Excerpt from “On Britney”

“I know I’m not ugly, but I don’t see myself as a sex symbol or this goddess-attractive beautiful person at all,” Britney said.

The world would not accept it.

Then Esquire released an article where they interviewed Britney, “Bending Spoons with Britney Spears: A deeply weird encounter with the sexual savant of American pop.” How could she be insisting that she was a virgin, all the while taking photos hooking her thumbs into her underwear and pulling them down? In fact, Esquire repeats that she is pantsless five times in their five-sentence opening paragraph. They show a photo of Britney in her underwear, defending themselves: “This is a hard detail to ignore.”

The article’s author, a self-proclaimed heterosexual male, expresses his annoyance that he was not allowed in on the photoshoot portion of the article, but rather sat across a “fully-clothed Britney” after the shoot to ask her questions. “The essence of Britney Spears’s rawest sexuality is something I will never see, even though I know it’s there,” he writes. The entire article he fights with himself, and even with Britney, about her sexuality. She claims she doesn’t care about being viewed as a sex symbol.

But “if she had pulled two inches more [of her underwear], Esquire would have become Hustler,” the author writes.

Sure. But the thing was she didn’t.

*

“The most important thing you can remember is to be unattainable,” my brother’s friends told me one night when they were home visiting from college. “Men love that shit.”

I took their advice to heart. I would passionately kiss someone at a party and walk away from them. Ignore them all night.

They’d message me on Facebook, text me.

I would never reply. Sometimes, I’d pretend it didn’t happen. Like I didn’t know them at all, had never seen them before. Make them question their own reality.

I can be really mean when I want to be.

*

Heels six inch

makes a boy wanna bite his lip

Look but don’t touch

unless you want to lose your innocence.

“Lace and Leather” by Britney Spears

*

When I was seventeen, I went to my cousin’s wedding. In the hotel room I shared with my mom, I googled photos of celebrity hairstyles. Sleek ponytails are in! Elle, Cosmo, and Vogue offered me. My hair looked terrible, having used the hotel shampoo and conditioner, and I could barely stand to look at my own reflection. I spent almost an hour trying to perfect my ’do.

“You can’t wear a ponytail to a wedding!” my mother shrieked when I emerged from the bathroom. She ripped off the hair tie and threw it across the room. My hair fell lifeless to my shoulders.

“Do not ruin my nephew’s wedding,” my dad seethed at me after my mom tearfully told him how disrespectful I was being. “Put a smile on, and act like this never happened.”

In all of the pictures, I was dancing, dancing, dancing, smiling, beaming, holding my mom’s hand in the air, spinning her around.

“Your daughter is so beautiful!”

“I wish I was her!”

“Me too!” my mom would laugh back.

Yeah, I wish I was me, too.

*

“It’s almost like it’s my alter ego when I get on stage…I turn into a different person, seriously.” – Britney Spears

*

AJ made me a better person—or, at least, it seemed that way.

We met in sixth-grade gym class, where all of the girls rolled their Soffee shorts twice, three times if they were really skinny.

I was really skinny.

One day, in the middle of winter, when we were having class inside, going stir-crazy with boredom, AJ rolled his shorts up so high that his pasty white thighs shone like flashlights across the room.

I loved him then, in that moment, I think, for the first time.

All of the girls were laughing, and later I’d realize he only did it to make me laugh.

For the first time, I realized what it was like to do something for just one person in a room full of people.

It took me many years to realize how dangerous that could be.

*

In Britney’s “sixth grade,”she was starring in the Mickey Mouse Club alongside Justin Timberlake. He was allegedly her first kiss, but it is tough to discern if this is fact or fiction, because a simple Google search of, “What happened with Britney and Justin,” yields 51,000,000 results.

The show was short-lived, leaving Britney and Justin to go their separate ways until they reunited years later on tour, when she opened for NSYNC.

Britney was the world’s Pop Princess and Justin was her Pop Prince. It was hard to tell who was more famous, who was more sought after. Girls wanted to date Justin and they wanted to be Britney.

I wish I was her.

And it felt attainable, somehow, to be them. Like the difference between a normal person and Britney and Justin was just an inch, a circumstance away.

*

AJ and I imitated love the only way we knew how, by curating a series of grand gestures: love letters, surprises, dressed up events, proclamations, secrets, moments turned into memories.

“It’ll always be us,” he would say. “Elle and AJ, Elle and AJ,” he’d repeat, grinning at me.

“I want what you have,” rang in my ears from our classmates, the upperclassman, even his little sister’s friends.

Our relationship felt larger than life. Larger, almost, than my heart could bear. It was his, it was mine, it was ours, but it was also everyone else’s; two of our friends dressed up as us for Halloween.

*

Britney and Justin. Pinky and Stinky.

Justin surprised Britney when she was hosting Total Request Live (more aptly named, for this episode, “Total Britney Live”). The screams from the crowd were so loud that Carson Daly could barely hold a conversation with Britney or Justin. Justin embraced Britney and she put her chin on his shoulder.

Their love, in a word: iconic.

And then the rumors started.

*

And then the rumors started.

“He’s cheating,” people I didn’t even know would tell me. Confide in me, with sadness in their eyes, heartbreak in their voices.

It would be easy for him to cheat, would make sense even. I rarely saw him anymore. He was “doing family things,” he was getting tighter with a different circle. I was working. He was working. Our schedules didn’t align. The summer will be better, I told myself.

But then, even in the summer, we were apart. I was with my parents in California for a month. He had two-a-days for football practice. “I wouldn’t be able to see you anyway,” he said.

“Are we going to be good this year?” I texted him.

“I’d like to think we’ve matured,” he replied.

“I meant in football,” I wanted to say.

*

Months before their highly publicized split, rumors swirled that Britney and Justin had broken up. She and Justin were barely getting to see each other, due to hectic schedules and “work commitments.” One of them being Justin shooting his music video for “Gone,” in which he kisses another girl.

Britney spoke out in Cosmo magazine, saying that the kiss “devastated” her. It was “too much.”

“You could have just taken a knife and stabbed me,” she said.

It can take only five minutes to bleed out from a stab wound. On the other hand, not every person who bleeds to death will die within minutes.

With AJ, it took years.

I loved him, but it felt like he didn’t love me back in the capacity. He said all the right things but I doubted the validity of each statement. He was like a car on cruise control. It seemed like there wasn’t “someone else” for him, but rather, everyone else.

“I feel like you don’t care about me,” I told him on the bench outside of Noodles & Co. My oversized sunglasses were blocking out any emotion I was conveying with my eyes.

“Elle, I will always care about you,” he said. Which felt drastically different than, “Of course I care about you.”

I wanted to shout at him to just break up with me. That I could see it in his eyes, written all over his face. But, he wouldn’t. Not yet anyway, not before Homecoming, not before he was my date to my brother’s wedding. We had commitments. We had people we couldn’t let down. We had reason to be together, it seemed.

The reason just wasn’t us.

I was tired of being ignored, tired of waiting for the inevitable end to come, tired of guiding his hand to the cord to unplug the whole show.

I love AJ, I really do, I thought, as I kissed lips that weren’t his. As I entered the backseat of another boy’s—a mutual friend’s—car.

“I’m not good at relationships. I’m not good at commitment,” AJ finally told me days later. “You deserve better than me; I don’t even know what’s going on inside my own head.”

“I saw this coming. I saw this coming, and so I made a bad decision and I cheated on you. And it sucks, because I still knew regardless of anything, whether I did it or not, that we’d be standing here right now and that you would be breaking my heart.”

“That really hurts,” he said, his eyes transfixed somewhere far away. He was gone, anywhere but here.

“I know.” It was how I’d felt for months.

*

Notice me

Take my hand

Why are we

strangers when

our love is strong?

Why carry on without me?

- “Everytime” by Britney Spears

*

Elle’s a skank.

Elle’s a whore.

Elle’s a cheater.

Why would she do that to AJ?

The other guy wasn’t even hot.

Why would she throw all of that away?

I always thought she dressed promiscuously.

Just look at her shoes.

She’s basically wearing hooker outfits.

Slut.

Slut.

Slut.

*

“Justin and Britney at War,” US Weekly headlined. “Justin Timberlake’s feelings toward former love, Britney Spears, have gone from hurt to hate.”

Britney cheated on Justin with mutual friend and choreographer, Wade Robson. Britney: villain. Justin: victim. The narrative was everywhere.

No one asked why. No one asked what happened leading up to the events. No one asked if she was ok.

“You weren’t faithful . . . you betrayed the relationship,” Diane Sawyer suggests in an interview shortly after the split, after asking her where her clothes are while holding up two magazines in which Britney is scantily clad.

“Have you ever gone further than you’ve wanted to?” Diane asks.

“Further . . ?” Britney clarifies.

Diane holds up another photo in response, this time, one where Britney is in her underwear, various lengths of necklaces placed strategically over her breasts.

Britney jumps to defend herself. It was the end of the shoot, she was ready to be done, she doesn’t have final approval over what gets printed. She sighs, “You just can’t win,” she says, defeated.

One thing was certain, no one felt bad for Britney.

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