|
I don’t even know why I’m writing this article, or why I’m still planning to write more. When I became fascinated by Britney Spears and began to write about her, most of the fans I encountered received the resulting articles with interest and gratitude. This is no longer the case, and the reason is both simple and sad. It appears that the fashionable response now to an article that tries to deal with the subject of Britney in a reasonably sympathetic (or even-handed) way is to laugh at it and sneer at the author.
Old-school fans like me thought it was our job to defend our idol against attack, try to see the good side of things, cut her plenty of slack and always look for a way forward out of any difficulty. But now we’re living in a particularly sanctimonious “blame culture” and genuine attempts to find explanations for Britney’s odd behavior are almost invariably described as “excuses” by people I call “Judgmentalists”. These people keep reminding us that every drama or debacle is “her own fault”.
I often wonder what is the point of this remark. It’s a comment that cries out for a “So?!” So what? So we shouldn’t feel sorry for her? So we shouldn’t “make excuses”? I often find that, when challenged, the “it’s her own fault” brigade explain that SHE shouldn’t make excuses. I find that baffling, because she hardly ever says anything in public that relates to the controversial events in her life. On one or two occasions in the past she has blamed the paparazzi for certain specific intrusions, but generally she seems more than tolerant of them.
One thing is unarguable, though. This is a critical time for the Fan Community. Britney’s year of horrors and her grim New Year surprise have brought out the best and the worst in people. TMZ’s Harvey Levin showed some unexpected compassion when he said “We made a living off of Britney Spears, and we did it frankly when she was just fun and wacky. For several years now, we've put her on the site everyday, she's been great for traffic... Have we crossed the line, I don't know. My feeling about it is it all changed when it stopped being funny and we started realizing she's got a bipolar problem.”
On the other hand we have the loathsome Perez Hilton, who has no qualms or reservations about showing how much he hates her and wants her to die. As I write, he’s taking bets on when she’ll commit suicide. Any culture that accommodates, tolerates, encourages and even welcomes the likes of this sorry excuse for a human being is in danger of slipping into a very deep and dark abyss. And he is by no means alone. There have been any number of other public utterances by venomous individuals who attempt to disguise their hatred of Britney as concern for her childen.
This is one of the moments when civil society stands at a crossroads. It can choose sympathy and compassion, or cynical brutalism. We have, being played out in front of us, a modern morality play, and everybody wants to be a critic. It’s a sad characteristic of present-day attitudes that so many people seem unable to lay down their critical instincts for long enough to recognise a modern parable with the power to teach us a lesson about ourselves and the harsh, flippant, uncharitable world we live in.
Queen Latifah, real name Dana Owens, said she wasn't surprised that so many celebrities were offering Britney help, even if other people appeared to be chiding and poking fun. She said, "A lot of us can relate to each other. Look how many people just want to take Britney home and give her a place to sleep and rest and talk her down. Everybody wants to help this girl... We understand the pressures we deal with and realise that underneath all that star stuff we're normal people with normal problems. We'd rather support each other than tear each other down."
And the chiding, poking fun and tearing down has reached epidemic proportions. For every couple of straightforward fans who declare their undying love for Britney, there are ten who appear to have issues with every aspect of her life, her person or her looks, for one reason or another, and are determined to say so stridently and on as many occasions as they can find.
Conflicting attitudes are now the most obvious characteristic of the Fan Community. One fan I’d been fighting with over his crass, stupid and sexist remarks about Britney’s appearance suddenly turned out to have her wellbeing at heart above all else. Another who had spent the last few months raining sanctimonious judgments on her head sent me a kind and thoughtful message saying how worried she was and expressing her concern for how all of this was affecting me.
But on the other hand, even this desperate situation has not prevented some fans from continuing their daily excoriation. “Dumb ignorant bitch” was one young man’s reflection on her failure to have herself committed to a mental institution. “She looks like a pig” - that was another gallant young gentleman commenting on the news that she had topped Hello mag’s poll for Most Attractive Female. It would appear that her fans are rather less fanatical than those of most artists.
I’m basing this article primarily on the attitudes and positions displayed by members of Britney forums or message boards. People who post on her forums are immersed in the minutiae of her life, have access to any information and rumors, and have many ways of telling what’s true from what isn’t; and if even THEY begin to become part-time haters or, at the very least, equivocal in their support for Britney, it’s not hard to imagine how fans who rely on TV and the tabloids for information must feel.
Members of fan forums are wont to plead that “she will never visit these boards” and therefore won’t see the harsh and unforgiving remarks directed at her. This is a transparent abrogation of personal responsibility for any part of the current fashion for snidery and cynicism, yet people on every fan forum are probably saying the same thing and either assuming or hoping she won’t visit. But those who accept the climate of thoughtless knee-jerk sourness are helping to make it the predominant mindset.
What they don’t seem to realise is that they are a representative cross-section of the global Fan Community, and if their response to a hypothetical meeting with Britney would be to inform her that she’s a “freaking joke”, it’s fair to assume that there are others who feel the same. And if a LOT of people are saying this kind of thing, word might just get back to her and it will hardly encourage her to throw herself back into her career - which is what the complainants appear to desire more than anything else.
Among fans of this kind, there’s very little understanding of, or sympathy for, her apparent psychological problems. They regard her as public property, and see claims that she suffers from serious medical conditions such as PPD and bipolar disorder as excuses for failing to perform her designated role. Their advice to her consists of little more than “sort yourself out” and “take responsibility for your actions”. And meanwhile, they indulge in their daily chant of “she’s a f@cking mess” as if this unholy incantation could somehow drive her demons away.
Fans may now be praying “Please, Lord, give us our old Britney back” but it would be wrong to believe that their ambivalence is a new phenomenon. I’m beginning to wonder if there was ever a time when they were completely behind her. I first started posting at the dear old WoB forum out of shock and dismay at the gloomy atmosphere of disapproval, hyper-criticism, disillusionment and jaded nostalgia that existed there. And it wasn’t only at WoB - my sister joined Britneyboards to combat the same attitudes.
While talking to Sitemeister Jason a while back, I offered the suggestion that the fans of certain artists are very different from one another. Christina Aguilera’s fans, for example, seem to bask in a kind of reflected glory. It’s like owning a Rottweiler - ownership somehow confers on you the power, the feeling of superiority and the useful weaponry of that massive bark and those sharp little teeth. Britney Spears’ fans are different. For them it’s like owning a 3-legged alpaca. You’re constantly having to explain how it got that way, why you like it, and what it’s good for. But damn, you love that alpaca and you know it’s only tasteless thugs who love Rottweilers.
Being a Britney fan wasn’t always such a defensive exercise. A few years ago, she was all but a household name for being the biggest star out there and famous for her legendary live performances. I can assure you that this is not a fanciful statement - back when the UK government was trying to sell the redundant Millennium Dome as a massive concert venue, it was suggested that it would take someone of the magnitude of Britney Spears to fill the place.
Love of Britney now may well be the new “love that dare not speak its name” but back then, there were no obvious reasons for her fans to torment themselves over their choice of idol. We agonised a lot over the issue of her lip-synching her live shows. There used to be a fair amount of debate about whether she could sing or not, and about how much plastic surgery she’d had. But at least she was universally agreed to be beautiful, incomparably sexy, an amazing dancer, the maker of the best pop videos, and a throughly nice, sweet, grounded and good person.
As a young apprentice forum user, I had just started taking notice of my boyfriend’s favorite site - the SBUK Britney Spears Forum, one of the many refuges for people displaced by the untimely closure of the old DotForums. And on this site, a member called “MelissaWilliamsFan” had just created a thread called “100 reasons why you love Britney”.
This small community of online fans had no problem at all in thinking of a hundred reasons. I wonder how many the typical gathering of fans could think of now? Looking around the internet, it seems that her fanbase has fragmented into many pieces, all with their different attitudes and agendas.
It comes as something of a shock to realise how true it is that love and hate are two sides of the same coin, for many of her fans now seem bitterly disillusioned and can find very little that’s good or positive to say about her. Maybe it’s part of growing up. Britney brought most of her fans with her when she made the transition to a more adult style of music in 2003-4, but since then, a fair proportion of the mid-teenage ones have become young adults.
One of the first merit badges of adulthood is to develop what’s sometimes called a “healthy cynicism” about the world you experience, or have experienced. There’s a “putting away of childish things” and a general rejection of everything associated with childhood and parental control. Everything is subjected to a whole set of searing new value judgments and doubts. And when flaws or traces of fakeness are found, a profoundly negative reaction is sure to follow.
So at the extreme end of the spectrum we have the people who feel that in being Britney fans, they were somehow duped by a huge corporate conspiracy encompassing her record label, her management, her PR people, the radio and TV networks, magazine publishers, concert promoters and just about everyone else who could fit their snout in the trough. NOW they see the truth. NOW they can see that she’s basically just a lightweight plaything for kiddies - which THEY no longer are.
Indeed, in their search for genuineness and rock-solidvalues, they may come to perceive her as little more than a fairly talentless confidence trickster, trading on nudity and blatant sexuality to fleece the gullible - while, despite the endless Pop Idol production line in competent live vocalists, the stand-at-the-mic-and-deliver-live-vocals singers like Kelly Clarkson and Avril Lavigne are now supposedly the real deal.
This idea that her typical “diehard fan” is so genitally led that all critical faculties are bypassed is a curious one, since music trade demographic surveys of her fanbase show that her audience is predominantly composed of straight females and gay males - exactly the kinds of people who should in theory have no interest in her sexuality whatsoever. What these two groups of people DO have in common is their interest in celebrities and fame - the glamor, the costumes, the drama, the falls from grace and the redemptions, the disasters and triumphs, the crashes and burns and the arisings from the ashes. These are the elements in the great Greek Tragedy of human existence and nobody should be ashamed about being absorbed by them.
Needless to say, there’s a downside to this “human interest” angle too. The interest in celebrities is not necessarily characterised by either affection or admiration and one of the least admirable human traits is regularly on display in celebrity magazines and on celebrity blog sites - the enjoyment of others’ misfortunes, the satisfaction in seeing the rich-and-famous “get what they deserve”, the opportunity to wag some finger and act all superior, to say that Britney is a bad mother and deserved to lose her babies. You may wonder why I even mention people with these attitudes in an article on fans. But, believe me, this distasteful agenda is right there on most Britney fan-forums, and the people driving it are incensed if anyone should question their fan credentials.
Of course, for many straight female fans, there are genuine - if inchoate - kindred feelings for Britney Spears that go a lot deeper than “She’s a star but I’m better than her”. In Britney they saw, maybe not a role-model, but certainly a paradigm. Here was someone who came from the unlikeliest of backgrounds to make her dreams come true, who made a fortune while remaining real, a genuine, flawed, anxious, desperate, self-abusing, boundary-pushing, man-seeking dreamer - and rather than criticize, we loved her for being just like the rest of us.
I believe that most of us are still fascinated by Britney’s complex and seemingly unending rites of passage. A lot of the fans she still has are people who’ve decided to stick around and see if the fairy tale eventually comes true. But it’s difficult to assess how much real sympathy there is for her. After each of her crazier episodes there are a few days when people ruminate on how insane she is, express their hopes that she will soon be committed to a mental hospital, and appear for a time to allow some compassion to flow through their veins. But after those few days the consensus feeling reverts to the comfort zone of criticism, blaming and fault-attribution.
Clearly nobody is jealous of her any more, no matter how much money she may have. There’s an eagerness to hear any scaps of good news about her, and delight when any such scaps are offered, so it seems that the majority still wish her well. I think the source of the negativity is probably something pretty crude and simple. A fair number of people - to put it bluntly - hate to see someone who’s been given everything apparently just pissing it away.
Be that as it may. I was in a farm supplies depot with my dad the morning after the news came through that Princess Diana had died. Everyone, from hard-headed salesmen to muddy-booted farmers, was silent and teary-eyed. Obviously nobody there knew Diana and their grief wasn’t over a personal bereavement. What we were all mourning was not just the death of a person - we didn’t really know her and reports of her personality were contradictory.
We were mourning the death of a dream, of a fairy tale. We were beginning to realise that fairy tales really are nothing but fiction and dreams really don’t come true. The more cynical elements in the media lambasted the public for their “hysterical” outpouring of emotion, but I was proud of that public for putting their customary phlegmatic character to one side and showing that they still had enough softness to recognise the meaning of tragedy and didn’t need to be told when it was OK to cry.
I wish more of Britney’s fans could show the same softness and find some mercy, tolerance and compassion in their hearts while we’re still lucky enough to have her.
 |
