Growing up I was not allowed to listen to secular music. I could listen to songs that came on Disney Channel. Once I got to high school my musical options expanded. That’s when I heard Circus by Britney Spears. I was hooked. Honestly, I also didn’t realize the sexual innuendos in so many of her songs (yay for growing up in a sheltered bubble jk don’t do that to your kids). Anyway, I liked pop and Britney Spears was the definition of pop. My music taste is prob 75% pop wouldn’t surprise me if it were more.
So when I heard of the Britney Spears Documentary I just had to watch it. #FreeBritney had been going around for about a year and I didn’t know too much about it. I knew that she had a conservatorship that she no longer wanted and her dad was in charge of her every move and I remember hearing about how she “may” have been sending signals on her Instagram. I thought seemed a little farfetched, but I was open to seeing the evidence. The documentary, “The New York Times Presents ‘Framing Britney Spears’”, shed a light on that and many other things.
A conservativorship is when a judge appoints a legal guardian over a person to manage their finances and daily life because of old age, physical limitations, or physical limitations.
Here’s what I got out of it:
1. Conservatorships are probably good things for many people, BUT there doesn’t seem to be regulations or checks and balances. It seems as if they are just permanent with very little room if the conservatee improves. That does not seem fair. I think the goal should be for all of the conservatees to have they ownership of their lives eventually. From what we have been made aware of Britney Spears no longer needs a conservator. Even if she does it seemed pretty clear her father should not be.
2. As Landon Newsom Starbucks mentioned in her episode you can listen here, Hollywood is evil. They do not care about our children. At the very beginning of the documentary they showed a scene from when Britney was just 9 years old and a 60 year old man asked her if you had a boyfriend. Aside from the part where he askes a nine year old about a boyfriend which I find highly inappropriate, he then proceeds to ask if she (9 years old) would date him (60+ year old). It was inappropriate and wrong. I believe it set the standard for the rest of her career. They showed us how she was sexualized from the start. I think we easily forget what could be going on behind the scenes especially when people are producing such great content.
Like previously mentioned I wasn’t allowed to listen to her when I was younger so I wasn’t even aware of the anti- Britney campaign in the early 2000s. They showed a Christian woman saying how she would shoot Britney if she saw her in person. (That comment was wrong all around, but we can get into that in another blog.) From the very beginning Britney’s brand was “sexy”. That was the downfall. I don’t understand why there were so many questions about her virginity.
3. One amazing thing about this documentary is the awareness of conservatorship that we are becoming aware of. I didn’t really know much about it before all of this #FreeBritney movement. I think it’s good for us to aware in case something like this happens to someone in our life that we love. Imagine how many other people have similar stories that just aren’t wealthy. Awareness can bring change.
If you want to learn more of Britney’s story and more about conservatorship I would recommend watching the documentary. It’s available on Hulu.
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