Photo illustration by Coda. Photo by Getty Images.
For a time Britney Spears’ Instagram feed was littered with wistful musings about a life that had been out of grasp. A life that used to be hers, back when she had any real autonomy over the way she lived.
We can see her dance and twirl in her home with all of the passion that came out onstage when she slayed stages as a pop queen. There are sunbathed portraits and candids with her boyfriend and snarky memes and bright, inspirational quotes. Her captions are stream of conscious musings ruminating on all that used to be, and all of what’s to come as she untangles herself from the life she’s known under the conservatorship she says her father used to abuse and manipulate her life and career over the last 13 years.
But every now and then her feed is an outlet for her anger. In real-time we’re getting a glimpse of Britney unpacking the untold traumas that linger from her conservatorship and coming of age during the tabloid era and the early days of gossip blogs that contributed to her mental breakdown. With a mix of unbridled rage and sharp cynicism, Britney is finally telling us how she feels about all she’s been through and all she’s been subjected to—by the media, by her family, by the world.
Whether she’s imploring Diane Sawyer to “kiss her white ass” for the time she grilled her over that breakup with Justin Timberlake, or dragging her father for an exhaustive list of cringe inducing—and also criminal—grievances (including having his daughter’s bedroom bugged) or telling her little sister to keep her name out of her mouth, Britney’s social media purging, in all its ferocious ways, are a reminder that she’s someone in the throes of processing not just a newfound “freedom,” but reckoning with all that she was unable to be because her sanity was under question.
Particular media attention has been given to her ongoing rift between Britney and her family. It was bound to happen, given all we learned about their division through the court records and Britney’s devastating testimony at a hearing last summer that she requested be open to the world. She wanted us to bear witness to her suffering. She wanted us to hear her anger as she detailed with a lucidity we had been led to believe was nonexistent.
At the moment, Britney’s younger sister, Jamie Lynn, is receiving the brunt of her venom. The former Nickelodeon star is promoting a tell-all memoir about her own mistreatment by the media when she became pregnant at 16 and the toxic family dynamics that impacted her and her older sister, but the promo trail has largely focused on her complicated relationship with Britney. Granted, this is all basic law of fame.
Good Morning America and Nightline will absolutely make room for a forgettable celebrity memoir ghostwritten by some underpaid sap if it meant getting the less famous, but famous nonetheless, Spears to talk about #FreeBritney. While Britney largely empties her clip via Instagram dispatches, she reserved her finest “fuck around and find out” for her sister. She had her lawyer fire off a scathing cease-and-desist citing “misleading” and “derogatory” comments and posted several Notes app screeds lighting her sister up.
Blogs ate up the back and forth and Jamie Lynn probably sold more copies than she would have because of the drama, but the sad truth that's gotten somewhat lost in this is that the younger Spears has a story that absolutely should be told. She watched her big sister become the biggest pop star on the planet and saw how she was eviscerated and destroyed by our judgement and the expectations we placed on her as a teen idol. And then she went through it too. An unplanned pregnancy took her from teen star to branded a “slut” by the same media that once demanded Britney tell us about the authenticity of her breasts and share the details of her sex life with Timberlake.
Jamie Lynn has a unique perspective of American celebrity culture that was a source of immense privilege and profound trauma. She could have used her book, and the promo trail, to explore the sad parallel she and her sister faced, and the toll fame and money and addiction took on their once close-knit family. This is a moment where there is serious discourse around the ways we treated young women in Hollywood and the music industry. We are having different conversations about Britney and Janet and Whitney and pushing for accountability from the ways they were treated in the media. Jamie Lynn could have used this moment to her benefit. Instead she’s on a press tour telling us all about sister’s “erratic,” “moody,” and “paranoid” behavior, reframing herself as the victim in her sister’s plight and running her mouth about the Timberlake breakup (which we most definitely don’t care about in 2022) all while her sister is carefully rebuilding her life. I haven’t read the book, and have no plans to, but apparently there’s some 315 mentions of Britney in it, according to Newsweek, so it's tough to sympathize with Jamie Lynn over the fallout she's getting.
It’s rough watching family business play out publicly, but these glimpses of Britney’s fury—and every other emotion she’s letting us in on through her IG grid—are vital to her healing and the work she’s doing to reclaim the narrative we took from her with our shame and our judgement and the dignity she lost under the legal arrangement that was supposed to care for her. After years of suffering in silence Britney is taking her power back, by any means necessary. She’s burning it all down. It’s getting ugly but she needs us to see that she’s no longer afraid to scorch the earth to live the life she wants to live. And after everything we’ve put her through—and all we’ve come to learn she’s endured over the past 13 years—the least we can do is get out of the way and let it burn.
