Britney the mad mum

Now hold your fires peoples, it's Britney, but this article is still interesting

Mad mum of pop

March 15, 2008

Advertisement
Around the time of the release of her debut album, Baby One More Time, at the bright age of 18, Britney Spears apparently commented, "I want to be an artist that everyone can relate to, that's young, happy and fun." The title song of the album, infectious in its pop rhythms, rap-inflected, was the second most charted song of all time and the album sold 25 million copies worldwide. The accompanying video shows a wide-eyed, uniformed schoolgirl jauntily baring her midriff with Lolita-like provocation, a blend of warrior maiden and blonde cheerleader.

Nine years on and the "young, happy and fun" Spears has been transformed into the mad, bad and sad woman of psychiatric wards and courtrooms - a woman confined by her father's legal order of "conservatorship", which puts him in charge of her life and estate.

Were it not for the headlines, the websites screaming "skanky whore" and the hundred pursuing paparazzi waiting with cameras by her door, we might almost be in a Victorian melodrama scripted by Wilkie Collins.

Then as now, it seems, men can be wild and bad, transgress bounds and enter the revolving doors of what we casually call "rehab", without incurring the stigma and constraints of madness, whereas women, certainly once they have reached the maturity of motherhood, cannot. Being a bad, rebellious girl, in the style of Amy Winehouse or Lily Allen, may just about be permissible, but the socially defined limits of what is considered "sane" narrow with the arrival of babies.

So what has happened to Britney Spears? And since we are somehow implicated in the life of our celebrity icons, what has happened to us all that we bay with schadenfreude at the fall of Spears from jubilant girlhood to a womanly madness that seems to warrant a paternal straitjacket?

Raised in smalltown Louisiana by an ambitious schoolteacher mum and a hard-drinking, building contractor, soon-to-be-bankrupt dad, Spears, it is said, already liked to perform when she was two.

She rose to rare heights for a female pop artist - one groomed and managed by a showbiz machine that wanted to keep her pure, fresh and innocently slutty. Her second album, Oops! … I Did It Again, sold more copies in its first week than any other chart album.

By 2002 Forbes magazine ranked her the world's most powerful celebrity. What matter if the critics carped, unconvinced by her unsteady transition from teen virgin to sexualised woman? Only Madonna matched Spears's global fame.

When Spears kissed her during the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, the gesture might well have marked her sense that she had now overtaken her. She, too, could now be in control. "Maybe she was my husband in another life," Spears is reported to have said.

By June 2002, Spears's relationship with Justin Timberlake had ended. On a drug-fuelled Las Vegas weekend in January 2004, she suddenly entered into a marriage with a childhood friend, Jason Allen Alexander. This lasted all of 55 hours before her mother railroaded an annulment on vague grounds of incompatibility.

Six months later Spears announced her engagement to Kevin Federline, a back-up dancer for Timberlake and a sometime rapper and model, professionally known as K-Fed. He had just split from his wife, who had recently given birth to their second child.

They married in September and soon Spears announced that she would be taking a break to devote herself to the making of a family. The word "family" carries as much symbolic freight as the word "virgin" and its moral power was to bear down on Spears with a particular vengeance.

By the time her first child, Sean Preston, was born in September 2005, a reality TV show, Britney & Kevin: Chaotic, that she and Federline had made about their courtship and wedding, had screened.

In the wake of identification with Madonna, Spears had joined the Kabbalah Centre. Now she left it publicly, announcing: "I no longer study Kabbalah. My baby is my religion."

Religions often demand icons. They also demand adherence and come with generalised rules about behaviour. Motherhood and the family are no exception. Spears was a dab hand at the icons, but she fell foul of the second and is still reaping the punishments.

To mark her participation in the religion of mother and baby, a pregnant Spears posed nude for Harper's Bazaar, appearing on the cover of its August 2006 issue. Her hair now queenly dark, her belly perfectly rounded and airbrushed free of veins and stretchmarks, she is the very apogee of poised, yet still emphatically sexy, motherhood.

Spears just about got away with it. After all, Demi Moore had been there before. But posed images rarely have much to do with the messy realities of everyday life. Nor, it seems, as Princess Diana sadly learned, can the press simultaneously be wooed and kept away.

On September 12, 2006, two days before her older son's first birthday, Spears gave birth to her second, Jayden James. By November she had filed for divorce: Federline was not living up to hopes. She asked for physical and legal custody of her children. Federline counter-sued. In response to her original text message asking for divorce, he had scrawled on a nightclub bathroom wall: "Today I'm a free man - F--- a wife, give me my kids, bitch." Kids, of course, come with generous payments from the Spears treasure-trove.

Two children under 18 months, let alone the postpartum hormonal blips that all women are subject to, compounded with the obsessionality that the failure of a relationship inevitably brings, a custody battle, the milling paparazzi at the door - these are hardly a recipe for calm behaviour. Not much wonder that Spears's actions were erratic and, as an increasingly condemnatory media noted, "unstable".

She was still only 25. But the once cheerful Mouseketeer had let American motherhood down and the media, were moving in to prevent Spears - now "unfitney" - from getting up again.

Marilyn Monroe, who spent a good part of her last years on the analyst's couch, once said, "I'm always running into people's unconscious." Saucy virgin Spears ran into the unconscious that doesn't like sexualised, transgressive mothers, and she began to pay the price.

She also now seemed to relish a perverse rebellion against all the expectations that her former golden-girl image had so carefully fostered. She went wild and bad. She partied on the LA scene, drinking, snorting, vomiting, hanging out with Paris Hilton, chain-smoking, swearing at reporters, screaming at fans.

A few weeks later, pressured by her mother, she took herself into rehab at Eric Clapton's Crossroads in Antigua. She checked out a day later. The following night, February 17, she walked into a beauty parlour back in California and demanded that they shave her hair off. When the hairdresser refused, she took her razor and performed the task herself.

Like all of Spears's acts, this one hit the headlines. Beautiful, virginal Spears had now become madwoman Spears.

A few days later she was back in a treatment centre in Malibu, and stayed for almost a month, before continuing her bout of badness. She drove her car wildly, racing against the paparazzi, stopping to allow them to click, and then re-engaging in a chase.

She was snapped revealing no knickers under her dress. "Britney's badger goes free-range," shouted the headlines. She attacked one of the paparazzi with an umbrella. She started an affair with another, hating and loving at the same time. The money they made from her snapped image ran into millions: her pictures accounted for 20 per cent of paparazzi agency coverage that year.

In late September, after she had been charged with a hit-and-run incident, and had lost custody of the children in yet another court hearing, Spears appeared at the MTV Video Music awards. She was nervous. Her hair was less than six inches long and she battled against wearing the prepared wig. She rejected the appointed corset-style dress. She would appear wearing a glittering black bikini and her unabashed nakedness. See and take me as I am, seemed to be the message. The response to her visibly rounded post-pregnancy body was less than kind. There were jeers and hoots.

We do not want our pin-ups to wear the very signs of what their sexuality is - in part, at least - most certainly for: reproduction. Spears could only be "mad" for challenging our ambivalence about the female body in that adamantly upfront way. Other celebrity mums - Victoria Beckham comes to mind - hide the hated signs of maternity in anorectic thinness, reproducing, instead, an eternal girlhood.

The humour of Piece Of Me, a song from her lastest album, should make us question Spears's purported madness. Disturbed, unhappy, wild, maybe. But utterly deranged and needing the confinement of paternal "governance", certainly not.

Nonetheless, earlier this year after she refused to return the children to her husband, now known as Fed-Ex, and barricaded herself in the bathroom. Scores of police broke through the ranks of photographers in front of Spears's gated home to take her off to a hospital where she was held for an "involuntary" evaluation. She lost custody of the children. Some weeks later, on January 31, the scene was repeated late at night when paramedics, police and a fire engine once more rushed to the camera-filled scene and carted Spears away to the UCLA Medical Centre's psychiatric care facility, this time at the behest of the Spears family. Daddy had now taken charge, and despite his daughter's release from the hospital a week later, he had also taken charge through the courts. In a statement, Jamie Spears said that he feared for his daughter's life. He called her "an adult child in the throes of a mental health crisis". The statement won him court permission to fire Spears's manager, take over all her documents, records and assets, and effectively to take legal control over her life - and her millions.

Is it likely that a father would have dared do the same with an adult son and received such ready acquiescence from the courts and a good part of the media? No fathers have appeared to take legal charge of the countless male pop stars who live out some of the wildest dreams of the adult children we all sometimes are. But women, it seems, like their Victorian great-grandmothers, still need to be taken in hand and charged with madness.

In 2006, Spears had written a poem about the "sins of the father" and told friends he was emotionally abusive: "The guilt you fed me/ Made me weak/ The voodoo you did/ I couldn't speak."

Let's hope Spears, however troubled, fights back and doesn't succumb to her father's "fears for her life". Let's hope the media help her. That would really be an iconic victory.

Lisa Appignanesi's Mad, Bad And Sad: A History Of Women And the Mind Doctors From 1800 To The Present is published by Virago/Little Brown.


This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/03/14/1205472088815.html

Now being the Indian that I am, I feel fathers, great aunts and the village sarpanch of Westchester County or Glastonbury or whoever should take the Pete Dohertys of this world in check, but maybe this article is aimed at another culture?