“As performers, we girls have our hair,” Britney Spears writes in her new memoir, The Woman in Me, while touching on her record-breaking Las Vegas residency and her strict conservatorship. “Everyone who was making money off me wanted me to move my hair, and I knew it – and so I did everything but that.” Audiences did indeed notice Spears’s lack of spark during the four-year residency, which began in 2013. “The singer’s presence felt so diminished – her dancing a tentative shadow of what it used to be,” reads a review in the Los Angeles Times. To many, it seemed like Spears had simply lost her touch. What they couldn’t have known was that her tenseness was deliberate: “I didn’t toss my hair or flirt. I did the moves and I sang the notes, but I didn’t put the fire behind it," she writes.
If there is an underlying theme to The Woman in Me, it is this: despite the level of control that was exerted over her life, Britney never lost full agency. In fact, she found power wherever she could. “By holding back onstage, I was trying to rebel in some way, even if I was the only one who knew that was what was happening,” writes Spears. “I became a robot. But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot. I became more of an entity than a person onstage. I had always felt music in my bones and my blood; they stole that from me.”
In The Woman in Me, Spears revisits some of the darkest moments of her mental health struggles, many of which played out in the public eye. But even in moments when she seemed most disoriented, Spears always knew what she was doing. In 2007, for instance, when Spears famously shaved her head, the press were quick to call the headline-making moment a mental breakdown. Yet, in her telling, it was more of an act of rebellion. “My long hair was a big part of what people liked – I knew that. I knew a lot of guys thought long hair was hot,” writes Spears. “Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you… I was tired of it.”
Around this time, Spears released Blackout, her masterful pop album featuring tracks such as “Gimme More” and “Piece of Me”. “Recording for Blackout, I felt so much freedom,” writes Spears. “I loved that no one was overthinking things and that I got to say what I liked and didn’t like… Despite my reputation at the time, I was focused and excited to work when I came in. It’s one of the most satisfying albums I ever made.”
Spears has always deserved more credit than we’ve given her – and still does. Near the end of her memoir, the pop star touches on her polarising Instagram page, where she regularly broadcasts the kind of behaviour usually masked from public view: dancing with abandon, posting nudes, and trying on new clothes in a chaotic, haphazard manner.
To many, Spears’s content is cringe-worthy – something that’s hard to look at (or away from). But for the star, it’s another means of regaining agency – to have autonomy over what she posts, and how she posts it. “I know that a lot of people don’t understand why I love taking pictures of myself naked or in new dresses,” writes Spears. “But I think if they’d been photographed by other people thousands of times, prodded and posed for other people’s approval, they’d understand that I get a lot of joy from posing the way I feel sexy and taking my own picture, dong whatever I want with it.”
We are living in a moment of reevaluation – both of Britney, and the larger ecosystem surrounding ’90s and ’00s female celebrities who were targeted, manipulated, and even abused for the sake of entertainment. But the narrative that’s offered – more directly than ever before – is that Britney has always been at least somewhat in control of her own image.
And now, she simply doesn’t care what you think of her. Because, for the first time in a long time, she finally has the ability to call the shots. “There’s been a lot of speculation about how I’m doing,” Spears writes. “I finally get to do what I want, when I want… Freedom means that I get to be as beautifully imperfect as everyone else.”
