out this man she was in love with did that and he only viewed he basically communicates that he only viewed her as a little kid sister she rebounds with this other dude who treats her pretty well at the time but with whom she has like nothing in common and she gets pregnant she's like 18 or 19 and the studio and her mother decide that that would not be good for her teen teenie bopper image and so she is forced in her words to have an abortion and then her first marriage kind of falls apart from that so eventually she does get with vincent minelli but part of the problem is is that even though he's it seems like by her accounts by all accounts was incredibly good to her as a husband very supportive and really tried to support her in this transition to more adult roles the problem is is that she is so taken with her substance addiction by this point or substance abuse she becomes increasingly difficult to be around very difficult to manage so basically the studio has gotten her addicted to these substances as she ages and as her relationship to these substances evolves it goes from these being things that facilitate her being this workhorse for them to being a reason to demonize her and to be able to override a lot of her attempts at autonomy or decision making because she is portrayed as being unhinged or unwell or an addict or whatever adjectives this plays out in the tabloids she does have some attempted self-harm incidents in this period and then we get into this dynamic where the studio she's this big star they want to put her into everything they also want her to stay at a certain weight there's this constant sort of merry-go-round over the last years of her time at mgm where she's being put into treatment centers where she starts to get well she starts to come back to a weight that is more her sort of set points that's more natural when she's eating a normal diet and she slowly starts to wean off of some of the substances but as soon as she's required to come back to work she falls into the same pattern and instead of any kind of ownership over that cycle or any kind of real like empathy or just awareness of how the situation has come to be eventually the studio system that created this situation for her spits her out and she loses her mgm contract and from that point on she's really at the beginning of what becomes a lifelong pattern of attempting to get well attempting to have a better relationship with her body in terms of her self-perception of her own glamour you know relationship with food and then also trying to not have the kind of dependence issues that were inculcated in her as a literal actual child and there are periods where that is going well for her and she's happy and she's you know a little bit better able to function without some of those things and then there are periods where that is not going well this becomes massive tabloid fodder and this continues for the rest of her life she unfortunately died of us an overdose in her i think mid-40s and she had had so many rises and falls if you look back on the tablets of this era it is so familiar to what we see with for example britney spears where there is this sort of curient interest and delicious delight and watching her fail to be what we as a society have deemed she should be and all of it is derived from these issues that were thrust upon her by the people in her life who she should have been able to trust and by us as a society because we eat this up so i go on that long side note with judy garland because you know this was again back in the 30s 40s 50s 60s she embodies what then becomes a recurring pattern with female pop cultural idols ever since then i mean i think britney spears is the most notable of this pattern but you could see it in someone like drew barrymore you can see it with like whitney houston there's also a whole level of like intersectional issues there because she's also a black woman who is exerting power as a pop princess and a lot of issues that come up with that and her relationship with bobby brown but we have brittany and then after brittany we have other icons who have fallen into versions of this pattern now i will say with the rise of social media i think that this pattern is actually dissipating somewhat because there isn't the same level of like centralized tabloid-ness that drives some of the profit motives of sensationalizing these women's rise and fall in the same way it's a little more i think that these women are able to control the narrative a little bit more and i do hesitantly think that we as a society have started to learn from some of these cycles that we have seen these are still patterns we are following to this day like it's going to be interesting to see what happens with for instance the social media stars who are coming of age right now like a charlie demilio for example like where is she going to be in 10 years and how will we perceive her or you know teen girls who are famous kind of through more conventional or mainstream media patterns some of the girls who are kind of coming up right now it's gonna be interesting to see how we ultimately handle them but i do think it's not quite the same the only way that it will get better is if we become more aware of some of these patterns that we as a society enact on these women over and over again there's a really good video that went up recently about the child star to adult burnout pipeline uh from a child star so i will try to remember to link that somewhere but i do want to talk about two elements of brittany's case in particular that i think are very resonant to how they exemplify pernicious forces in our culture at a broader level so first of all looking at this from sort of like a feminist lens these three books i think all are very relevant to the narratives that we have around britney spears so this is too fat too [ __ ] too loud the rise and reign of the unruly woman by anne helen peterson i think this gets at some of the ideas around how we treat women who do not fit a very specific mold in our culture but even more so jude doyle's two books particularly trainwreck but also dead blondes and bad mothers talking about in particular our need as a society to have women who we love to hate mock and fear and why so this idea of a train wreck so an amy winehouse or an amanda bynes or a courtney love or whoever we have these women in our culture who we love and then we love to hate and we love to watch them fail britney spears being i think the perfect embodiment of this impulse that we have as a society basically hashtag because the patriarchy i think that there's so much we could say about what kind of either misogyny or internalized misogyny we have towards women like britney spears this idea of her being truly monstrous this is part of what jude doyle talks about in this book from them the idea of her being this monster who we have to learn from and how we have to protect our sons from and warn our daughters not to be i think that it's intensely patriarchal and misogynistic and pop culture figures like britney become almost like morality plays about what it means to be a good girl and then a bad girl so the good girl the narrative there being that good girls in our pop culture are role models they are sexy but not sexual so they are beautiful they are conventionally attractive and they are objects of attraction for men but they are unaware of it and they are not seeking that attention out per se but kind of this really gets into the image that at the time it was constantly pushed to us that britney spears was choosing this sort of innocent sexuality that she was the one engineering all that in retrospect it seems very hard for me to believe that a 7 16 17 year old girl is choosing to put on a catholic school outfit and like dance provocatively like that seems improbable to me but that was entirely the narrative at the time and even if she was the one to choose it think about what your environment growing up would be like to get to a point where you under you're canny enough to understand why that would be an image that would be resonant to men i remember at the time in my fundamentalist school she was really vilified for rather than why are all these adults in her life allowing her to sexualize herself in this way on a national stage now there is this discussion we could have about how hollow this idea of being a good girl or being a role model really is both for girls who are famous but also for girls who aren't i mean i think that there has to be room to allow teenagers to become adults and part of becoming an adult is exploring and expressing you know the fact that you are a sexual person in one way or another be it you know gay straight asexual demisexual i mean like whatever your ultimate state is with sexuality that is a part of adult identity formation and you know so i think that this idea of demonizing teen girls having any kind of sexuality is a part of the perniciousness of this good girl myth but what i'm trying to get at is there is a difference between allowing your teenage daughter to explore herself as a sexual person and having your teenage daughter dress in a way that is very clearly meant to elicit a specific response from adult men on a literally an international stage like those are not the same thing and yet at the time i remember so judging her for that particularly as she started to evolve from her good girl image into her more bad girl image like her rebelliousness with the oops i did it again of it all where she's in the skin tight red latex like semi bdsm type outfit and i remember going to that concert that my friend took me to and her dancing on a stripper pole this girl she was probably like 18 at the time and i remember just vilifying her for that thinking she was so gross so sexual so [ __ ] so bad yet think about how she was portrayed in the media and how fixated everybody was on was she a virgin was she not that was like such a trope in the portrayal of her at this time constant harping on whether or not she was a virgin on the size of her breasts if her breasts were real or if they were augmented the original coverage of her even when she was underage as being intensely sexual that infamous rolling stone cover but also the interview that went along with it jude doyle reminded me of just like how lascivious the male gaze of the writer of that was towards this 17 year old in between visits to brittany's bedroom steven daly made sure to note her thighs and what she did with them he made sure to include lines like spears's pink t-shirt is distended by her ample chest and her silky white shorts with dark blue piping clinging snuggly to her hips and then it progressed into this obsession in sort of the early to mid odds with like uber short skirts and all of these sort of upskirt shots that were happening and this constant fixation of like are we going to be able to see these women's vulvas when they're getting in and out of cars nip slips being a big thing tara reads i feel like being the most infamous like there was this intense sexualization of these young women who were like barely legal and that being just a cultural fixation in the tabloids in my own awareness of these women driving fashion driving sort of like idealized images of women in this period it is intensely sexual and yet it's not a free-spirited sexuality it's not an embracing of these women being sexual agents in their own right it is these good girls who have been corrupted by their sexuality and who are objects of sexual desire not subjects in any way they are objects not subjects they are essentially reinforcing this constant sort of like madonna [ __ ] dynamic that we have had in our culture for centuries where women have to be sexual in order to make them valuable to society because they are the bearer of children and they are the objects of these men's lust but at the same time whenever they have any awareness of that role or take any pleasure in it or use it to their own potential monetary gain that is what is demonized not the fact that that is all that they are being valued for so i think that this was an era where i was very unquestioning of that dynamic that now as a woman in my 30s i look back on and have a completely different perspective on both because the world has changed i think a lot in the last 20 years but also just with the advancement of time i no longer see britney spears as being this temptress harlot woman but as a child being exploited i'm also much more aware of how scary that must have been for a 16 17 year old girl but even a 19 20 21 year old woman as jude doyle says for that matter despite the fact that i hate read the first rolling stone profile at least three or four times i somehow managed to miss the part where daley mentioned that britney was being routinely assaulted alone in the house one night she hid from a prowler lurking at the window her mother surprised another as he was hailing to her through a locked bedroom window i was so unhappy and so afraid that i never thought about whether britney spears was safe or happy nor did i consider any of the plentiful evidence that she was not worrying about britney would have required seeing her as a real girl my own age capable of experiencing the same trauma subject to the same pressures and i couldn't do that in my mind she was an icon a symbol a teenager-shaped screen onto which i could project all of my own frustration with how i was expected to behave or how men saw me so i think what i'm more aware of now as an adult with the kind of narrative around britney spears is that we have this expectation of her as a society that she was this full agent in this sort of jezebel temptress role and i think that we became desensitized to the idea of her being a real person who might have feelings about how this role that she was asked to play affected her mental health affected her sense of self affected her well-being and essentially this idea of her being this all-powerful pop diva allowed us to treat her badly because she deserved it she was she was the one in full control and so anything anybody did who cares she's powerful enough to take it she's strong enough to take it she becomes almost like a super villain of female sexuality rather than an actual human woman with fears insecurities ability to be taken advantage of capable of making her own decisions but as we all experience like we all you know i'm i'm an autonomous independent woman but that doesn't mean that i am divorced from like cultural baggage or family baggage or you know my my choices are not limitless they are not they are constrained in some way and so by divorcing her from the real humanity that she had i think it allowed us to see her as this like all-powerful kind of sex demon who deserve bad treatment from the paparazzi from people in her life to be used and discarded by men in a way that people are very cynical of i just think all in all allowed us to dehumanize her and treat her purely as an object of sexual gratification for men the other thing is like her anger i remember you know when when her narrative starts to shift so obviously she has the good girl era then she shifts into this like uber sex demon and then she starts to be portrayed as like the crazy woman who is intensely angry like we see her in that infamous moment where she shaved her head and then started hitting the paparazzi's car with an umbrella of her anger is so justified at the time i just was like whoa you've really lost it but now that i think about it i'm like if you were being stalked basically by strangers who were constantly trying to take advantage of you to use you for money to sexualize you in ways that you had no real control over to harass your children when you're with them to make fun of your life choices in terms of like who you're married to and how you're living your life if you were constantly stalked by people who were doing this yeah wouldn't you be angry too like her anger is so justified in retrospect and i think it continues to be justified as and this is part of what i think i i instinctively hated her for because i wanted it for myself she always seemed to have this sort of like devil may care attitude kind of like [ __ ] y'all type attitude that i think i had contempt for and now i see as like wholly justifiable and a wonderful trait of her it's a wonderful characteristic because like think about if you heard her speak on her own behalf in court recently just the raw anger and despair in those recordings and i'm happy it's a lie i thought i just maybe i said that enough maybe i might become happy because i've been in denial i've been in shock i am traumatized you know fake it till you make it but now i'm telling you the truth okay i'm not happy i can't sleep i'm so angry it's insane and i'm depressed i cry every day and the reason i'm telling you this is because i don't think how the state of california can have all this written in the court documents from the time i showed up and do absolutely nothing just hire with my money another person to keep and keep my dad on board ma'am my dad and anyone involved in this conservatorship and my management who played a huge and punishing at me when i said no ma'am they should be in jail and we you know are learning more and more about what she is likely going through the new york times has reported that her father has like bugged her home her anger and her despair are so justified now under her conservatorship and now that i look back on it we're justified when she was you know hitting paparazzi's cars with umbrellas it's not misplaced or crazy anger it is completely rational responses to being treated like an object and treated badly it's embarrassing and demoralizing what i've been through and that's the main reason i've never said it openly and mainly i didn't want to say it openly because i honestly don't think anyone would believe me and maybe i'm wrong and that's why i didn't want to say any of this to anybody to the public because people would make fun of me or laugh at me and say she's lying she's got everything she's britney spears i'm not lying i just want my life back and it's been 13 years and it's enough and then the other thing that jude doyle talks about is this narrative of like okay now so you know she was out of control but then her dad swoops in and saves her and now that she's suffered she can be redeemed now that she's suffered and she is brought back under the control of a man and now that she you know has done her penance of having her entire legal life and freedom taken away from her now we can love her again now we don't have to hate her she has been brought down and she can be loved again and brittany in the end did not even die she was buried alive put under her father's conservatorship she now lives under a form of legal control that is normally reserved for late-stage alzheimer's patients and people with severe developmental disabilities she is no longer legally allowed to decide whether she gets married or who her doctor will be or how to spend her money she can no longer legally sign a contract she is not allowed to use her cell phone unless her father approves it reads like a cruel joke the queen of teen the ideal american girl woman is now condemned to be a child in the eyes of the law for potentially the rest of her life but just as she was breaking down something strange happened the world began to love britney spears again the endless devouring need to see her fall apart and break down was replaced with something more like sisterhood a desire to see her well or happy or free feminist writers begin to attack and reject nasty or invasive press coverage to protest the conservatorship that made her in the words of michelle dean a prisoner meanwhile mainstream pop culture coverage stopped using words like meltdown and white trash and started calling brittany words like icon and living legend they referred to a woman in her early 30s as if she were the battle scarred survivor of some ancient war which in a way she was her suffering had purified her allowed us to identify with her in a way that perfection had precluded the ideal girl broke down became a monster and emerged on the other side as a real flawed and struggling woman with plenty of reasons to say [ __ ] you to the world that woman we didn't have to see as a role model that woman we could simply love this cycle of hating and then loving celebrities is so toxic i mean forgive the brittany pun but it's a really disgusting i don't know if it's a part of the human condition if it's just a part of our culture if it's a function of envy which contra points did a really interesting video about recently like i don't know where this comes from but it's honestly like such a gross part of human nature that we have these people who we build up and then we love to tear them down this is where i think some of the more valid criticisms of cancel culture can come in now often i think that they are thinly veiled excuses for awful behavior from stans who have too intense of a parasocial relationship with someone but i do think that it is well taken it's a point well taken that we do as humans tend to have a level of envy of people who are more successful than us or more whatever than us and we do take a kind of gross delight in watching them be leveled so now that britney has suffered and now that she you know has done her penance we can start to love her again and then the only other thing i wanted to talk about and i feel like this is a whole video that i would like to well not even that i would like to that i do plan to do at some point is this idea of kind of the ableism that our attitudes at least i can speak for myself my attitude towards britney spears was characterized by for much of the time i've thought about her plight in the last 10 years is this idea that people who have like let's okay i have so many thoughts about this but basically let's even just take that britney spears has some sort of psychological issues or impairment of some kind does that mean she deserves to have all of her rights stripped away i honestly one of the most interesting things that has come out of this discourse in the last few months is just me being made aware and i think a lot of us being made aware of the ways that mentally disabled people or mentally impaired people can have their legal rights stripped away for reasons that seem not great doesn't everybody have the right to make bad choices why does having some sort of mental you know handicap or disability or however you want to say that does that mean that you lose the right to make mistakes and lose the right to make decisions for yourself even if they don't always end up being great ones isn't that a part of how you grow as a person i don't know this has really made me think a lot about how we think of kind of monstrousness in the guise of responding to people with mental illnesses and i'm you know again i'm not really convinced that britney spears has much other than probably ptsd from the trauma of her being stalked legally stalked by members of the paparazzi corps for years yeah she probably has that and she probably now has trauma from her whole family ganging up to take her rights away from her the cool tactics working for miley cyrus as she smokes on joints and stage at the bmas nothing has ever done to this generation for doing wrong things but my precious body who's worked for my dad for the past [ __ ] 13 years trying to be so good and pretty so perfect when he works me so hard when i do everything i'm told in the state of california allowed my father ignorant father to take his own daughter who only has a role with me if i work with him they said back the whole course and allowed him to do that to me that's given these people i've worked for way too much control and i would honestly like to sue my family to be totally honest with you um i also would like to be able to short share my story with the world and um what they did to me instead of it being a hush-hush secret to benefit all of them i want to be able to be heard on what they did to me by making me keep this in for so long is not good for my heart i've been so angry and i cry every day it concerns me i'm told i'm not allowed to expose the people who did this to me i'd like for my boyfriend to be able to drive me in his car um and i want to meet with a therapist once a week not twice a week and i want him to come to my home because i actually know i don't need a little therapy she probably has trauma from that but does that mean she deserves to not be able to make her own choices about who she marries if she can have children i think that was something in particular that really resonated with a lot of the history of how we have police people with mental disabilities is this attempt to control their reproduction in pretty pernicious ways throughout history and i would like to progressively move forward and i want to have the real deal i want to be able to get married and have a baby i was told right now on the conservatorship i'm not able to get married or have a baby i have a id inside of myself right now so i don't get pregnant i wanted to take the id out so i could start trying to have another baby but this so-called team won't let me go to the doctor to take it out because they they don't want me to have children any more children there's a certain group of people who are constantly complaining about the nanny state from the government but isn't this the kind of nanny state we should actually be mad about here's where i get so hung up about like government intervention many people who claim to hate government intervention really only like it when it is there to coerce people in terms of a very strong police force who can use violence against you to force you to comply with often arbitrary laws this is a great example of like being able to strip rights away for what reason other than we see a successful wealthy person a wealthy woman who we're afraid might dissipate some of her fortune okay like isn't it her right to dissipate some of her fortune if she chooses to do that in her 20s yet we have like a legal mechanism for the government to interfere in this way we have all of these coercive nanny state interventions but like where is that same energy why can't we have nanny state interventions for things like actually providing any services to people so that they can work without worrying about child care costs like this is where i get really hung up i'm down for the idea that maybe the government has overreaches in certain places in our lives this being a prime example of it but i often feel like the discourse around government intervention is not coming from a place of actively promote flourishing it's only to punish people who don't conform to our ideas of the right kind of person be they you know able-bodied in this case or you know straight or christian often we're like enforcing sort of the norm is fine for a lot of people when it comes to government intervention but proactively promoting flourishing human flourishing regardless of the position you happen to find yourself in when you are born doesn't seem to be as much of a concern and this really drove that home for me like how i think this really has made me challenge a lot of my own ableist assumptions and like think through what does it mean to really believe in full human rights for people who maybe have a mental disability or just a physical disability of some kind and again all this is saying that i do think that britney spears seems to have some trauma but it seems to me that very likely mental issues she has is being an angry woman who has a certain amount of power due to the monetary wealth she has acquired through exploiting people's sexualized ideas about her like that seems to be what makes her crazy considering the fact that they have allowed her to work and make millions of dollars for this estate seems to me that if she is unwell enough to need a conservator certainly she should not be well enough to do that it's been a long time since i've owned my money and it's my wish and my dream for all of this to end without being tested again it makes no sense whatsoever for the state of california to sit back and literally watch me with their own two eyes make a living for so many people and pay so many people trucks and buses on the road with me and be told i'm not good enough but i'm great at what i do and i allow these people to control what i do ma'am and it's enough it makes no sense at all there should be no i shouldn't be in a conservatorship if i can work and provide money and work for myself and pay other people it makes no sense the laws need to change what state allows people to own another person's money and account and threaten them and say you can't spend your money unless you do what we want you to do and i'm paying them ma'am i've worked since i was 17 years old so in closing i feel like this was kind of all over the place and a lot of me just like spewing interesting ideas from these books and talking about how mad all this has made me but basically i just want to say that we all did this to britney spears i have enjoyed the cultural pariahying of her father through this process like i'm here for that jamie's gone kayla i pulled out half oh this is a good day me shaming in the face the only thing that this raggedy ass man has ever been successful at was spitting some seed out and making britney spears so i think part of him the insecurity of like not being successful and being a straight white man was like this is all i got so i don't even give a [ __ ] if it's my daughter like i'ma run it up i cried on the phone for an hour and he loved every minute of it the control he had over someone as powerful as me as he loved the control to hurt his own daughter 100 000 he loved it but the reality is none of this was possible without all of our kind of complicity and culpability in creating an environment where she was seen as crazy rather than in distress from being spewed out from the sort of child star industrial complex that we have going we're all culpable i'm culpable and i think it's a good sign that as a society we are having more awareness and problematizing some of these very deeply ingrained narratives like i think that's a good sign for instance the fact that miley cyrus yes had some cultural backlash but i think she rebounded from that a lot quicker and i think that there was sort of a meta awareness on a lot of people's parts that she was going through this sort of repetitious cycle like i think that that is actually a pretty positive sign that maybe we're starting to learn some lessons from this but there's always a fear that when you start to learn lessons from one thing you may start to have a backlash as we try to progress i think that's kind of how progress tends to work is two steps forward one step back so i'm also aware that while i'm very hopeful that britney spears at the time of filming she is still in her conservatorship but i'm very hopeful that that may be ending by the time that i post this so brittany may be okay but i think unless we and myself more than anyone i'm talking to unless you i learned the lesson that we don't need to demonize people who are apparently experiencing some sort of psychic distress we don't need to demonize women who are conventionally attractive and are able to create a career with that somewhat as the basis for it if we don't learn those lessons on a deep level there will continue to be backlash against it eventually and it is entirely possible that there could be a young pop culture female star who is rising today who could find herself in a very similar situation to brittany so till we as a culture defeat the patriarchy and ableism this is just gonna keep happening yeah i don't know how this went this is a little different than commentary videos i've done in terms of i didn't do nearly as much scripting i just sort of ranted but let me know what you guys think of this video what you think about the whole britney spears saga if you have been as interested in this as i have been i will link a bunch of resources below of things that i have been keeping up with this topic via obviously the the toxic podcast has been great um emily d banker who is fellow nashvillian and she is here on youtube is a former la prosecutor and she's had some really interesting breakdowns of the actual legal filings in this that i found very interesting and helpful to understand some of the issues that have been argued back and forth between the two sides and just generally how conservatorships tend to work so i'll link some of that some yeah i'll just link things that i found interesting on this topic and yeah i guess that'll do it for this one if you enjoy this video like subscribe hit the bell all those things and i will catch you guys later bye no judge penny today after a hearing decided to agree with britney spears and as of today effective immediately the conservatorship has been terminated as to both the person and the estate [Applause] we love you brittany [Applause]

Channel: bookslikewhoa

Views: 3,078

Keywords: books, reading, booktube, literature

Id: Lj1KPMraSsM

Length: 47min 1sec (2821 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 14 2021