Declawing the Fame Monster: Pop Culture Was Never Incorruptible

Image courtesy of Lucas Brígido on Flickr.

What happens after pop culture dies?

There is a belief in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy that through God, the bodies of certain saints and beati can avoid typical decomposition. Corpses that remain pristine long after death, even without embalming, are incorruptible.

Alyosha Fyodorovich Karamazov, one of the titular brothers in Dostoevsky’s immortal The Brothers Karamazov, is a kind, faithful novice at the local monastery during the novel’s opening. He faces a test in the first half of the novel, wherein his mentor, the monastery’s beloved Father Zosima, dies. All of the people who had once so highly esteemed Father Zosima are both shocked and disappointed when, just a couple of hours after his death, his body starts rotting and emitting a putrid smell. It’s highly uncommon for saints’ bodies to actually be incorruptible, but Father Zosima’s body doesn’t even decompose normally—it rots quickly and without abandon, leaving his followers to question their faith for themselves.

In 2013, a Tumblr blog called “Pop Culture Died in 2009” emerged, documenting the unique nature of early 2000s pop culture and how celebrity gossip just didn’t exist anymore. Pre-2009 pop culture was before social media made it possible for anyone to become an influencer overnight through a single algorithmically blessed post; before honest conversations about mental health, misogyny, and other forms of structural discrimination became mainstream; and, perhaps most importantly, before the glittering world of pop culture became, to garden-variety celebrity gossip consumers’ (GVCGCs’) horror, rotten like Father Zosima’s corpse.

Image courtesy of @ParisHilton on Twitter.

Back then, celebrity gossip revolved around a tight pool of young starlets, some of whom, like Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, had already made immense contributions to the entertainment industry as child stars. Some of them, like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, were just famous for being famous. Paparazzi photos like the famous shot of Paris, Lindsay, and Britney squeezing in the front seat of a two-seater sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

According to the Tumblr blog’s title, pop culture died before I was ten-years-old. Even then, however, I remember how present these young women were in media and how their escapades transcended from gossip into news. I remember watching the morning news before school and learning that Lindsay Lohan was arrested the previous night for whatever fucking reason. Perez Hilton, perhaps one of the vilest fixtures of the gossip industry at the time (not the least of which is because of his repeated outing of gay celebrities and posting an explicit photo of a then-underage Miley Cyrus) reportedly hit 7 million pageviews a day on his self-titled gossip blog. His awful treatment of celebrities was normalized to the extent that Hilton guest starred on an episode of Victorious, a sitcom for children, in 2010. The first decade of the 2000s was before the contemporary phenomenon of people getting to truly choose which media they consume and, for that reason, I hesitate to blame GVCGCs for all of the cruelty that the entertainment industry inflicted on young female celebrities during that time. I do wonder, however, how much of the blame should go to GVCGCs and how much rightfully lies with the industry itself.

A misconception about early 2000s celebrity culture is that it marked a departure from celebrities being classy to celebrities out-trashing themselves at every opportunity. Celebrities (like all people) have always been trashy, but it wasn’t until the early 2000s they were exposed by paparazzi thirsty for drama. TMZ is now a mainstay of the media ecosystem, but it was only launched in 2005, accumulating a whopping 10 million unique visitors per month by 2008. In the 2021 New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears, Brittain Stone, the photo director of Us Weekly from 2001 to 2011, said that the publication spent an average $140,000 a week just on celebrity photos, adding up to 7 or 8 million per year.

Various Hollywood industries—ranging from music, to magazines, to movies—exploited these vulnerable young women by putting their entire lives on display and turning them into shallow punchlines. Primetime interviews like Diane Sawyer’s cruel interrogation of Britney—wherein Sawyer verbally harassed Britney to the point of tears about her breakup with Justin Timberlake and told Britney that the current Maryland governor’s wife wanted to shoot her—conditioned the American public into believing that these young women’s pain didn’t matter. All that mattered was that there was always something good and juicy to watch on TV. Ironically, it was perhaps the subhuman treatment of these young female stars that made them seem larger-than-life despite the obstacles that corporate media and GVCGCs threw in their faces every day.

[Child] Stars Unraveling

In 2003, 36-year-old Rick Salomon released a 2001 sex tape featuring him and his then-nineteen-year-old then-girlfriend, Paris Hilton. This revenge porn came just weeks before the premiere of Fox’s The Simple Life, which would catapult Paris into immense stardom. Despite Paris’s public statement that the release of the tape both “embarrassed and humiliated” her, the media speculated that the uproar over the tape would attract viewers to the show if not outright saying that the release of the tape was a calculated publicity stunt.

2003 was long, long before mainstream media would even consider promoting honest narratives about misogyny, rape culture, and inequal power dynamics in Hollywood. Still, instead of treating a revenge porn victim with even an iota of sympathy, mainstream media relentlessly mocked her and treated her as if she was “asking for it.” A 2003 New York Times article by John Leland quotes a New Yorker article by E.J. Kahn in response to the sex tape’s release, stating that Paris “‘makes no attempt to curb the imaginative press,’” “even compared with her attention-seeking peers.”

By 2003, Paris was already a fixture of late 90s NYC nightlife. But after both attention-grabbing events collided, she instantly became the prototype of the early 2000s vacuous-headed “It Girl.” The Simple Life, which aired from 2003-2007, starred Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, daughter of Lionel Richie and fellow birthright socialite, as they left LA and attempted to live like normal people without access to their cell phones or credit cards. The producers of the show allegedly told Paris to play “the ditzy airhead,” and she embodied the dumb blonde stereotype so well on the show that she probably won’t ever manage to shake that perception.

Though “The Simple Life” itself soon faded from America’s collective pop culture psyche, it was immensely popular, its first season raking in 13 million viewers each week. This is because for the first time, it took two of America’s fixations—celebrities and reality TV—and wrapped them both up in a delectable, trashy little morsel every week. While reality TV in the past had featured regular people competing for a prize, The Simple Life was one of the first unscripted celebrity TV shows. The Simple Life was a gamble for Fox, both because it was a new format and because reality TV shows were not thought at the time to earn as much money from later DVD sales or re-syndication.

Other than technical details like its format, what really set The Simple Life apart was the arguably thin veneer of reality surrounding the series. Back then, celebrities had little control of the public narratives surrounding them because they didn’t have their own platforms to communicate with the public. Even with their hotel fortune, the Hilton family could not change the public narrative surrounding Salomon’s release of revenge porn of Paris. The series began the 2000s craze of GVCGCs getting to see novel glimpses of reality in celebrities’ lives instead of focusing solely on their carefully curated brands or media narratives over which the celebrities in question had no control.

The Simple Life ended in 2007 after a wildly popular five-year run, and though Paris’s immense fame (or, if we’re being honest, infamy) receded in the following years, she continued to capitalize off of her perfume line and business empire. The media obsession over her, however, set the stage for the publicity of Britney’s breakdown in early 2007. Harvey Levin, the founder of TMZ, contextualized the phenomenon of Britney Spears in the most early-2000s way possible, stating, “We serialize Britney Spears. She’s our President Bush.”

Throughout Framing Britney Spears, people who had professional relationships with Britney pre-2007 insist that she was always the boss despite the common perception that she was a puppet being pulled around on strings. Having starred in The All-New Mickey Mouse Club before she achieved global stardom with “…Baby One More Time” in 1998, Britney emerged onto the scene as a child star with an all-American image and rapidly transformed into that girl your parents warned you about. Framing Britney Spears argues that her transformation from girl next door to teen sex symbol was Britney making an informed choice to shed her child star image rather than the entertainment industry demanding sex appeal from every young woman who crosses its path.

Photo courtesy of David LaChappelle for Rolling Stone.

But, as Tavi Gevinson wrote in The Cut, Britney was never in control. It strikes me as fallacious if not malicious that anyone could insist that Britney was in control. How can anyone ever be in control when the only form of capital they can leverage is their ability to entertain? Rolling Stone’s April 1999 cover story “Britney Spears, Teen Queen” featured the adult Steven Daly following an underage Britney around her bedroom while describing her chest as “ample” and the way her shorts clung to her hips. We’re supposed to see Rolling Stone put an underage girl clutching a Teletubby plush on their cover in a bra and hot pants and believe that the girl was in charge?

Britney survived her very public breakdown from 2007-2008, wherein she checked into rehab for substance abuse problems, lost custody of her children, shaved her head, and damaged paparazzo Daniel Ramos’s car with an umbrella after he harassed her at a gas station. Everything about her breakdown was monetized for others’ profit, including the umbrella which went up for auction (albeit much later, in 2017) and her actual shaved hair for $1 million. Paparazzi would fight each other to get pictures of Britney because the free market placed so much value on them, and the capitalist machine surrounding Britney’s every action swelled to the extent that Hollywood strategists referred to it as “the Britney economy.”

Image courtesy of Charles Williams on Flickr.

The people with active stakes in Britney’s downfall were not only paparazzi, people with stakes in gossip rags, and network executives. Journalists, too, joined in the pile-on, as in this Associated Press article published on Today’s website: “On Friday night, Spears, the mother of two young sons, shaved her head bald. But that didn’t send her into hiding, as she was later seen wearing a cheap blond wig.” 

The anonymous writer behind “Britney Spears checks herself into rehab” masterfully employs their journalistic skills to punch down at the princess of pop with every word. They go so far as to imply that Britney should have gone into hiding, describing her blond wig as “cheap,” a seemingly frivolous detail that, in itself, accomplishes the main goal of the article—to portray Britney as, like Vanessa Grigoriadis so acutely described in her 2008 Rolling Stone cover story “The Tragedy of Britney Spears,” “an inbred swamp thing who chain-smokes, doesn’t do her nails, tells reporters to ‘eat it, snort it, lick it, fuck it’ and screams at people who want pictures for their little sisters.”

It almost seemed miraculous when Britney made a comeback so quickly after her breakdown, releasing two platinum studio albums—Blackout and Circus—in 2007 and 2008, respectively. Blackout is regarded by many as the best album of Britney’s career to date, the opening song and single “Gimme More” opening with the first iteration of the now-immortal “It’s Britney, bitch.” Despite a rocky comeback performance at the 2007 VMAs, Britney went on to win three VMAs the following year, followed by cameos on Glee and How I Met Your Mother, a stint on The X Factor, and a four-year Vegas residency that grossed over $130 million.

After Britney’s comeback, it didn’t take long for the tabloid machine to find another similar target, a young and talented but most importantly vulnerable female recording artist who publicly struggled with substance abuse and bulimia—Amy Winehouse. Amy released “Rehab,” the song that made her an international star, in 2006 at the age of 22. Though honest discussions about rehab and substance abuse are more common in mainstream media now, “Rehab” changed the game in that Amy was kind of the first artist to have a hit song about needing to go to rehab. She turned a clear cry for help into a bop that made people want to get up and dance. Amy died of alcohol poisoning in 2011 at the age of 27, having gone to rehab several times and accepted her Record of the Year Grammy for “Rehab” from rehab.

Amy wasn’t treated with any more sympathy or kindness by the British tabloids than Britney was by the American media. The cover photo on an issue of The Sun, a British gossip rag, showed an unaware Amy smoking out of a glass pipe with massive lettering that simply read, “Amy on crack.” In death, they treated her just as scornfully, with headlines like the BBC’s “Singer drank herself to death,” and the Washington Post describing her as a “drug-haunted British pop diva.”

It is undeniable that Amy’s struggles with substance abuse and addiction were a central tenet of her public image, one that she fostered through songs like “Rehab” and “Back to Black,” in which she sings, “You love blow and I love puff, and life is like a pipe.” The issue was that time after time, Amy fell, and she always seemed to land on her feet—except when she ultimately didn’t. As The New York Times noted in their obituary for Amy, though she always openly “flirt[ed] with self-destruction,” she kept treading water even as the waves began lapping around her neck. That bare minimum of survival made her seem, despite every shred of evidence pointing towards the contrary, incorruptible. Nobody realized that Amy was capable of dying.

As Asif Kapadia, director of the documentary Amy, said in an interview with NPR, “It became about [the machine surrounding Amy] and not about her, and she was one that was getting more and more lost.”

It is impossible to discuss media coverage of young female celebrities’ drug addictions in the early 2000s without addressing Lindsay Lohan, whose breakdown overlapped with Britney and Amy, and has continued throughout the last decade. It’s difficult now to imagine that Lindsay, whose name has become synonymous with drug arrests, crashing cars, and kidnapping children was once one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood.

Like Britney, Lindsay’s transition from picture-perfect Disney child star to adult performer was turbulent. Lindsay broke out as a veritable child star with her performance in The Parent Trap in 1998, after which she starred in the box office hits Freaky Friday (2003), Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (2004), and Mean Girls (2004), which is retrospectively the height of her career. 

In an Esquire interview in 2013, Megan Fox compared Lindsay to Marilyn Monroe. “[Marilyn] was sort of like Lindsay,” said Megan. “She was an actress who wasn’t reliable, who almost wasn’t insurable. She had all the potential in the world, and it was squandered.”

Despite the overall negativity of Megan’s assessment, it is ultimately favorable for Lindsay. Marilyn is often used as a symbol of class in the 21st century, while Lindsay has become a culturally irrelevant punchline for tabloids. Despite the polarity of their statures in pop culture, they share the illusion of incorruptibility from the media as Britney and Amy, and by so many influential women before and after them. Like Marilyn, Lindsay was one of the most desired Hollywood actresses and became a sex symbol as a young woman, whether she liked it or not. But the media attention ate her alive in every regard.

As late as 2013, David Letterman hosted Lindsay on his show and repeatedly goaded her about her time in rehab and her substance abuse problems, going so far as to ask her, “Do you have an addiction problem?”

Lindsay, unamused by the question, pejoratively responded, “Now you sound like Dr. Phil.” Throughout the rest of the interview, Lindsay continued to deflect questions about rehab and her legal troubles, attempting to redirect the conversation to her upcoming movie, The Canyons, and explicitly stating, “It’s not, like, a joking matter.” Celebrity news outlets characterized her clear discomfort and unwillingness to discuss these topics on national television as “snarky” and attempting to make excuses. The media and paparazzi attention that constantly made a spectacle out of Lindsay’s substance abuse problems and eating disorder led to Lindsay leaving the country for Dubai, where there are virtually no paparazzi.

Image courtesy of CNN.

That’s not to say that none of Lindsay’s bad choices have been her own fault. Mental illness and growing up in a turbulent household are explanations for behavior that harms others, but never excuses. Defending Donald Trump in 2017, defending Harvey Weinstein in 2017, and attempting to kidnap children because of their perceived status as Syrian refugees are all reprehensible. But instead of focusing on this behavior that had the potential to physically and emotionally harm people, the media only focused on the “bad behavior” (i.e., mental illness and personal struggles) that it perceived as marketable—her eating disorder and abuse of alcohol and other drugs. Media outlets “cared” about Lindsay when they could harness the public’s morbid curiosity about people’s personal low points to exploit her, not when she needed support after her then-fiancé publicly abused her.

It is ironically Rose McGowan, one of the silence breakers against Harvey Weinstein, who showed Lindsay the most grace in her entire career.

“Please go easy on Lindsay Lohan,” Rose tweeted. “Being a child actor turned sex symbol twists the brain in ways you can’t comprehend.”

It’s a brutal statement, and in my opinion, one that almost blames the young victim of constant media attention rather than the adult abusers. Still, it’s one that every shred of evidence corroborates over and over again.

Whose Prerogative?

In a 2004 cover of Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative,” in a breathy voice accompanied by tabla beats, pre-2007 Britney sang, “Everybody's talking all this stuff about me, why don't they just let me live? I don’t need permission, make my own decisions—that’s my prerogative.”

At the time of its release, critics gave the song negative reviews, Stephen Thomas Erlewine of allmusic.com even calling it a “useless remake.” Looking back on the cover, however, it feels like a chilling premonition of all of the adversity Britney would face in 2007 and her ongoing legal battle against her father Jamie Spears’s conservatorship of her estate.

There’s a whole market on Etsy just for objects that read “If Britney made it through 2007, then you can make it through today.” What this trite platitude ignores is that while Britney physically survived after 2007, it’s questionable whether Britney really made it. In 2017, she told Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth that following her breakdown, she didn’t leave her house for two years.

Along with not leaving her house for two years, part of the reason that Britney made her comeback so soon after her public breakdown was because her father was granted a conservatorship of her estate and person. Jamie has complete control over Britney’s assets and medical decisions as well as who she’s allowed to communicate with and where she performs. She has not given an in-person interview since the conservatorship began in 2008. Fans have repeatedly questioned her social media presence and whether she actually has any control of it, with a podcast, Britney’s Gram, dedicated just to analyzing her Instagram. Under the rule of law, it is no longer her prerogative to make her own decisions. 

No member of the public actually knows Britney’s exact mental health diagnosis (or even if she has a diagnosis), as Jamie has kept her medical records sealed despite Britney requesting in 2020 to unseal them. Some fans claim that Jamie forces Britney to perform through heavily medicating her, though this specific claim is unsubstantiated. Britney has said that she will not perform again if Jamie continues to control her career. Vivian Lee Thoreen, Jamie’s attorney, stated in Framing Britney Spears that she has not ever seen a conservatee successfully appeal to end a conservatorship.

Image courtesy of Know Your Meme.

Britney, one of the most iconic singers of all time, has no voice of her own right now. She’s resorted to court documents to communicate with the public, expressing that she appreciates the “informed support” of her fans and “doesn’t want this battle hidden away like a family secret.” In taking away the voices of conservatees, conservators effectively incarcerate them in invisible prisons. Not all conservatorships are abusive, but the power imbalance between conservators and conservatees is inherently conducive to abuse. It is such an effective means of legally stripping rights away from adults and holding them hostage to their careers that after witnessing Britney’s rapid comeback with Blackout in 2007, Michael Lohan considered petitioning to be Lindsay’s conservator. Based on public record about Lindsay’s relationship with her father and his rocky legal history, it’s abundantly clear that he is unfit to oversee his own estate and person, let alone anyone else’s. He wanted to control Lindsay.

Thoreen has insisted that the end of the conservatorship depends on Britney, and that she’s free to file a petition to end it whenever she sees fit, stating on Good Morning America that “people have it so wrong.” Thoreen’s assessment of Britney’s relationship with her father directly contradicts what Britney’s own lawyer, Samuel D. Ingham III, has said about her fear of her father and the fact that she was “strongly opposed” to having Jamie reinstated as her conservator in 2019 after he briefly stepped down due to health reasons. Following the inception of the conservatorship, Britney has released a handful of albums, raised two children, and starred in one of the most successful Las Vegas residencies of all time. Why would such a capable woman want her father to restrict her most basic freedoms?

In an interview on the As NOT Seen on TV podcast, Bryan Spears, Britney’s brother, revealed that Britney has always wanted to get out of the conservatorship. Britney’s boyfriend, Sam Asghari, publicly referred to Jamie as a “dick” and said that he had “zero respect” for Jamie.

It is easy for Jamie’s team to garner sympathy for their implementation of the carceral system because his team mostly controls the public narrative about the conservatorship. They cast doubt on any statement from Britney’s allies, insisting that the sentiments aren’t true because they didn’t come directly from Britney. Denying her a voice isn’t just convenient—it’s essential to keep the Britney economy running. Court documents show that the aptly-named Andrew Wallet, a lawyer appointed to help Jamie Spears manage Britney’s massive estate, even referred to the conservatorship as a “hybrid business model.” There is no more hiding that the carceral conservatorship is a tool to make money.

Framing Britney Spears brought Britney’s conservatorship into the spotlight following years of #FreeBritney activists’ demonstrations to free Britney and bring light to conservatorship abuse. In the 2000s, even at the peak of Britney’s suffering and exploitation, she still seemed incorruptible because the public had no way of knowing her side of the story. Over a decade later, everyone is still talking about Britney, but pop culture and media outlets have shifted from holding her accountable to questioning the machine that called her a monster and then turned her into one. Because of this new angle of focus, she is already the most talked-about pop star of 2021. 

Paris Hilton’s 2020 documentary, This Is Paris, also explores the dark underside of stardom that the public has taken for granted for so many years. A common criticism of Paris is that she failed to harness her fame past 2007 because she never managed to understand what made audiences like her—the veneer of authenticity painted onto The Simple Life and the actual authenticity in a massive 2007 leak of Paris’s personal documents, including but not limited to celebrity party photos, various records of Paris being extremely racist and antisemitic, and a few pictures of Paris peeing.

Image courtesy of Duncan Rawlinson on Flickr.

Paris’s 2020 tell-all documentary conflicts significantly with her perception of fame and maintaining public attention from 2004, when she wrote (okay, well, when her ghostwriter wrote) in Confessions of an Heiress that the key to maintaining fame is just a dash of mystery. The book completely misunderstands one of the foundational truths of fame, one that has stayed put since 2004 despite the mammoth shift in how GVCGCs consume media and interact with celebrities—that vulnerability, whether it is forthright or outright forced, will always sell. This Is Paris is Paris’s years-late attempt to take back control of her narrative through exposing her vulnerable side for the first time and critically assess her personal brand as a coping mechanism for past trauma. Once and for all, she wants to shrug off the “ditzy blonde” character she’s been playing for so long and rebrand herself as “someone who is brilliant.”

While I do believe that the documentary is a stab at regaining relevancy on Paris’s behalf and cleansing her public image, I also believe that it is mostly authentic. Her interactions with former classmates from Provo Canyon School for troubled teens and recounting of her sex tape leak show that she has gone through much more than she’s ever dared to let on. It’s laudable that Paris focuses so much of the documentary on advocating against abuse in schools for troubled teens. At the same time, if indeed the main purpose of the film was to regain relevance by capitalizing on vulnerability, it misunderstands the type of vulnerability that the public is drawn to.

In the film, Paris shows us a closet stacked with designer outfits and complains about having to wear a different outfit every couple of hours. She shows the cameras stacks of dozens of laptops, explaining that every time she gets a new boyfriend, she also gets a new laptop because she fears for her privacy. Since its inception in 2002, Paris has been a regular feature on Us Magazine’s “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” feature. Part of what has endeared the Kardashian clan to GVCGCs is that, even though they’re filthy rich, they still deal with regular problems like cleaning up after their dogs and family drama. In her documentary, Paris further alienates herself from viewers because no regular human could possibly relate to her “problems.” In trying to demonstrate how she’s just like us, she shows that she is nothing like us. She blames media outlets for their misogyny towards her and her generation of starlets, which is fair. But in the process, she also exonerates herself from profiting off her blonde airhead persona and cleanses her past of immense anti-Black racism, antisemitism, and other atrocious behavior.

Paris’s authentic self is as distant from a regular person’s experience of the world as her early 2000s party girl persona was. Nevertheless, it is clearer now than ever that media scrutiny her for things outside of her control, like the release of her sex tape, took a toll on her self-worth and worldview. She has realized that the way to keep the public interested in her isn’t to maintain a “perfect life” with just a little bit of mystique but to reconcile herself with the fact that she is corruptible.

Race in Hollywood

All of the celebrities whose mistreatment I have discussed so far—Britney, Paris, Amy, and Lindsay—are white women. The treatment and uncontrollable scrutiny all of these women received from tabloids and corporate media is unjustifiable and immoral. At the same time, the question of how whiteness has affected these women’s treatment in the media is complicated. White women are allowed to make it into the spotlight with a significantly lower barrier to entry, and once in the spotlight, they suffer. It’s nearly impossible for people of color to aspire to the same level of fame because of the misconception that people of color don’t sell, and when they make it, they suffer even more debilitating public scrutiny. From 2019-2020, only 20% of executive producers and showrunners were people of color. Only 1.3 out of 10 film directors are people of color, the same percentage for female directors.

Representation of Asian, Latinx, and Indigenous people remains abysmal. In film, from 2007 to 2019, Latinx actors only played 3% of leading or co-leading roles in top movies despite making up 18% of the U.S. population. Asian actors who make it big are basically unheard of or forced to play stereotypical offensive roles for non-Asian people’s mockery and entertainment. The same is true for Indigenous people in Hollywood, who often have no choice but to play active roles in the corporate bastardization of their cultures.

Though Black people are significantly more represented in the entertainment industry, Black creative professionals still face vastly inferior treatment than their white peers. Put simply, the music industry as we know it today would not exist without the contributions and innovations of Black artists, who invented genres including but not limited to rock, jazz, hip-hop, rap, and EDM. The music industry routinely exploits Black innovators in music by forcing them to sign bogus contracts which deny them access to their masters. Though record labels have pledged to increase the number of Black music executives following the increased momentum of the Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020, the music industry is not even close to reckoning with the amount of profit that white executives have made from the exploitation of Black artists.

Alongside the renewed interest in Britney from a social justice angle, discourse about the mistreatment of Janet Jackson has also reemerged. The public treatment of Britney and that of Janet are not directly related, but they share one crucial connection: both women’s affiliation with Justin Timberlake, and how their careers and reputations suffered while his remained intact.

Janet Jackson is the youngest sibling of the Jackson family, one of the most influential families in music history. Though Janet is a talented and influential artist in her own right, it is dubious that she could have achieved such fame without the prior fame of The Jackson 5. Her third album Control, which was her first album after she stopped doing business with her family, shot to number one on the Billboard 200 and sold over 10 million copies. Janet became one of the most powerful women in R&B and pop, to the extent that she is one of a handful of female pop stars known as the “Queen of Pop.”

Janet and Michael Jackson in the music video for “Scream.”

With the same unfortunate prescience as Britney’s cover of “My Prerogative,” in 1994, Janet recorded the song “Scream” with her brother Michael about tabloid coverage of their family and contemporary child sexual abuse allegations against Michael. In the song, the siblings sang, “Stop pressurin' me, just stop pressurin' with me. Stop fuckin' with me… make me wanna scream.”

The turning point in Janet’s career came ten years later during the now-infamous halftime show of the 2004 Super Bowl, during which she performed with Justin Timberlake. I don’t need to explain what happened during the wardrobe malfunction that made television history and indirectly caused the founding of YouTube. Timberlake suffered no consequences for his role in the wardrobe malfunction, nor should he have. The injustice is that network executives punished Janet and her career over a wardrobe malfunction that she had no way to control. The injustice lies in Janet not being allowed to attend the 46th Grammys where she was already scheduled as a presenter and being blacklisted from many radio stations, CBS, and Viacom, which owns MTV and VH1. Disney World removed a 700-pound Mickey Mouse statue dressed like Janet. The FCC repeatedly tried to sue CBS for $550,000 over the broadcast, even attempting to take the lawsuit to the Supreme Court.

It’s easy to blame the mistreatment and abuse of Janet Jackson on the disambiguated legacy of Puritanism in the United States. But the truth is that displays of nudity, whether intentional or not, have long won fame and influence for white celebrities while people of color, especially Black women, are punished. Long before Kim K’s and Paris Hilton’s respective sex tapes catapulted them superstardom, white actresses like Marilyn Monroe and Demi Moore posed nude for magazines. Their careers did not suffer for their nude photos, nor should they have. The mistreatment of Janet Jackson ought not to be blamed on an ambiguous “American aversion to sex and nudity”: the reason Janet Jackson was blacklisted and her career sabotaged was not only because she is a woman, but because of mainstream media’s obsession with punishing and policing Black women and their bodies.

Timberlake went on to win two Grammys that year. Though he apologized for the wardrobe malfunction of his own accord, not once did he attempt to stand up for Janet or against the racism and misogyny that governed her treatment after the accident. A full seventeen years later, in 2021, after increased public scrutiny since the release of Framing Britney Spears, Timberlake posted an apology to Britney and Janet on Instagram for the way that he treated them. It’s questionable how much of the apology, posted in the much-ridiculed Notes app format, is genuine and how much stems from wanting to save face in a media ecosystem increasingly focused on unpacking misogyny and racism in media. Grasping the basic concepts of misogyny and racism doesn’t take seventeen years.

Though Timberlake has financially benefited more from the subjugation of women than the average white man, he is not singularly responsible for the mistreatment of Janet and Britney. This is in no way a defense of Timberlake; for as long as he has had a career, he has behaved reprehensibly towards women who have been conducive to his professional success. Still, his behavior is symptomatic of a media ecosystem that thrives not only on manufactured scandal, but specifically scandal that is detrimental to women and gender-marginalized people—the more marginalized, the easier to tear down because systemic discrimination puts their success on thin ice from the get-go. Unlike our white peers, people of color—especially women of color and Black women—in pop culture have never been seen as incorruptible.

Declawing the Fame Monster

Tabloid-style journalism has declined drastically since 2007, in part due to celebrities’ increased power over the narratives surrounding them and in part due to California’s strengthening its anti-paparazzi laws in 2014. And, as mentioned before, conversations about mental health, sexism, and racism have increasingly appeared in mainstream media since 2007. In YouTube comments sections of nearly every Britney Spears performance or music video, there are always comments from nostalgic millennials warning the younger generation that they will never know an artist as talked about Britney—and though the manufactured generation wars are largely just a way for older people to complain about younger people, they’re right. Pop culture as the United States knew it in 2007 is long dead, in no small part due to the internet. Though the fame monster itself is still alive, it has lost the razor-sharp claws that made it so dangerous in the early 2000s, both for celebrities themselves and GVCGCs whom tabloids spoon-fed a steady diet of unhealthy celebrity worship.

Image courtesy of Makati Tondo on Carousell.

Whether mainstream media began pushing honest conversations about drug use first or whether celebrities began openly speaking about their struggles with addiction first is a chicken-or-egg situation. But in 2021 it’s much more common for celebrities to speak about their struggles without facing public ridicule or embarrassing tabloid headlines in the vein of “Amy on crack.” When Demi Lovato, a former Disney star like Britney and Lindsay, revealed in Feb. 2021 that a 2018 opioid overdose gave her three strokes and a heart attack, the public responded to her honesty with sympathy. The same was true for comedian John Mulaney, who was met with an outpour of public support and sympathy when he entered a rehab facility for alcohol and cocaine in December 2020.

Moreover, whereas before adult stars had very little say over their own narratives and information that went out to the public, child stars had basically no voice of their own. When they did, their voices were restricted to snippets of quotes in cover stories like Rolling Stone’s “Britney Spears: Teen Queen.” Today, former child stars are more able to speak out against the mistreatment and downright abuse that they faced while entertaining a nation. Jennette McCurdy, most famous for playing Sam Puckett on iCarly, wrote multiple articles for the Wall Street Journal and HuffPost in which she discussed the fame monster and her lifelong eating disorder, respectively. She also now has her own podcast, a medium little-utilized in the early 2000s, on which she recently spoke about how she is now ashamed of the roles that she played in the past and her decision to retire from acting.

Jennette’s begrudging fame doesn’t compare to the enduring international fascination surrounding Britney, Paris, and Lindsay, but that’s not really the point. When Lindsay Lohan spoke to Vanity Fair for the first time about her eating disorder in 2006, MTV characterized the interview as her “coming clean,” as if she had committed a crime and wasn’t suffering from a deadly illness. A Today article portrayed the interview without implicitly passing negative moral judgment on Lindsay, but still did not treat her condition with any sympathy. For Jennette to write so frankly and vulnerably about her struggles with disordered eating in 2019 marks a much-needed U-turn in former child stars’ agency to speak about their own bodies and struggles with fame.

Taylor Swift also won fame with her debut self-titled album when she was sixteen, though she was not a child star. In her earlier years, interviewers and mainstream media constantly mocked her for writing songs about her exes and generally dating to the point that she cried on national television. After going on a media blackout and not doing a single interview for Reputation, an album that focused heavily on Taylor’s reputation in the media as a “snake” following public feuds and breakups, Taylor emerged victorious. She spoke about her life as a woman in music in the 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana and has grown progressively bolder about defending herself, recently referring to a sexist joke about her dating life on a Netflix show as “deeply sexist … horse shit.”

An article from KQED, an NPR affiliate station based in San Francisco, argues that celebrities who are open tend to receive more support and grace following public breakdowns and struggles. This theory holds true for every celebrity mentioned in this feature. Celebrities who are open and vulnerable about their struggles control the narrative by intentionally destroying any veneer of incorruptibility surrounding their fame, rather than letting it shatter without them having any say in the matter. It is too early to tell how this new level of agency will shape future decades of pop culture and media consumption, but I almost fear that this rule is a new incarnation of corporate media demanding pain and vulnerability in exchange for basic respect. All celebrities are incorruptible until they have proven themselves capable of rotting, but they shouldn’t have to metaphorically rot before being allowed public sympathy.

Image courtesy of The Fresno Bee.

No doubt, attempting to beatify pop culture icons in Hollywood was, and is, a fool’s errand. But like Father Zosima, pop culture as we once knew it is dead and the question that remains is what to make of its once-mighty, now rotting corpse. After Father Zosima’s corpse started immediately rotting, Alyosha Karamazov chose not to give up on his strong religious and altruistic beliefs. In the face of all of the harm that early 2000s pop culture has inflicted, mainstream media and GVCGCs seem to have chosen the same path. Unfortunately, there is no way to completely undo the damage of past pop culture phenomena. There is no way to go back in time and make paparazzi stop obsessively stalking Britney, force tabloids to stop making a public spectacle over Amy’s drug use and prevent her death, or force media outlets to reckon with their rampant racism and misogyny in a way that can truly right the wrongs of the past.

Not everyone watches reality TV, keeps up with celebrities through social media, or actively reads tabloid “journalism.” Still, the realm of celebrity culture is inescapable. Celebrity culture is so prominent that, for better or for worse, it affects everyone to some extent. In 2024, fifteen years after pop culture’s purported death, we will be able to more thoroughly examine the results of pushing more humane conversations about fame and rampant discrimination. The questions of where to allocate blame for this mistreatment and how to reckon with ourselves as we reckon with the media lack a definitive answer. Only through asking them, however, can we begin to understand how massive shifts in media consumption since 2000 have altered our perceptions of what we really owe to each other.

#FreeBritney.