Britney Spears’ disturbing body comments, the role of tabloids and her father

Since Britney Spears graduated from conservatory in November 2021, the singer has been free and frequently on Instagram. Part of that 13-year conservatorship, which gave Spears’ father Jamie Spears authority over her business and personal decisions, limited Spears on social media. No longer limited, posts from Spears in recent months have included candid revelations about pregnancy loss, emotional posts about her newfound freedom, and pictures of her body.

Some fans argue that her posts go too far, particularly on Monday when Spears shared a quote attributed to Rodney Dangerfield: “I’ve found there’s only one way to look skinny: hang out with fat people.” She followed the picture along her own caption: “I wish I could have chosen the nannies for my kids…my dancers…I mean if I had the dancers from Christina Aguilera I would have looked extremely small…I mean why not talk about it ??believe.” not you, my confidence would have been a little bit better if i could choose where i live, eat, who i call, date and who has been on stage with me !!!It’s hard sometimes now I see how much my Femininity was taken away back then and everyone sat back and said nothing!!! Anyway… I’m going to talk about things here that people have NEVER talked about!!!”

This “dirty” beef with Xtina

But it’s the way Spears “talks about things” that fans — and Aguilera, who Spears immediately befriended after the post — have issues with, even as it reflects the restrictive, sexist world she grew up in .

Spears implied that Aguilera’s dancers were taller than her own dancers, whom she also claims were handpicked from her father to make Spears feel bad. This comment underscores a long history of animosity between Spears and Aguilera that may have started after the 2003 Video Music Awards. At the awards ceremony, a kiss between Madonna and Spears was famously televised; a kiss between Madonna and Aguilera that happened right after it wasn’t. Shortly after the event, Aguilera described Spears as “a lost little girl” in an interview with Blender magazine.

one Twitter user laid out an extensive history of Aguilera’s public insults against Spears, including insulting Spears’ engagement ring (and the fact that she proposed to her second husband, former backup dancer Kevin Federline), wearing a pin at an event with the captioned “IF *** ** Britney Spears” and called Spears “fake and superficial” in an interview.

But the singers were pitted against each other from the start. Both blonde teenagers when they became musical stars after first meeting and starring in ‘All New Mickey Mouse Club’, they released singles a year apart in the late ’90s.

Starlets come of age in the ’90s

And the ’90s and early 2000s, as anyone who lived during that era will tell you, were mined with misogyny, fat phobia, and harmful messages about body image, especially for young women and girls.

Binge eating disorder was first officially diagnosed in the 1990s. The resulting media articles amounted to an almost moral panic. As writer Allison Yarrow points out, in the 1990s, much of the attention on anorexia and bulimia presented the disorders as problems for white women, while ignoring people of color. A 1991 cover story in The New York Times ran the headline, “The Woman of the ’90s: How Fat is Fat?”

Spears and Aguilera both came of age during this period, and both grew up under the scorching microscope of the tabloids, where their bodies were regularly used as cannon fodder. Spears’ breasts were discussed in front of her by a talk show host. In 2021, Aguilera said she was still recovering from the damage the tabloids had done to her. Other female stars from Brooke Shields to Tara Reid have reported similar claims, describing the years and years it takes to unlearn the hurtful messages fed to them as children. Shields was 15 when Barbara Walters asked her for her body measurements in a television interview.

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It makes sense that stars like Spears and Aguilera would internalize such destructive messages and behaviors. Both singers have a history of abuse. Just last year, Spears was fired from her father’s conservatorship after she claimed Jamie Spears controlled such aspects of her life as forcing her to take contraceptives and other medications against her will and dictating everything from her dating to her performances . The New Yorker reported a witness account by Jamie Spears telling his daughter, “You’re fat. Daddy will put you on a diet.” The witness also claimed that Jamie Spears repeatedly called Spears a “whore.”

But Spears’ Instagram comments about height are hurtful, and they come all the more so just a day before Lizzo won an Emmy for “Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls,” a series on Amazon about her search for backup dancers. She dedicated her award “to the big grrrls!”

Hopefully the tide is turning on body shaming, but the tide also appears to be turning on Spears, who some fear may not be getting the help they need. Since Spears’ post, they have been joined by Selena Gomez, Paris Hilton, Donatella Versace, Demi Lovato and Madonna Aguilera Don’t follow Spears.