Britney: The Mouse that roared
By Ricardo Baca | Sunday, March 14, 2004
Dismiss her as all puff and hype but, frighteningly, she is one of the most influential people on the planet
Go ahead, Google Britney Spears. And do it without the guilt, because this time it's purely sociological.
The first two Internet search results are official - her own and her label's - and the next four are typical fan sites featuring bad Britney collages, even-worse cut-outs, pseudo news about Britney topping the charts in Finland and the most annoying pop-up ads ever.
But after the gunk is when the truth really hits. Britney is a star - Earth's World Idol, even - and people create "dress-like-Britney" websites devoted to her fashion prowess and others devote time to sites that take the real/fake debate around her breasts quite seriously. True, the former Mouseketeer is an easy target, but she's also one of the most influential and most talked about people on the planet
It goes without saying that Britney is everywhere - including Monday night at the Pepsi Center. And of course we're paying attention - reveling in every botched interview or sympathizing with each misstep - but it's daunting, scary even, to realize how powerful this 22-year-old from Kentwood, La., really is. And some will want to think her sway starts and ends with fashion, but while that's right up there, it's only the tip of the iceberg.
Just think about ...
The sway of Britney
When the pop star accidentally spilled the contents of her purse before boarding a plane at London's Heathrow Airport, the local paparazzi captured a bottle of Zantrex-3, a popular diet pill, among the scattered contents. A representative for Basic Research, the manufacturer of the pills, said the pills were already the No.1 nonephedrine diet pill when Britney was discovered as a customer, but the incident did create a bump in sales.
When contacted, Don Atkinson, the company's vice president of sales, refused to comment but earlier told The New Yorker, "You know what is great about that? It's the fact that she is using a weight-loss product, and she looks terrific. Just the fact that we are even talking about what Britney Spears uses or doesn't use to keep her weight down tells the whole wide world that it's OK to be a little overweight and it's OK to work on it."
Moments such as these have their fall-outs: Forbes magazine recently reported that Britney's bodyguards have been known to confiscate all nearby camera phones, "to avoid a digital record of candid moments."
Britney's breasts
Type the word "breasts" into Google, and your first selection is LiquidGeneration.com's pop-toon, "Mystery of Britney Spears' Breasts." It's an animated faux-documentary chronicling the varying appearances of Spears' bosom, and surprisingly, it doesn't support the widely held idea that the star underwent breast-augmentation surgery.
"People are always going to be typing the word 'breasts' into Google from now until the end of time," said the site's head writer, Slippy Jenkins, who noted the mini-film has been seen more than 15 million times in less than two years, "and it's hilarious that we're the first one coming up all these times."
Does the Great Britney Breast Debate play a part in the fact that breast-augmentation surgery numbers were up 11 percent from 2000 to 2001 and another 8 percent from 2001 to 2002? That has yet to be seen. "But there's this big ongoing war," said Jenkins, "does she or doesn't she have breast implants, and I guess the jury's still out on that one. But I think the answer's no."
Britney's 24-hour gossip train
Britney's rediscovered religion. No, she's overweight and hooked on diet pills. Wait, she just misses her ex-husband of 55 hours. Actually she's fighting depression. Her "Entertainment Tonight" quotient is higher than Michael Jackson, and like M.J., a.k.a. Jacko, she's got her own nickname in the British tabloid press: Brit-Brit.
"She has reached major icon status on a worldwide level," said Matthew Donahue, a professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University. "Like her or not, she's a major force in popular culture right now, and major industry revolves around her. I went to Japan, and there was Britney stuff everywhere. I went to Singapore, and they're loving her there, too. When the album came out, 'In the Zone,' it was Britneymania ... In my classes, the guys just rave about Britney Spears. They love her, and they think she's great - not her music so much, but I think a lot of it has to do with her body. She's quite provocative with everything that she does."
Her 55-hour marriage definitely raised a few eyebrows. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church, brought the singer into the gay-marriage debate by telling the Associated Press: "It is very irritating to me that Britney Spears, when she traipsed off to be married in Las Vegas, instantly had what my partner of 15 years and I do not have."
Britney going public with her masturbatory fantasies
The lyric, from the new track "Touch of My Hand:" "I love myself/It's not a sin/I can't control/What's happenin' ... I'm all in my skin/And I'm not gonna wait/I'm into myself/In the most precious way." Although it comes off as a thinly veiled plea for attention and harmless controversy (read: publicity), it's a positive step forward for Britney and her female listeners, according to Tricia Rose, author of "Longing to Tell: Black Women's Stories of Sexuality and Intimacy" and an American Studies professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
"Even if the song's explicit, as long as it's driven by her own desires, then that's great," said Rose. "There should be more songs about that and fewer songs about, 'I'm gonna be so desirable for you, and you should do me.' Her youth audience could stand a little education on that. It's unbelievable to me, because children masturbate at 3 years old. ... They don't know it's masturbation - they play with themselves, because it feels good - and then we tell them not to do it, and they drop it until they pick it up again without telling us."
The rich-kid mall-rat fashion of Britney
Going back to the Britney Spears Internet search, No.7 on the list is the Britney Spears Café, which is an impressive, interactive site subtitled "Dress Like Britney." It shows magazine clippings and TV stills of Britney at the Super Bowl wearing a tight, cropped Aerosmith T-shirt or on the street wearing a Pepsi-mocking "Sexsi" symbol. Next to the pix are links, prices and examples of similar clothing. For less than $100, you, too, can look like Brit-Brit.
LiquidGeneration's Jenkins said fans might as well focus on the fashion when the music's so rotten. "The popularity in her music is definitely waning," he said. (To be fair, we'll note Britney's enjoying her first No.1 single, "Toxic," since 2000's "... Oops I Did It Again.") "But is her celebrity waning as a whole? Sometimes, sometimes not. She's not as much fun to talk about anymore. It's like Michael Jackson. How many Michael Jackson jokes can you make?"
As we've seen, countless, but Jenkins has some more Britney jokes up his sleeve. Expected up on his site this weekend: "Toxic: The Passion of Stern," a toon mocking Britney's latest single, Howard Stern's latest FCC battle, and Christ's latest film.
Collective therapy via Britney
The American paparazzi caught Britney leaving a bookstore with the book "Listening to Prozac" a few months after the British photogs caught her with the aforementioned Zantrex-3 diet pills. In addition to boosting sales, photos like these humanize the popstar and allow Average Janes to feel OK about their battles with depression, obesity and other issues.
"People like to imagine that their stars are untouchable and amazing and larger than life, and they have an equal desire to imagine that they're mere mortals," said the University of California's Rose. "It's a contradictory desire. That said, I am very cynical about these kinds of things. There's such a media engine behind all these superstars, and now they can't survive without it. Why is it that if Britney wanted a book about Prozac, why wouldn't she just order it on Amazon? She knows the cameras are on her 24/7."
Forced humanization could be a ploy by Britney and her team of publicists ... or maybe she just wanted the book right then and there without waiting for shipping.
Transition to womanhood and non-role-modeldom
Britney was barely 18 when her first single was owning radio. So although her world had revolved around showbiz already, this was more than a supporting Mouseketeer role. She was prepping for superstardom, and she was going to be growing up quick.
"It's like her song, 'I'm Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman,' because she's going through a major transition as far as who she is and who her audience is, too," said Bowling Green's Donahue. Britney's virginity, or lack thereof, made for countless People and Us Weekly covers, as did her drinking (Scandalous Champagne!), smoking (Oh my God, a Cigarette!) and sexuality (Tart - She Broke Up My Marriage!). "She still appeals to young girls, and she now appeals to young women," said Donahue. "It's the best crossover you could ask for."
The feminist approach to Britney
Uh oh. Britney is "trying to be respectable enough to hold onto enough of her youth audience, but daring and explicit enough to hold onto her adult market, relying on explicit sex to market itself," according to the University of California's Rose. "Women find themselves in a really tough position, because they don't want to call for less sexual self-expression, because they're in need for female-generated sexual expression - but not marketed sexual titillation. Nobody wants to cut down on female sexuality, but women are being pressured into self-exploitative male-fantasy sexual expression, and that's the problem."
