I can’t avoid Britney Spears forever on a blog about feminist motherhood. She is virtually the cowboy boot-walkin’ embodiment of bad mother mythology. Britney has even entered folklore in our house and my partner still doesn’t know who Baby Shiloh or Baby Suri are, we both refer to ourselves as “going Britney-style” when we tootle down from our garage to our letter box with our daughter unrestrained in the car. (Hey, I already said we can be your parenting role-models).
Do I think Britney is a bad mother? Well, kind of hard to say since celebrity gossip pieces filter everything Britney says and does through the holy-shit-you’re-a-terrible-mother-of-almost-but-not-quite-unheard-of-proportions-because-my-neighbor-is-just-like-that-and-all-single-mothers-are-too-oh-and-teenage-mothers narrative. Yes, I shudder when I read about the children’s diet of chewing gum and soft drink, the unfenced pool, the constant moving from one hotel to another, the late late nights, the chaos, and the unrestrained baby in the car (ah yes, well.. um.. because hypocrites like to get especially uppity about things). But I shudder while also feeling very manipulated. In reality the articles are saying more about us and our ideas about women and mothers than they are about Britney, because who the hell knows what Britney is really like as a mother. (OK, maybe yes that court-appointed parenting coach). And for that matter, who knows how many of us are having a Britney moment or ten ourselves as mothers? We’ve collectively projected certain ideas on to Britney and she’s carrying them around like a billboard -though I guess when you’ve been a marketing brand for as long as she has it just feels natural. Of course there are people out there doing it a lot harder than Britney, but there are also celebrities out there copping a lot less misogyny than Ms Spears too.
One day, years from now you’ll be able to major in Britney in your Womens’ Studies at university. What Britney could tell us about feminism if only she were so inclined. Here’s my course outline prediction. (I’ve never been a Britney fan so I hope I haven’t forgotten anything).
Course Outline:
Weeks 1-3 The impact of hyper-sexualisation and corporate paedophilia
Week 4 Objectification and the impossible balance for women between virgin and whore images
Week 5 Lesbianism as a product for heterosexual consumption
Week 6 Bitch fights: Manufacturing female competition
Week 7 Girls gone bad: how bad behaviour is celebrated in young men and vilified in young women
Week 8 The misogyny of vagina hatred
Week 9 Removing symbols of female beauty and other acts of defiance
Weeks 10 Distorted body image and fat hatred
Weeks 11-12 Bad mothers
I think you’ve covered a lot of it here.
I keep on ending up in arguments about Britney, and (being a dullard) it never entirely occurred to me how much the responses I got fitted into standard modes of patriarchal misogynistic dialogue (or should that be monologue….actually, I think it should probably be ideologue, but lets leave it at that).
The biggest argument was about how ‘fat’ she had gotten for that MTV show, with all sorts of arguments about how she’d put herself into the public eye and therefore had higher expectations to live up to.
Part of me wants her to be the ultimate role model. Maybe what we should really be doing is mailing her an enormous load of feminist literature. If she could sort herself out enough to become that voice, then a lot of people would listen (unless the media stifled it under more accusations of obvious insanity…which it would).
Anyway, thanks, eloquent thoughts, that trigger thoughts in me.
Sorry for ramble.
Ohmigawd! I sooooo want to take this class. You are brilliant. You should market this. Like ya!
I agree with the last comment – you are brilliant – laying out that timeline. Someone has to cop it, don’t they!
Don’t forget Week 13 for review.
Your next task : four topics for the major assignment.
A really interesting contrast is Brittany c.f. Sarah Murdoch’s coverage – that woman is presented as the polar opposite and it’s illuminating to set them alongside each other as examples of discourses of good and bad mothers. As you say – who knows what B. is actually doing but it sure says a lot of about how we define mothers and what’s appropriate parenting.
Indeed, it’s kind of instructive to think about our own Brittany moments. Apparently a judge chatised B. for taking her kids to cafes which are not ‘kid friendly’ – hey, I’m guilty of that, plus, I let the girls have chocolate syrup in their babychinos.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Britney too and I agree that she does make a good study. Actually a lot of mums out there are talking about her (maybe it’s just me introducing the subject) an nd while we’re not going to go to extremes as in the youtube “leave britney alooonnne!’, we do empathise with her. We’ve wondered if she’s had postnatal depression – from an outside perspective it looks so. I can’t believe the scrutiny of her mothering practices either Kris. There are times when I let my kids drink the chocolate syrup straight from the bottle. There were times at a certain point of my life when I looked forward to having the night off so I could get pissed and do some dirty dancing at a tragically and trashy bad nightclub – just like Britney. But there is something extremely disquieting about her losing her kids to K-Fed. Let’s not forget either that Britney grew up as a child through the media lens – maybe bluemilke your documentation of her decline needs to start there.
Just for the record. There’s also room for a Marxist appraisal of the way she’s treated. The trailer trash label has never been far from her, and the implication of that is that she was always destined to be a bad mother. Because that’s the class discourse. The media never once allowed her to forget her true destiny as a working class grunt.
Could be a week, or it could be an essay question. Needs to be considered.
you can take the girl out of the trailor……
Holy crap, I love post like crazy.
Ahem. This post. Still like crazy.
There’s also a generational thing going on. Her own mother is repeatedly presented as a ‘bad mother’ for cashing in on her daughter’s sexuality but of course there’s no mention of the broader media production and societal consumption of that sexuality.
I think Alabaster’s also on to something. B.’s definitely spent her life selling her labour power for the benefit of capitalists – maybe part of the problem is that she’s made huge amounts of money but isn’t sufficiently grateful and has now somewhat removed herself from the production process by presenting an image that surely isn’t worth as much as it once was. Also, her ‘taste’ is often called into question (see every mention of ‘cheap’ wigs), which reminds me of all that Bourdieu and pop sociology on materialists and culturalists – it’s not how much money you have but how you spend it – a very nice tool for putting people in their place.
But why Britney? Think about Kate Moss, who has many of the same characteristics in her public story: highly sexualised youth; rumours of drug use; problematic boyfriends and sexual practices; massive spending; always on the move; single mom-dom – why does the discourse surrounding her avoid mention of her daughter and her mothering practices?
Isn’t it amazing what I can pick up through reading Who in the chip aisle at Coles?
The way you’ve organized all of this is genius–it gives structure, meaning, and context to so much of this Britney media hysteria. Sign me up for your class.
I not only want to sign up, but I want the women commenting above to be my classmates. I’d fail miserably on a bell curve, because you have some whip-smart chicks reading this thing, but BOY, would I learn a lot!
I think the Kate Moss parallel is fascinating and one I hadn’t considered. Another one is Christina Aguilera. Talk about a 180! She went from Class-A skank in the media’s eyes to perfect wife and soon-to-be mother, even donating the gifts she received at her baby shower to charity (supposedly). Is she allowed to remake herself as the virgin mother because Britney now occupies the “Mouseketeer Slut Queen” throne?
Riveting.
and in the news today, they say she’s adopting Chinese twins…hmmm……
http://www.smh.com.au/news/people/spears-to-adopt-chinese-twins–report/2007/11/26/1195975912015.html
Alabaster and Kris’s analyses of the class dynamics and the lurking generational bad mother narrative are really insightful because there is the tacit question of ‘what kind of mother’ would allow her daughter from a young age to be put in that media spotlight. The shadowy spectre of Britney’s own mother who I can only imagine as some monstrous Jon Benet mother-figure type, the backstage child beauty queen mom. I suspect the difference between Kate’s ‘cool’ slacker-mother chic and Britney’s trailer trash motherhood is all in the accent, in every way conceivable,m that cross-Atlantic thing in which Americans will never have the same cool Britannia / Euro thing. Certainly subject to some Bourdieu treatment and so pointed in its exemplification of the absolute limits of female social capital (something bluemilk has been addressing for some time.)
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