Britney
Spears: Is Girl Power in the Mind or the Midriff? This
past year or so, I’ve become fascinated with the phenomena of “Girl
Power” in popular culture, especially as manifested in television,
advertising, and pop music video. I
am currently intrigued by the figure presented by former New Mouseketeer
and teen icon Britney Spears, and for the purposes of this short
assignment I’ll narrow the focus here.
Britney Spears perhaps needs no introduction. She was a pop music star almost as soon as she started, her
first video “breaking out” on MTV when she was fifteen. I am not a pop music listener, nor typically an MTV watcher
(although I’d have to admit to the sort of house-on-fire magnetism it
commands for me), so I was never really other than a critical consumer of
Spears. I never just
listened, or just watched. Certainly,
however, I saw the effect on younger audiences and other fans.
Because of the way her sexuality was marketed from the beginning,
and because of the undercurrents (or overt tidal waves?) of girl power
fever in youth culture (power found here in the bare midriff or sexual
knowingness), she was instantly embraced by the media, and so by much of
the public, as a new feminist icon.
What interests me here is not so much young girls’ embracing of
their sexuality—indeed, more power to them—but the way that Spears has
been marketed, simultaneously to boys and men as sex object* and girls and
women as a symbol of female empowerment.
It is also impossible for me not to notice the restrictions placed
by the media on Spears’s empowerment.
First, by marketing Spears as both object of sexual desire and icon
of female power, the media is implicitly equating the two identities: A
woman’s power is in her sexuality.
Spears so often claims to be wearing what she wants and expressing
her true self, it as if even she believes her identity isn’t somewhat
formed, and informed, by her market in the media.
On a recent episode of MTV’s “Making the Video,” a male
director shows Spears two outfits he’s hoping she will wear for her
video. Spears takes the
colorful Gidget-style cropped outfit, and hands back the almost-not-there
slashed black cobweb dress, with a playful, “I’m not
going to be wearing that.” Later,
in the show and in the video, we see her straddling a chair in the black
webbing, nothing more said to explain to the viewer this inconsistency.
Spears has “chosen” to wear what she wants to wear.
The idea seems to me to be to change the rhetoric of
objectification without touching the circumstances.
Basically, women once made to dress provocatively and be ogled by
men were being exploited; now, women are choosing to dress provocatively
and be ogled by men, and are, so, empowered.
Equality problem solved, and we just had to throw in that
popular-currency word “choice.” I
do not mean to say that liberating women’s sexuality is not a cause of
feminism or social justice, but it certainly is not the only cause, and is
not necessarily best achieved in the rhetoric (and under the power
structure) of the opposition. I
question the “empowerment” of providing the same sexual exploitation
under a different name.
The second restriction put on Spears’s empowerment by the media
is how they often answer claims of her sexual objectification.
The typical response: hype the fact that Spears is, and plans to
remain for now, a virgin. Again,
problem solved; we can’t be exploiting or objectifying her sexually if
she is not having sex. Here,
again, Spears’s womanhood and power is equated with sex, this time to
detract from her sexuality. Because
her expression of sexuality does not include sexual activity, she does not
have a “full” sexuality. Claims
of Spears’s virginity are proffered to tame her sexual expression, and
so disempower her this time not by making her a willing participant in her
objectification, but by telling her that her womanhood, her full
sexuality, will only come to be upon sexual intercourse.
Again, woman’s power is defined by sex.
And because, in American society, virginity is most often
contingent upon/defined by heterosexuality, she can only come to this
sexuality and power through man.
Perhaps because of my training in literary and rhetorical studies I
can’t help but carry out this sort of criticism, but I mean only to
explore how even the seemingly trivial examples of our culture seem to
betray, for me, the challenges operating behind different social
ideologies. Even feminist
“bestsellers” like Katie Roiphe and Camille Paglia fall into the media
trap of seeing much of the cause of feminism today to be sexual
liberation, as if all political, economic, and violent circumstances
surrounding the lives of women are no longer at issue, are no longer
there. I am informed, as much
as anything, by the “resisting reader” of feminist literary theory:
when I read the media, it tells me one thing, and when I read behind it, I
see another story.
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