what is it about britney spears?

Having seen the (June 2000) issue of GQ with Britney Spears on the cover, I found myself wondering what her appeal is (and how I can get hair like that, but that's another shopping trip). Now I know that there is a big group of boys that rather like her increasingly, erm..sassy looks but I'm not sure so many of them rush out to buy her CDs. Maybe I'm wrong, but my guess is that most of her CD sales are to girls rather than boys who'd be a bit embarassed to admit to actually liking her music. Poster sales on the other hand...

And then it hit me - the reason for the appeal is exactly the reason that in a recent 'Tranny Of the Year' competition there was more than one contestant miming along to 'Baby one More Time'. Britney is the ultimate proto-slut - and strangely this is not meant as an insult. In her videos and photo shoots and interviews we can see a sweet young thing(tm) experimenting with being an adult. Her much commented upon school uniform in 'Baby One More Time' was just the same as the girls at my school rolling up their skirts as short as they could before being told off.

I'm not actually criticising her for this - she seems to be fairly in control of her life, and the slick manufactured images are memorable and well produced. She does that slightly larger than life child's view of what's sexy very well, which I can appreciate as I often do exactly the same thing. It's inoffensive enough as she (so far) has managed not to cross the line into genuinely sluttish behaviour. Is it a bad influence? I'm not sure. Young girls might be influenced to copy her coy 'come to me' looks, but the risks they put themselves in are probably no greater for the fact that they're copying an expensively produced concept than simply rolling their skirts up.

Is it worse for being manufactured? If you can appreciate that it is exactly that - a manufactured image, then I don't think so. In this respect it's no worse than the difference between a beautifully painted (but imagined) landscape and Monet's Water Lillies. I would be the last to claim Britney is an example of high art, but I think that a 'false' but strong image is still a strong image that can be respected for being memorable and well composed. On the other hand, the ongoing advances the media world makes toward digitally airbrushed and silicone enhanced perfection seems threatening. How are we mere mortals meant to feel good about ourselves when so much of our view of the big wide world is filled with unusually perfect breasts on tanned, trained and toned bodies? Can we really feel good about that trip to the hairdresser when models' hair can apparently loose and gain inches length and change colour every sucessive week? In short, can we keep up?

In a way, yes. If it matters to you that much how you look then the means that Britney uses are available to everyone. I use them regularly and I think that the pictures on this site speak volumes about their effectiveness. If you can keep a level head, then there is plenty of information about health and fitness freely available to help you make the most of your body. There are more and more widely available sources of fun and funky clothes to wear that don't cost the earth. There are the little cheats that help things along, like lift, thrust, up and over bras and clip-on hair extensions.

But the problem is that if all your self worth comes from the way you look, then things can start to get a little more desperate. and expensive. There are real hair extensions (which won't last the years it would take to really grow that much hair), and designer collections each season and breast operations and liposuction- the list goes on and the money runs out, without actually changing who you are. I think a lot of us go through a phase as we grow up of experimenting with our image. Most of the time we work out how much those changes affect other people's attitude to us (initially they might, but it eventually comes down to how we act) and green hair and puffball skirts become less important. From that perspective, experimenting is vital and even if we do it vicariously through a pop-star we can grow up with them into better rounded individuals. In some cases though, there's the need or the temptation to keep on trying to be someone else which at the least is time-consuming and at the worst is definately unhealthy.

However, in my mind Britney is simply (though rather publicly) going through a hyper-real version of that growing up. That's a fun trip to be in on. She wants to be seen as a grown up now, and wearing a red latex catsuit is both a way to be noticed and be very adult - even if rubber means absolutely nothing to her (to the annoyance of the fetish community). She's undoubtedly tied tight to the marketing machine that introduced us to her, but the result is more exaggeration of youg adult life than perversion of it. I hope she appreciates that and is in some sort of control of it, because it will make watching the videos and reading the interviews entertaining rather than sordid. If she can stop being the perpetual 'sexy but still a virgin' Peter Pan of girl pop, then she'll gain my respect as an artist (though something tells me that she doesn't really care what an unknown British pervert thinks of her..) We won't find out for a while how it turns out, but in the mean time, I'm happy to keep watching the fashion parade and I still want that hairstyle.