The story recounts the story of the “Fossil sisters”, three girls adopted by an eccentric British collector who then leaves them in the care of his great-niece and a nanny, with dwindling funds. The three girls begin careers on the stage, while still children, in order to pay the bills. Near the end of the book the most beautiful, Pauline, is offered a Hollywood contract. She accepts it, in order to pay for her sister Petrova, a talented dancer, to train in Europe. 

As a child it was a satisfying ending. As an adult, knowing about Harvey Weinstein, it read like Pauline selling herself to fund her sister’s dreams. I wanted to yell at her: the price is too high! Don’t do it! 

In real life, though, most children offered up to the god of showbiz are sent by their own parents — a decision as unfathomable as the willingness of ancient Canaanites, according to the Old Testament, to sacrifice their own children to the god Moloch. When so many child stars come to such miserable ends, why do it? But perhaps, again, we might find a clue in other, equally disturbing religious practices attributed to the Canaanites, and condemned in the Hebrew Bible.

The latest child star to be sacrificed to the gods of showbiz is the actor Hayden Panettiere, who was found dead over the weekend aged 36. I loved her as the Cheerleader in Heroes, and found her sympathetic as troubled country star Juliette Barnes in the musical drama-soap Nashville. But according to the memoir she released earlier this year detailing her addiction and mental illness, experience of domestic violence, and grief at losing custody of her daughter, Panettiere’s celebrity came at tremendous cost. 

Nor is she anywhere near the first former child celebrity to have grown up deeply troubled. Earlier this year, too, former child actor Daveigh Chase was found dead in Los Angeles, killed by sepsis after a years-long struggle with substance abuse. Drew Barrymore, who had — like Panettiere — acted since infancy, was notorious in the Nineties for wild partying, rehab, a suicide attempt, and a lot of being nude in public and on magazine covers.

A still more notorious just-about-survivor is the singer Britney Spears, whose parents pushed her into acting as a tween and who was just 16 when she sang “Hit Me Baby” in 1998. Spears’ later mental health difficulties were the subject of intense tabloid fascination in the early 2000s, along with those of her fellow child star Lindsay Lohan. But where Lohan eventually withdrew from public life, settling in Dubai, the conservatorship imposed on Spears in 2008 would see her deprived of full adult autonomy while continuing to work. Though unable to control her own finances or even remove her birth control, during her conservatorship Spears released four major albums and completed several world tours.

Still darker, less verified rumors swirl around the children of showbiz. There’s a whole P. Diddy rabbit hole, for example: the rapper and producer has been accused (and acquitted) of sex trafficking, and allegedly held multi-day drug-fueled “freak off” parties which were, according to rumors, sometimes attended by underage celebrities. (After the death of Daveigh Chase, a clip resurfaced of Diddy inviting her, then aged just 12, to “an after-party”. I hope she didn’t go.) Among the rich and famous, it appears, the kind of sexual license now notoriously associated with the Epstein circle was perhaps simply normalized. Hayden Panettiere herself claims to have experienced a kind of celebrity grooming: in her memoir she describes one woman who first befriended her, in her teens, before maneuvering her into situations where she was pressured to have sexual contact with much older celebrity men, including while trapped on a yacht some way out to sea. If true, it seems there’s more than one Ghislaine Maxwell out there.

Who knows what comparable assaults other child stars have endured? And given the risks, and the notoriously high rate of attrition, why would any parent willingly propel their child into this seductive, exploitative, amoral world? Perhaps, again, we can glean some hints from the Old Testament. 

In Leviticus 18 and 20, the injunction not to sacrifice your babies to Moloch is, to modern sensibilities, strangely placed. The context is a warning to the Israelites against adopting Canaanite practices described as “detestable customs”. But most of the injunctions specify not religious rituals but practices we’d call “incest”: that is, prohibitions on sexual intimacy with family members or the spouses of family members. 

More from this author

Don’t let grifters kill the university

By Mary Harrington

This seems, on first glance, an odd juxtaposition. One interpretation is that all these prohibitions relate to religious practices, which for the ancient Canaanites included sexual rituals. But whatever the truth of that ancient world, it’s still relevant today in the subtle but profound connection it draws between different ways that natural family relationships can become corrupted. 

What child sacrifice and incest have in common is a shocking inversion of parental instincts we consider so natural as to be almost universal. Most parents, human or mammal, instinctively seek to protect their young; child sacrifice ghoulishly inverts this, for example in the archaeological remains discovered at ancient Canaanite Carthage. Incest, too, is taboo more or less universally across human cultures, as the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss observed. In this context, again, the alleged incestuous Canaanite rites again appear as the detestable practices Leviticus says they are.

I’m obviously not suggesting that children pushed into showbiz are literally sacrificed to Canaanite gods. Nor am I alleging a literally incestuous relationship between these children and their parents. But it’s clear that when a child is placed under pressure to perform as Panettiere was, at auditions, from pre-verbal babyhood onward, the adults making that choice for them are sacrificing important elements of their normal childhood. Meanwhile Freudian psychoanalysis describes as figuratively “incestuous” those parent/child relationships that remain over-identified and enmeshed, such that the child can’t reach full adult independence. And there’s a parallel between those two detestable Canaanite practices, in that their modern analogs — sacrificing a child for economic gain, or perhaps status, while blurring the boundaries between parent and child — are profoundly unnatural relative to normal parental instincts. And, where child celebrity is concerned, at least figuratively speaking these forms of profound parental failure often appear together. 

In Panettiere’s memoir, the way she describes the relationship she had with her mother makes it appear, to put it mildly, strange and lacking in boundaries. Panettiere outlines first how her mother, herself a small-time screen and stage actress, signed her infant daughter up for a modeling contract at eight months old. By the age of five, Panettiere had a well-established acting career. The mother-daughter relationship itself was plainly always deeply entangled: very much the kind an old-fashioned Freudian psychoanalyst would have called at least figuratively “incestuous”.

Panettiere writes of her own childhood that “Disappointing her was one of my biggest fears”. Her mother seems to have transferred all her acting ambitions seamlessly onto her child, and simply expected Panettiere to comply. As Panettiere puts it: “Her dream had become mine, and mine had become hers.”

A similar level of strangeness and enmeshment seems to have characterized Jamie Spears’ relationship with his daughter. Jamie Spears’ relationship with his daughter. Back when the conservatorship was imposed, he described her in legal papers as “an adult child in the throes of a mental-health crisis”. In other words: he refused to allow her to grow up, then continued to make a comfortable living off his artificially infantilized child-celebrity daughter. 

Spears later described the conservatorship as “abusive”. Her father continued to control every aspect of her life until she finally won a legal battle to end it.

Suggested reading

The death of Hollywood

By Matthew Crawford

Barrymore also seems to have had a strange relationship with her mother, in which ordinary caregiving seemed weirdly missing. She recounts that, while she was still a minor, her mother took her to parties at the notoriously wild Studio 54, instead of to school: a radical abdication of the duty to keep your daughter safe, in favor of enjoying celebrity access through her. Barrymore later emancipated herself from her own mother at the age of 14. 

Similarly, Panettiere describes how, by her late teens, she began to find her mother’s low-cut tops and party behavior uncomfortable, and sought to leave behind the working relationship for a more normal, mother/daughter dynamic: “I just want you to be my mom now.” But her mother didn’t want that. In Panettiere’s account, she just retorted: “You owe me.” Their relationship never recovered. When the memoir was published Panettiere’s mother, Lesley Vogel, dismissed Panettiere’s account, claiming the drama was all “to sell books”. The Independent reported that Vogel declared that it was she, in fact, who had “chosen the no contact route” in relation to her daughter.

Why do some former child stars achieve adult independence, while others struggle? Drew Barrymore still hasn’t fully reconciled with her mother, but she seems comparatively stable, and has hosted a daytime talk show since 2020. Lohan is now married to a Kuwaiti financier, has two young children, and mostly leads a private (presumably extremely comfortable) life in the Emirates. Spears, by contrast, has refused to reconcile with her father since the conservatorship ended, despite reported pressure from other family members. Earlier this year, she checked back into rehab in April following an arrest for driving while intoxicated. Others, such as Panettiere, Daveigh Chase, and many other child stars, are simply no longer with us. 

Perhaps Pauline Fossil would have survived Hollywood just fine, avoided all the Ghislaines, and just ended up with a financier husband and large collection of Hermès scarves. Or perhaps not. Who can say from the outside what makes the difference between the children who survive their offering to showbiz Moloch, and the ones who get consumed? Is it the enthusiasm with which a child is sacrificed? The intensity of showbiz-parent enmeshment? The horrors encountered in Moloch’s fiery belly, or indeed on the yachts laden with pervy old rock stars?

Whatever the precise formula that produces the maximum of psychological damage, perhaps the only safe recourse is to listen to Leviticus. That is, rather than trying to find a low-impact way of sacrificing your child to Moloch, just don’t sacrifice your child to Moloch. Alternatively, if you prefer levity to Leviticus, there’s the 1935 message of another Noel — not Streatfield, but Coward — to every sharp-elbowed Theatre Mummy pestering him for auditions:

Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington
Don’t put your daughter on the stage!

You can call Samaritans for free on 116 123, email them at jo@samaritans.org, or visit www.samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.

Rae was 18 when she broke into our cultural imagination amid the first Covid lockdowns. She choreographed and mimicked dances in TikTok videos, and turned her millions of followers into devoted listeners. Her first self-titled album, released the following year, preached the #GirlBoss feminism of a bygone era: “I’m obsessed with me as much as you.” It was a flop. But then she let go of her self-determined pop vision, gave up attempted originality. Instead, she became something cleverer, more kitsch, consciously emulating Britney Spears and Bjork — less a pop star than someone who wants to be a pop star. Since her transformation, every single she’s released has shot up the charts to wide critical acclaim.

Her success is an index of TikTok’s power as a star maker, and the way the app has dominated not just the music industry, but fame itself. But it’s a Cinderella not lacking for a dark side: TikTok fame endangers and takes advantage of teenage girls.

Rae’s metamorphosis followed a clear-cut, and volatile, path familiar to earlier generations of teeny-pop fans raised on the Disney Channel: that of the young star who shed the snakeskin of adolescence into something sexy and avant-garde. Rae’s formula was formula. Her innovation was not to innovate at all. And so, she fulfilled the American Dream that Disney, and now TikTok, promised: an ambitious cheerleader from Louisiana — where her idol Britney Spears also grew up — could be shepherded by managers and executives waving more cash than her family had ever seen, to become a global superstar. But it’s never that simple.

More from this author

Test article

By Lily Isaacs

There are Disney princesses, and then there are Disney Channel princesses. Disney brought up a generation of young people who went home after school and were parented by their televisions. As society shifted, so did Disney: the soft traditionalism of prince-charming love stories gave way to high-schoolers who fought, laughed, danced, and sang for millions of young watchers; the mediators of what life could and should be. Then those teenagers rebelled, turning their lives inside out. It’s now just as much a well-trodden path to success as the one it was originally defined as a fall from: Rae became, in the words of Rihanna, “a good girl gone bad”.

The formula may be the same, but the medium has changed. The Disney Channel is a shell of its former self, with only about 100,000 viewers while 68% of teenagers go on TikTok every day. The Wild West of TikTok influencers — paid through lucrative brand deals but without contracts or stability — means that you can shoot to enormous success as a teenager without any guardrails or support.

Yet even in the Disney-dominated era, there were signs of trouble. Britney Spears shaved her head and was hounded by paparazzi; Miley Cyrus swung naked on a wrecking ball; and so on. These tendencies have found their next shape in TikTok’s algorithm.

The day after Rae flashed Coachella’s crowd and was videoed by thousands, the child star Sophie Nyweide died at 24, from a what authorities suspect was an accidental overdose. Nyweide was thrust into the spotlight when she was just 5, and her death was a sobering reminder of what fame’s aftershocks can do to the young and vulnerable. Nyweide’s death, like Britney’s breakdown, is another example of the industry’s Faustian bargain: give up control and we’ll make you into a star.

Girls like Spears, Amanda Bynes, and Miley Cyrus, who got famous as kids on our televisions, turned their Disney fame into stardom at brutal costs to their lives. They were left unable to make the usual mistakes of being a teenager without the eyes of millions upon them. This was not an incidental side effect. As a new book by the Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl, argues, the industry was designed to feed on girls — and then discard them.

Gilbert suggests that two forces, porn and paparazzi, transformed a generation of women, impelling them to switch away from powerhouse idols like Madonna in favor of sexualized but virginal and girlish figures like Britney Spears and Kate Moss. Real women, in control of their music, were replaced by girls being shaped by their managers. This was the era of American Beauty, Britney Spears with schoolgirl outfit and pigtails, a 2003 Vanity Fair cover declaring: “It’s Totally Raining Teens!” The early Oughts showed girls that “there was only one way to exist in public”, Gilbert writes, “and it was a trap.”

TikTok has brought this trap to the doorstop of every teenager in the world. Want to use your body for likes, money, and fame? The siren app beckons. The algorithm rewards nudity, dancing, and oversharing personal trauma. The writer Roxane Gay, after sinking glassy eyed into the algorithm, observed how “right there, in plain sight, is TikTok, a platform hosting the new pornographers, savvy, hungry creators willing to push and test and give, more and more and more”.

Take Jenny Popach (whose real name is Roselie Arritola), who had 7 million followers by the time she was 15 and posts hyper-sexualized dance videos with captions like “when men can go to jail for being with you”. She rakes in a small fortune from brand deals but still has braces. When a Bloomberg interviewer asked her mom about her daughter getting famous, she said: “We loved it. We loved the attention…. I knew I’d be famous one day, I believe in destiny, and I believe in manifestation, and I believe Roselie is that.”

Kids like Popach proliferate on TikTok, dancing, making money, and dreaming of the Addison Rae model of fame: where a video can turn into a record contract, and then into the main stage at Coachella. Nearly a third of TikTok users are under age 14; and any scroll on the app will lead you to prepubescent girls, dancing, trying on makeup, playing at adult femininity but for an audience that includes not only their peers, but millions of unknown grownups, too. Gilbert’s book tracks the horrific “countdowns” that magazines and public figures had for Britney Spears, Natalie Portman, and the Olsen twins to turn 18 and be legal for sex. Popach’s 18th birthday has elicited countless such fantasies from men on TikTok.

By sharing your own life, you may eliminate some of the power of the paparazzi who stalked Spears so brutally, but you also have to accept your place in the industry’s ecosystem; or as Gilbert writes: “Young women in the public eye had been framed across media as sexy, entertaining, uncomplicated dolls, paid to entertain but never complain. Some understood the bargain.”

More from this author

TikTok girls like me are just fine

By Adeline Isakov

Addison Rae bought into the bargain. She only got famous the same year that Britney gained control of her finances. Her tongue-in-cheek references to Spears show her ability to alchemize pop’s darkness into fun self-defense. She teased the paparazzi with her likeness to Britney when she was photographed walking down the street in pigtails reading Spear’s 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me; and in her music video for “High Fashion,” she danced next to a bottle of Spears’s perfume. Her success, we can hope, is a direct rebellion against the more exploitative forces that trapped Spears. She references Spears so frequently not just because she admires her, but because she isn’t her.

Still, as Gilbert’s book reminds us, the misogyny inflicted upon Britney and her peers never went away: we internalized it. Scroll through TikTok, and the exploitation paradigm feels like everyone’s reality. Back in the Disney days, says Gilbert, it was shocking to imagine that girls “could be most liberated while on their knees”. Now it would only be shocking to question that.

Disney doesn’t make stars anymore; stars make themselves, and TikTok profits when they do. TikTok, like Disney before it, makes its money from teenage girls, and those girls hope to get fame back from it. Some, like Addison Rae, may get everything they want from it, and emerge unscathed. But most who idolize and emulate her will not be so lucky.

In this, she represents an entire generation’s penchant for repudiating the culture that shaped it. Nostalgia is resentment-tinged among millennials, for whom being downtrodden and disenfranchised has become something of a permanent calling card. Five years ago, it was a truth universally acknowledged that we would be the first cohort to do worse economically than our parents. Crushed by unmanageable college debt, unable to buy houses or start families, and burned out by the endless demands of side hustling, millennials were surely the unluckiest generation.

The only problem with this universally-acknowledged truth is that, actually, it’s not true: a fact that’s become inescapable this year. “Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically,” wrote Jean Twenge in The Atlantic in April. “Since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breath-taking financial comeback.” The data backs this up: although the wealth gap between rich and poor persists within the millennial generation, and the housing market makes home ownership slightly more challenging than it used to be, all the catastrophising seems to have been premature. Millennials are doing fine.

And yet, their image as uniquely put-upon has proved persistent — especially among millennials themselves. Once you’ve entrenched a generational narrative, people will continue to identify with it, irrespective of how things may have evolved. For the same reason that the children of the Sixties styled themselves as anti-establishment hippies from the comfort of their corporate offices, millennials have struggled to let go of the sense that there’s something uniquely difficult about their lives — even as they cruise comfortably into middle age, buying homes, having kids, accumulating assets. But if we’re doing well by every available metric, how can we explain the fact that we feel like such losers?

Enter the successor ideology to the debunked myth of the Left-Behind Millennial: the retrospective problematising of the Nineties. This oeuvre of cultural criticism, devoted to uncovering the evil subtext in every entertainment property produced before 2005, makes a certain kind of sense if you understand it as a coping mechanism for a generation that views their adult lives with not just disappointment but a sense of betrayal. The expectations we internalised — that the world was our oyster, that we would have it all — and which reality has so cruelly failed to meet, were the products of a Nineties paradigm in which millennials were not just avid consumers but guilty participants, victims and perpetrators alike.

More from this author

Paris Hilton teaches Prince Harry a lesson

By Kat Rosenfield

Hence why, where other generations dabble in more straightforward nostalgia for their formative years, millennials have developed an antagonistic relationship with them, rewriting and reframing it like a therapy patient searching out the hidden darkness in a seemingly happy childhood. (That this has happened in tandem with the widespread creep of therapy-speak into everyday life is surely not a coincidence.) Actually, your parents’ loving marriage was a sham; actually, your fun-loving father was an alcoholic man-child; and actually, Friends was a cesspit of racist sexist heteronormative bigotry masked as feel-good primetime TV.

The reckoning isn’t solely an American phenomenon: the latest season of The Crown, which opens with Princess Diana’s death in 1997 and doubles as a searing indictment of the tabloid culture of the era, is also a fine example of this sort of meta-commentary. But in the US, exposing the dark underbelly of our youthful obsessions has become a genre unto itself. There’s this year’s memoir boom, in which maligned Nineties icons have spoken their truth in documentaries and bestselling books. Paris Hilton’s memoir of abuse at a boarding school for wayward youth reveals that her “celebutante” antics and baby-voiced bimbo persona were the result of hideous trauma; Britney Spears’s tell-all, The Woman in Me, describes how her apparent career renaissance was actually a puppet show in which she dangled on strings held by a father who managed her life, her finances, her reproductive choices, even the choreography of her Vegas comeback show.

Meanwhile, on HBO, Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage discovers a sinister valence to the gleeful raunch culture of the Girls Gone Wild era, featuring interviews with the musicians and media figures who were once its vanguard. Now, middle-aged and chagrined, they shake their heads in lemon-faced disapproval at the provocations of toxic male pop metal icons like Limp Bizkit — but also at themselves, for being complicit. The question hanging in the air is: how did we ever think this was okay?

Suggested reading

Why the Nineties rocked

By Doug Coupland

And then there’s Monica Lewinsky, who marked the 25th anniversary of the scandal that made her famous with interviews, articles, even a television series — highlighting how her Nineties-era infamy has transformed to become one of the greatest reputational rehabilitations of all time. In 1998, when the story of her affair with then-President Bill Clinton broke, Lewinsky was a Jezebel, a homewrecker, and a punchline to the worst jokes that the slut-shaming culture of the moment could think of. Now, for exactly the same reason, she’s a feminist hero, toast of the Hollywood elite and NYC social pages alike, greeted with a standing ovation when she walks into a room.

But stigma isn’t the only thing Lewinsky has shed: in the old paradigm, a woman in her early twenties who slept with a married man, even a powerful one, was considered an autonomous actor and old enough to know better. In the revised one, she’s not just a victim, but practically a child. Her shame is gone, but so is her agency — and with it, any sense that she may have had a hand in the current shape of her life.

The cultural revisionism that refashions the wanton seductress as a hapless innocent speaks to the interplay of millennial childhood nostalgia with the overwhelming sense that we still aren’t really adults. The same generation that treats grownup responsibilities like bill-paying or doing laundry as a sort of LARP (“adulting”) is also characterised by its insistent and continued interest in childish things. YA fantasy, Funko Pop dolls, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have supplanted the more sophisticated ideas and aesthetics that were once the hallmarks of adult taste. Even the most acclaimed millennial creators tend to be backward-looking, revisiting and reframing childhood favourites rather than writing something new, fresh, complex, grown-up.

Suggested reading

The empty promise of Friends

By Mary Harrington

It was the approach to art expressed earlier this year by Greta Gerwig, director of Little Women and Barbie, when she proclaimed that the latter movie was both “doing the thing and subverting the thing” — the thing in question being Barbie’s pink-tinted, stereotypical, sexist tropes. But the bigger thing to accept about Barbie is not just that she’s sexist, but that she’s simple, in the way kids’ stuff tends to be. Where the irony-tinged approach to millennial nostalgia falls short is not in Gerwig’s notion of the thing that is at once done and subverted; it’s in its failure to comprehend that adulthood means putting aside the toys you used to play with, and doing something else.

The fact is, despite all the think pieces, reckoning with the naughtiness of the Nineties ultimately doesn’t change much. Britney Spears, freshly liberated from her conservatorship, may be understood as a victim to be pitied rather than a spectacle to be gawked at — but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re all still gawking. Monica Lewinsky, no matter how sympathetically she is now received in a discourse chagrined by the #MeToo movement, is still only famous for being the owner of a dress covered in Presidential semen. And the videos of women being groped and assaulted at Woodstock ’99, which were aired to such moral indignation in Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage are still… videos of women being groped. All this revisiting and revising does little, except give us an excuse to relive every titillating tabloid scandal, every salacious moment. The former Nineties kids who engage in this mode of cultural critique are like the murderer who gets off on reliving his crime through confession, almost as much as he got off on the killing itself. There’s an almost giddy subtext to the whole thing: we were so bad!

But of course, we’re also better now. We’re obsessed with the same scandals, but for morally superior reasons. This not only absolves us of our complicity in the raunch mischief of yore, but also conveniently align with the sentiments of the upcoming generation, the Zoomers, who are displacing us as society’s youngest adults whether we want to grow up or not. As the meme goes: How do you do, fellow kids? Maybe if we repudiate our own misspent youth enough, the zoomers will let us glom onto theirs? (They’re already wearing all our old clothes anyway.)

Suggested reading

The tragedy of Britney Spears

By Sarah Ditum

The alternative, wholly unappealing, would be to abandon the protection that permanent adolescence affords — and with it, the central tenet of millennial identity that we have been, and remain, uniquely screwed by circumstance. The self-described “smol bean” who uses “adult” as a verb also maintains a teenager’s belligerent stance toward the world: a conviction that society doesn’t understand you, has left you behind. Millennials may not actually be materially worse off, but our expectations still don’t line up with reality. We still feel disempowered, disenfranchised, and victimised. The problematising of everything Nineties offers a sort of absolution: the expectations-reality gap isn’t our fault, but the fault of a toxic culture.

And as long as we can keep writing bitter think pieces about the heteronormative whiteness of everything we used to love growing up, maybe we don’t actually have to grow up. We don’t have to embrace complexity or develop more sophisticated tastes. We don’t have to confront the uncomfortable limits of victimhood as a safe haven from responsibility — or, for that matter, the uncomfortable truth that Britney’s social media output since winning back her independence raises some serious questions about whether she is in fact equipped to manage her own affairs. Like the therapy patient who returns week after week, year after year, to dwell on the childhood traumas that shaped the man he became, we can linger in this metacritical limbo, virtually forever.

Critics adored her. “Page’s presence and timing are extraordinary,” enthused Roger Ebert. “I think she will be one of the great actors of her time.” Juno won her an Oscar nomination for best actress. But it wasn’t craft alone that made Page so appealing. It was also something about her as a person — as a girl. In a period when the dominant mode of female celebrity was the “trainwreck”, Page was different. She was big-eyed and skinny, but she didn’t party. She didn’t cycle through boyfriends. She didn’t drink-drive. You never, ever saw her falling out of a club — or out of her clothes. 

“If she and her contemporary Lindsay Lohan were put on an attention-seeking sale, they would certainly be at polar ends,” wrote Helen Pidd. “Flashing her crotch getting out of taxis is so not Page’s style (this is just speculation, but she seems like the kind of big-pants gal who wouldn’t even contemplate wearing a thong).”

Page’s peers were quizzed about their sex lives and their scandals. Page talked about politics and feminism. “I think a lot of the time in films, men get roles where they create their own destiny and women are just tools,” she told Pidd. “As a girl, you’re supposed to love Sleeping Beauty. I mean who wants to love Sleeping Beauty when you can be Aladdin?”

Still, Page wasn’t unscathed by the gossip machine. The very fact that she didn’t date, and did dress like a tomboy, raised a whole other set of questions: was she (whisper it) a lesbian? “Is Juno a you know?” asked an article in the Village Voice. Ellen DeGeneres had successfully negotiated coming out in 1997, but she’d done so as the beloved lead of a hit sitcom. Page was only just getting established, and a preference for flannel shirts was hardly compatible with the part of the rising starlet.

It took till 2014 — when Page was 26 — for her to declare her sexuality publicly. “I am tired of lying by omission,” she said in a speech to the Human Rights Congress. The scrutiny of her perceived failure at femininity had taken a toll. She told the audience that a website had recently run photos of her in sweatpants, with the question: “Why does this petite beauty insist on dressing like a massive man?” With audible exasperation, she delivered her answer: “Because I like to be comfortable.”

Page seemed, for a while, happy. She wore suits on the red carpet: an adorable baby butch. She got married to choreographer Emma Portner in 2018. And then, in 2020, Page came out again — this time as transgender. “Dressing like a man” had never merely been about comfort, apparently: it had been about actually being a man. 

Page had top surgery — a double mastectomy. In an interview with Time, Page called this “not only life-changing but lifesaving”, and described it as a remedy to the “total hell” of puberty. The public reaction was widely supportive: Netflix immediately announced that it would update the credits on The Umbrella Academy, in which Page stars, to reflect Page’s chosen name. Ellen Page disappeared. Elliot Page emerged instead.

More from this author

The tragedy of becoming a woman

By Sarah Ditum

In the Time interview, Page said that the journey to identifying as trans started with reading trans people’s memoirs, in particular Becoming a Man by P. Carl. Through identifying with Carl, “I was finally able to embrace being transgender,” Page says, “and letting myself fully become who I am.” So it makes sense that Page has now contributed his own volume to the genre — Pageboy, released for this Pride month. “An ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength and joy,” according to the flyleaf. 

But Pageboy doesn’t read defiant, strong or joyful. It reads sad: the story of a vulnerable girl thrown into the entertainment business at the age of 10; unprotected by her family; struggling with food; closeted, and reminded by the casual homophobia of Hollywood to stay that way; and subjected to sexual assault and harassment by people who should have been trusted colleagues.

In the memoir, Page says: “At certain points I’ve referred to myself using my previous name and pronouns. This is a choice that felt right to me, occasionally, when talking about my past self, but it’s not an invitation for anyone to do the same.” But talking about Page’s past as though it happened to a boy is nonsensical: Ellen’s experiences are tied to her femaleness, and more than that, her lesbianism.

Not that Page refers to his pre-transition sexuality as “lesbian”: “queer” is preferred, and when the word “lesbian” comes up, it’s marked as something held in contempt, by others if not by Page. At one point, Page calls lesbianism a “repugnant” feature that directors cannot allow on-screen.

Any resistance to compulsory femininity — high heels, tight dresses — is cast by the industry as Page being “difficult”. Roles for women are so sexualised that at one point Page describes Juno as representing “a space beyond the boundary”. This is, remember, a film in which Page’s character is pregnant: you could hardly get a more female role. But because Juno is not “hyperfeminised” — because Page wears tees and jeans for the part — the pressure of gender is lifted, somewhat. 

Suggested reading

Why I stopped being a good girl

By Hadley Freeman

But 2007 was also the year that trans writer Julia Serano published Whipping Girl, which is probably the most influential text in terms of solidifying gender identity theory. In it, Serano argued that “feminine verbal and aesthetic expression” are “driven by intrinsic and deep-seated inclinations that are likely to be the result of biology”. In other words, regardless of your actual sex, if you don’t act or dress “girly”, you might not be a girl at all. 

As this idea gained intellectual purchase, femininity standards in popular culture were growing ever more exacting. This pressure was even dramatised in Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody’s follow-up movie, Jennifer’s Body, which starred ultimate hottie Megan Fox as a cheerleader succubus, and Amanda Seyfried as her hoodie-wearing, jealousy-gnarled best friend. The space for the kind of girl-character Page played — girls who were not limited to being objects of desire — was shrinking.

But Hollywood was only amplifying messages Page had heard from her family. Page’s mother informs her daughter that she can “do anything a boy can do”, but from Page’s perspective, this is never sincere. There is continual maternal pressure for Page to be more girly, as well as an absolute rejection of the possibility of homosexuality. One of the few vignettes in which Page recalls his mother being happy is when Page requests a shopping trip to buy “girl clothes” as a teenager. (Page enjoys the way the new wardrobe alters her social standing, but not the way the clothes make her feel about herself.) When Page initially comes out as gay, her mother’s reaction is to yell: “That doesn’t exist!”

Becoming a “transgender guy” doesn’t spare Page from judgement and disgust. (Page still seems wounded by a Jordan Peterson tweet that referred to the surgeon who performed Page’s mastectomy as a “criminal”.) But it does resolve the problem of being a lesbian: Page’s mother, at least, seems better able to accept a trans child than a gay one. “She loves her son endlessly,” writes Page. Transition also makes Page’s body safer — a body that has been repeatedly violated and threatened. Page mentions an “acquaintance” who told her, after she came out for the first time, “I’m going to fuck you to make you realise you aren’t gay.” There’s also a male director who “grooms” her, a male crew member on an early film who forces oral sex on her, and a female crew member on another film who sexually assaults her while presenting it to Page as a consensual relationship. Over and over, Page is informed with violence that her body is not hers.

Again, Hollywood reinforces what began in Page’s childhood. Her adversarial relationship with her body can be seen in her reaction to her stepmother’s cooking. Page hears an “internal voice” saying “no, that can’t go inside you” when she’s confronted with food that scares her: a terror of adulteration, of losing control. Puberty inevitably heightens this. Page describes the age of 11 as “the age I sensed a shift from boy to girl without my consent”. This is, I think, a common sensation for girls: puberty ends an era of uncomplicated, happy embodiment, and launches you into a world where your body appears to invite dangerous attention against your will. Not a shift from boy to girl, but a shift from “person” to “thing”. As Hilary Mantel wrote, some girls want out. They starve themselves, or punish their bodies, and now they have the option to disown their sex entirely.

Trauma is a commonplace of trans memoir, or rather, of trans men’s memoirs. Trans women’s memoirs are, for the most part, exuberant narratives of self-actualisation (albeit usually with some background homophobia, similar to Page’s mother’s). Trans men’s memoirs are often wrenching accounts of rape and self-harm, climaxing in irreversible body modification. Thomas Page McBee’s Man Alive features a harrowing description of the author as a 10-year-old girl being sexually assaulted by her father (the abuse started when McBee was four). It initiated a “split” between self and body. “I felt like a marionette, otherworldly and wooden,” writes McBee, who nonetheless separates his masculine identification from the depersonalisation caused by the abuse. 

Carl (in the book that inspired Page) also relates being sexually assaulted at the age of 11 or 12, also by his father: “You’re becoming a woman. Your breasts are beginning to show. I like watching you change,” Carl recalls him saying. Later, the first stage in Carl’s transition is a double mastectomy. “I feel a fiery rage … for what men did to me,” Carl writes, before adding: “I feel so much joy living in a man’s body.”

For Page, these experiences of rejection and violation are incorporated into a story of latent maleness — or rather, of boyness. As the title suggests, there is little interest in being seen as an adult male. Even his new name, Elliot, is inspired by the boy hero of Spielberg’s E.T. Ceasing to be a woman confers a sort of immunity to time. Carl, who transitions in midlife, is spurred to take action by impending menopause: “I knew menopause, becoming an older woman, would kill me, that menopause would shove my femaleness in my face in a way that would make me too sick to live.”

Suggested reading

Why should lesbians sleep with men?

By Kathleen Stock

In retrospect, the Noughties insistence that Page was different to the other girls could be seen as an excuse to mistreat her peers: by casting them as sluts in contrast to Page’s “good girl” figure, the media could suggest that they deserved what they got. Yet Page received much the same abuse; and her reaction was not entirely different. Rather than responding with public self-destruction, Page redoubled a private war against her own body — now his body. Britney shaved her head; Page removed her breasts; both cut away what gave them away as female. 

It feels a long, sad distance from the woman who once protested that she was entitled to wear whatever made her “comfortable”; longer still from the girl who, back during promo for Juno, spoke up for a woman’s right to be at the centre of her own story. In Pageboy, Page’s girl-self seems passive and tragic: a sleeping beauty, held in suspended animation, afraid to grow up, and kissed without her consent. (There is, I suspect, some retconning here. Achieving a career such as Page’s takes considerable determination, and Page does not suggest this was driven by parental ambition. Yet Page never addresses where this drive to act comes from, or attributes his professional success to more than luck.)

As a “trangender guy”, Page can be Aladdin: the main character, capable of making decisions that affect reality. No more pressure to wear the dress or play the princess. But the fairytale Pageboy reminds me of most of all is the Little Mermaid. In the Hans Christian Andersen original, the mermaid fails to meet the condition of her womanhood. Her suffering ends when she is transformed into one of “the daughters of the air”; finally incorporeal, she makes an impossible, fantastical escape from her betraying body.

On the surface, Pageboy is a euphoric account of Page “finding himself”: the model narrative of the trans memoir. The happy ending is Page waking up in a hospital bed, breastless. Between the lines, though, there’s another story, of a self-hating girl who engineers a flit from femininity. It’s obligatory now to be shocked by the cruelty of Noughties culture. When, I wonder, will we recognise the even greater cruelty of inviting women and girls to barter their body parts for self-determination?

*

Sarah Ditum’s Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties is available to pre-order.

But while the verdict is significant — most of all for Kelly’s many victims — it doesn’t fundamentally alter what we know about him as a man. You could say that his reputation was fixed in 2019, when the documentary Surviving R Kelly revealed his extensive history of predation. But eleven years earlier, he had been tried on child pornography charges in Chicago. He was acquitted, but the trial established the existence of a video featuring a man who looked a lot like Kelly having sex with (and urinating on) a girl who looked a lot like a child.

That videotape was not new information in 2008, however. It had been reported on by the Chicago Sun Times in 2002. By 2003, it was sufficiently well publicised that the comedian Dave Chappelle could include a joke about it in his Comedy Central show — a perfectly executed parody of an R Kelly jam called “Piss on You” (sample lyric: “Your body / Is a Porta Potti.”)

So we, collectively, have known about R Kelly for just shy of two decades.

Even that’s not really accurate, though. The first time I heard of R Kelly, it was 1994 and the occasion was the release of his protégé Aaliyah’s album Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number. Aaliyah made the record when she was fourteen. Kelly, who wrote and produced it, was 26 at the time. The title track means exactly what you think it does: the chorus goes, “Age ain’t nothing but a number / Throwing down ain’t nothing but a thing.” When Kelly gave her those words to sing, he was already having sex with her.

More from this author

Test article

By Sarah Ditum

Back in the 1990s, there was a rumour that Kelly and Aaliyah were married. It was relayed not with shock and disgust, but generally with a salacious frisson. When Aaliyah died in a plane crash in 2001, music critic Kelefa Sanneh wrote this about her in the New York Times:

“She didn’t sing like a little girl — even then, she had a stronger voice and a more sophisticated approach than most pop singers — and she didn’t act like one, either: the child star was reported to be a child bride, secretly married to her mentor, the R & B crooner R Kelly.”

It’s an image of child sexuality as proof of precocity: the “all grown up” little girl, who couldn’t be a victim because she was just so mature for her age.

At Kelly’s New York trial, a very different picture emerged of this relationship. Yes, Kelly had married her when she was fifteen, and he had bribed a government employee to enable it. Their union came about not because she was a femme fatale trapped in a adolescent body, but because Kelly was worried she might be pregnant and wanted to be able to arrange an abortion without consulting her parents. Kelly had come up with the scam in consultation with his accountant and his manager: three adult men conspiring over the problem of a teenage girl’s uterus.

I remember reading about Aaliyah and Kelly at the time (I was thirteen) and feeling disquieted. But I felt very much on my own with whatever doubts I had, and in the years after I wondered whether I was, after all, the one in the wrong: prissy, censorious — even (in that classic phrase of noughties feminism) “denying Aaliyah her agency”. This was before #MeToo, before words like “grooming” were in the popular vocabulary. The framework for talking about this kind of relationship as abuse was only sketchily accessible.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Jenny McCartney

And so Kelly went on making music, having hits, collaborating with artists who I not only loved, but who I obscurely associated with feminism — in 2003 he popped up on a Missy Elliott track, and in 2013 he appeared on Lady Gaga’s “Do What U Want”. (After the release of Surviving R Kelly, Gaga apologised and pulled the track from streaming.)

His persona was so horny, it was tantamount to a joke. Everything he made was an orgy of priapic falsetto, full of promises to “hit it from the front and the back and the side and the side”. His 2005 hip-hop opera Trapped in the Closet is a full-on sex farce delivered with unbelievable earnestness. It all seemed to invite an automatically exonerating question: come on, would someone with a sexual secret put all this out in public? He even released a song called “I Admit It”, in which he admitted to nothing apart from being a victim of “fake people” and his own tendency to “trust too much”. In his trial, he pleaded not guilty.

Those around Aaliyah seemed unperturbed by the fact of a teenage girl delivering a slick hymn to underage sex (her uncle, an entertainment lawyer, had introduced her to Kelly), although they’ve since described their horror at learning about the abuse. Her label was similarly sanguine. Jive even took a second bite at the teenage temptress package when they launched Britney Spears in 1998: at sixteen, dressed in school uniform and panting out provocative lyrics, she was the ultimate refinement of the pop nymphette. It had worked once, and it worked even better the second time.

No one seemed to consider — let alone care — what this role did to the girls playing it. Britney’s testimony at her conservatorship hearings this year sounded, sometimes, like a cry of pain from someone who had spent her entire adult life objectified. She talked about her body as a separate entity to herself: “my precious body, who has worked for my dad for the past fucking thirteen years [the span of the conservatorship], trying to be so good and pretty.”

But in the noughties, objectification was something that women were supposed to enthusiastically embrace. How could it be bad for you if you chose it? But how could you choose anything else? The alternative was to be frigid, no fun, unattractive.

Suggested reading

We are all Britney now

By Mary Harrington

We’ll never know what Aaliyah had to say about her experiences, of course, because she died 20 years ago. From the remove of 2021, though, her careful, constrained public presentation and her precise, reserved artistry can be read as the mark of someone negotiating public life while holding herself out of reach, out of harm. “Where most divas insist on being the center of the song, she knew how to disappear into the music,” Sanneh wrote of her. It sounds like the kind of thing a person carrying deep and private damage might do.

Maybe she’d never have said anything. Kelly’s first trial fell apart largely because the girl who was allegedly in the video refused to testify. “How do you victimize a person,” wondered his defense, “when she says, ‘It’s not me’?” One of the reasons the prosecution succeeded this time was that it built its case on multiple accounts: it mattered less if one witness became uncooperative or could be made to look bad under cross-examination, because the accounts altogether produced their own corroboration.

But it was also important that this case went after racketeering charges, fixing Kelly as the lynchpin of a criminal conspiracy rather than a solo malefactor. Important because it led to a decades-overdue conviction; important, too, because it tells the truth about how these crimes occur. For Kelly to do all he did, he needed collaborators. Sexual abuse, especially at the scale Kelly committed it, is never an individual crime.

Harvey Weinstein’s crimes — and the way he used his production studio Miramax to both access victims and enforce their silence — was an open secret. Jimmy Savile had the BBC and the NHS as the venues for his rapes: the institutions simply delivered the prey and looked the other way. Terry Richardson’s crime scenes were published as fashion editorials. At the time, it just looked “edgy”.

More from this author

Noel Clarke is an everyman

By Sarah Ditum

Impunity will run out when associating with a perpetrator becomes too much of a reputational cost (look how Jeffrey Epstein’s entourage cold-shouldered him at the end), but while it lasts, it’s unbreachable. Kelly knew he had it. “I’m a genius. We should be allowed to do what we want — look at what we give to the world,” he said, according to one of his accusers. But his rule doesn’t just apply to geniuses: in schools, in churches, in care homes, in families too, there’s nearly always some complicity. A blind eye turned, the benefit of the doubt extended.

You could say that the culture of irony which grew up in the Nineties and thrived in the Noughties was the perfect environment for abusers to hide in plain sight. But just because these corruptions happened in previous decades, that doesn’t mean they don’t still happen now. There’s always some class of people you’re not permitted to suspect: someone who’s too powerful or too respected or just by definition too self-evidently good for their motives to be questioned.

In Kelly’s case, the complicity involved, obviously, the members of his entourage who were named in court. But it also implicates other parties, indirectly. That means the record label that winked at the Aaliyah album, a media that smirked at his not-really-confessions, the listeners who let it all fly because they were having a good time. It means me shouldering my own small portion of guilt for the times I ground my hips to “Ignition (Remix)” on a sweaty dance floor. I always, always knew. Everyone did.

Men are barely part of the picture. Ask Google what a “dadager” is, and the first result is the definition of “momager”. Ask it about “tiger dads”, and it wonders whether you might mean golfer Tiger Woods’s actual dad. “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington,” Noel Coward advised: Mr Worthington apparently did not need to be told. Maybe the assumption is that a father would never inflict such pressure on a child. After all, raising children is the woman’s job, and she’s supposed to crack on with it quietly. We make so much more fuss about Mother’s Day than Father’s Day — which is this coming Sunday, not that anyone will notice — perhaps because dads are still seen as supporting acts to mothers, the primary carers (who are always to blame when things go wrong).

But men do, obviously, get involved in their children’s careers. Tiger Woods’s actual dad is one example: he was coaching his son from practically the moment he could toddle. A high-level golfer himself, he knew what making it as a pro would mean for his son, whereas other fathers only get deeply involved when the glory begins. That’s the version of Mitch Winehouse that’s presented in the 2015 documentary Amy: a father who left the family home when the star was a child, reappearing as her career took off to become her effective second manager — and take control of her finances.

It’s a version that Mitch himself has rejected, complaining to an interviewer that the film was “trying to portray me in the worst possible light”. The fact that Amy died in 2011 as a result of alcohol poisoning raises the stakes for his reputation. Was he a caring father doing his best in an impossible situation, or one of the many who profited from Amy while neglecting her wellbeing?

His own book about her is really a long-form testimony for his own defence. All the same, Mitch did OK from his status as “Amy’s dad”. He got to travel the world in her entourage and manage her bank accounts — and writes in his book that “she and I knew that I needed to stop her frittering her money away”. He also got his own portion of fame with a TV series and a record deal. But all this success derived from his daughter.

More from this author

The fake feminism of Fifty Shades

By Sarah Ditum

Tyler James, Amy’s best friend, is at pains in his new memoir My Amy to give Mitch all possible credit and stress how much Amy loved him (remember, she had “Daddy’s girl” tattooed on her bicep). But he also describes Mitch hoping to film Amy for his own documentary, regardless of her reluctance to be involved. Mitch pressing Amy to sign autographs for fans and be in photos, even though she doesn’t want to. Mitch lavishly announcing “we’ll get that” when James is booking his flights. (“I’d think, No, you won’t be getting it Mitch — Amy’s getting it,” writes James. “It wasn’t his money and it did my head in for years.”) Mitch, enjoying every moment of the celebrity that was manifestly tearing his daughter apart.

The most generous thing James can say about Mitch at these moments is this: “He was so caught up in her success I felt like he didn’t see his daughter for who she was anymore, and maybe not even himself.” Within the Winehouse machine, it seems like Mitch lost sight of Amy as an individual. She was just the raw material that supplied the mini-industry around her. Still, no record industry pro came any closer to saving Amy than cab-driver Mitch did. None of the seasoned experts in dealing with substance abuse were any more effective in their interventions.

It is unfortunate that Mitch is fixed forever in that line from “Rehab” where Amy explains she won’t be going because “My daddy says I’m fine.” Mitch accepts that he said this, but “as we carried on talking, though, I saw the other side” — that is, the side he ended up contracted to make a documentary about. His TV series was on families affected by addiction, and he writes that he “wanted the public to know about the heartaches and dilemmas that such people live with.”

Which presumably seemed a good reason to try to get footage of his alcoholic daughter relapsing. God knows life with an addict is impossible, but it’s hard to reconcile Mitch’s apparently simultaneous beliefs that Amy was well enough to tour while also being sick enough to anchor a whole series on the topic of substance abuse. The one thing that unites both positions, though, is the fact that they made money, which has a marvellous power to dissolve scruples.

Suggested Reading

How daughters turn fathers into feminists

By Tom Chivers

If Mitch seems at best naive in retrospect, the most extreme charge against Jamie Spears is the opposite: that he has wilfully run his daughter’s life to his own benefit. Britney is still fighting a legal battle to have her father permanently removed from the conservatorship that has controlled her personal, professional and financial life since her 2008 breakdown. How Jamie came to hold this central role in his daughter’s life is an interesting question in itself, given that (according to the documentary Framing Britney Spears) he was largely absent from her childhood, with her mother doing most of the career running.

But after 2008, it was Jamie who scooped Britney up off the floor and got her back in money-making shape. He set her up with a Vegas residency that made her (and by extension, him) wildly well-off — and which continued until she abruptly announced her “indefinite hiatus” in 2019. Among the #freebritney contingent of her fans, who believe she is being controlled by her father, her withdrawal from work is read as an act of resistance after a lifetime of being treated as a puppet. Her attorney has told the court that she’s “afraid” of her father, and won’t return to work until he’s no longer in control of her career.

Jamie’s not the only dadager who’s ended up putting an axe through his golden goose. If Thora Birch’s career trajectory had continued from where it was 20 years ago, she’d be one of the most famous actresses in the world: American Beauty, Ghost World. But in 2010, her ex-porn-star father got her fired from an off-Broadway play by allegedly interfering in the production, threatening other actors for touching her per direction, and poking his head through windows on the set. She didn’t have another significant role till The Walking Dead in 2020.

More from this author

Why I had a baby at university

By Sarah Ditum

And no one can outdo Thomas Markle when it comes to grifting from your own child: here’s a man who has faked paparazzi photos and sold private correspondence to get a slice from his daughter Meghan’s success in marrying into the royal family. It didn’t matter that she firmly held him at arm’s length. His logic seemed to be that she was his, and he felt entitled to his portion from her. Any boundary she set, he saw as a betrayal. Any infraction he committed was only what a loving father would do. No wonder she didn’t want him walking her down the aisle. He gave her away a long time ago.

It’s a question of possession. Some fathers still treat their children as an extension of themselves, regardless of how post-feudal the rest of the world becomes. When a woman takes the tiger role, she’s being ambitious through her children, and ambition in a woman is always suspect. When it’s a man involving himself in his child’s career, though, he’s merely exercising his patriarchal rights — something he’s apparently entitled to do even if, as in most of the examples, he wasn’t around for much of the actual childhood bit.

Except, if you knew about the #FreeBritney campaign, this felt like something else. Not a tech-flavoured parable about the commoditising effects of the pop industry, but a straight-up retelling of a story about Britney Spears, who for the past 12 years has had no legal control over her life while her family has made every decision for her. In 2008, Britney — who by then had been shockingly famous for a decade, since the release of “… Baby One More Time” — had a very public breakdown. She shaved her head. She attacked the paparazzi. She lost custody of her children for a time. She was taken into hospital strapped to a gurney, and all this was harrowingly documented by the eager press.

Around this time, I woke up in the middle of the night, turned on the World Service, caught the latest update on the Britney situation, and semi-consciously decided that the first thing I would do the next morning would be to write Britney a letter inviting her to stay with me. She just needed someone to look out for her for a bit, and boy am I good at looking out for Britney, who I’ve loved since the first time I saw the “Baby” video. I put a poster of Britney in her teenage bedroom in my own teenage bedroom and had to, excruciatingly, un-out myself when this led everyone to assume I was mostly into girls.

No pop star has ever arrived with such a perfect statement of what they are, and what they mean. Here’s the former Disney Mousketeer, now 16, surrounded by a pounding Max Martin production, big-eyed in school uniform and moaning out every word, absolutely desperate with desire — with love, because Britney’s S&M-skirting invitation to hit her (figuratively!) one more time is all directed at one baby. And of course, we all knew she was a virgin. That was part of the sell. She had to be in on it, didn’t she?

Maybe my 17-year-old self was making some generous assumptions about how far Britney was directing this, but don’t teenage girls always make generous assumptions about their command over the world? Anyway, the Britney template was established: half unstoppable purpose (hit me!), half hopeless supplication (when I’m not with you I lose my mind!). On top of this, by her second album, the irresistible phoniness of this confection was being acknowledged in songs like “Lucky”, a ballad about a “Hollywood girl” who’s “lost in an image, in a dream.” She had to be in on it. Didn’t she?

more from this author

The sly sexism of the OK Karen meme

By Sarah ditum

The best of Britney’s fame songs is probably “Piece of Me”, which was released in November 2007. In it, Britney — by then well into her “hot mess” era, with two broken marriages and one abortive rehab stint — goes in on her tabloid image. “I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17… Mrs She’s Too Big, Now She’s Too Thin,” she chants. The refrain is classic Britney, part come-on and part threat: “You wanna piece of me?” It sounded like someone throwing her own coverage back in the media’s face and taking charge.

A few months later, she was strapped to that gurney and in charge of nothing. From that point, amid rumours of mental illness and substance abuse, she was put under a court-ordered conservatorship, which gave her father control over essentially her entire life — her finances, as well as her physical and mental health. In the public account of the Britney story, this is where the show got back on the road. Head shaving: out. In: mammothly profitable Las Vegas residencies. I saw the touring version in Scarborough, in 2018, and God she was good when she was performing.

When she wasn’t in motion, though, she seemed a little vacant, and I’m not fully sure she knew she was in Scarborough (the best we got was a “Hello UK!”). This is where a second version of the Britney story cuts in, the one that’s been assembled by supposition and guesswork. This is the version the #FreeBritney campaign is working to. For them, Britney, like fictional Ashley O in Black Mirror, has been wholly co-opted by the people around her — her family — who they believe are exploiting her for maximum financial gain. The ACLU has even offered to support her in challenging the conservatorship arrangement. Her latest attempt to remove her father from her affairs was just deferred by a court till 2021.

suggested reading

Why Jeffrey Epstein deserves to be forgotten

By louise perry

What’s actually going on with Britney is difficult to say, because the hearings on her conservatorship are all closed, and her family deny any charge of acting against Britney’s best interests. Fans have been left picking over her social media for clues, which is, it’s fair to say, opaque. But even the most generous guess at what’s happening leaves a bad taste. If this is a woman who really is incompetent to run her own life, and has to be overseen in every particular by her guardians, why was I squealing away in the stands watching her do hot Thatcherite self-determination anthem “Work Bitch”?

Being a hypocrite, I guess. Being a fan. Getting my piece of her. Other artists play off their persona and their private lives in their music: Gaga, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift — in fact, all the most exciting pop stars since Britney have followed her in making their music primarily a record of their relationship to fame. But with Britney, it seems as though the image long ago outran the woman underneath it, and even the supporters who want to free her still want her to be their Britney.

The most heartbreakingly implausible bit of that Black Mirror is that the pop star character gets her liberation, because it’s hard to see Britney’s way out. If she succeeds in cutting her father from the conservatorship — even if she’s eventually deemed too competent to be released from it entirely — what does freedom look like for someone whose entire adult life has been spent being famous for being Britney Spears? The most constricting part of celebrity isn’t the people who hate you: it’s the people who think they love you, and who think that love means they own you.