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CULTURE:
Spearsenfreude!
by Marrit
Ingman
On a news day the headlines should not read, in order:
Insurgents offer to halt attacks in Iraq
Palestinians hoard food in fear of siege
Va. Senate race heats up over flag burning
Survivor says Sago miners expected rescue
Raptors take Bargnani with No. 1 pick
Pregnant Spears poses nude for magazine
So, Washington D.C. is underwater, those various violent people we categorize as "insurgents" are offering a truce, Israel has invaded the Gaza strip, and some idiots are trying to distract us with the usual gimmick of Our Values as Americans. Obligatory thing on the miners, some sports thing, and boom: Pregnant Spears poses nude for magazine. Nakey pics of Britney Spears are international news (I repeat: at the time of this writing, Israel has infantry on the Gaza strip, and Palestinians are hoarding food in fear of a siege. What, you're clicking on the link to Britney Spears?).
Oh yes I did. I looked at pregnant Britney Spears. I thought she looked pretty good, considering the run of bad luck she's been having since I don't know when. Then I wondered why I was looking at pregnant pictures of a stranger. I see lots of people’s pregnant pictures—plenty of them naked, but none with that net stuff over their heads and weird chunky jewelry—on moms’ boards; women share these things as part of a friendship. Why was Britney showing me hers?
I've never met her and I have no reason whatsoever to be involved in the narrative of her life. But I am. We all are. The woman is our official scapegoat--an object of scorn at which we fling our disgust in order to purge ourselves of our own flaws. We love it when she nearly drops her baby while holding fast to her drink. We love it when she drives SP around on her lap or buckled, hatless, into a wrongly-positioned car seat. We love the way SP’s babydaddy is trying to save the penny, the way she colors her hair while she’s pregnant. We love it when she falls apart on Dateline, when she has an elective caesarian because birth is so icky. We like it when she cusses with her mic on and throws milkshakes at the paparrazi. We like it when she almost has a manny, and we like it when SP topples out of his highchair.
(continued at right)
Why do we hate Britney so? Partly it’s the music. We
want revenge for the music. For Crossroads. For that Pepsi commercial with
Bob Dole. For her protestations of virginity despite her trashy schoolgirl
costumes and Madonna kisses. Britney and her handlers have not been kind to
the world’s people. Now we see the other shoe drop for her, and Americans
love nothing better than savaging our celebrities when their luck is down. But partly it’s motherhood. Mothers are notoriously
competitive with each other for a complex set of reasons, not the least of
which is how we’re always being egged on—encouraged to fight over our
differences instead of allowing our similarities to unite us. Each of us
abides with judgment: we judge and we feel judged by what our children wear,
by their apparent health and size and temperament, by the state of our bodies
and our minds, by our relationships, by our sleeping arrangements and feeding
methods and discipline. None of us has the privacy Britney begged for on
Dateline. At times we all feel, as Anne Lamott wrote, that we are merely
babysitting and the “real” parents will show up any minute. At times we
all fear that we’re screwing up our kids even as we exhaust ourselves
tending to them and worrying about them. We are on alert for disapproving
looks and rude comments in public—because we’re yelling at our kids and
we shouldn’t or because we’re not yelling at our kids and we should;
because we’re letting our kids eat some kind of unwholesome processed food
or because we’re too uptight about diet and we’re going to give our
children compulsions and complexes; because we’re sloppy and frumpy or
because we’re vain and shallow; because we’re apparently too young or too
old; because we’re too poor or too pampered; because we work too much or
not enough. Everyone is entitled to an opinion of mothers and their
mothering, and it is rarely communicated constructively. Fortunately we all have Britney to serve as our Bad
Parenting Barbie. She’s the world’s easiest target, and she takes the
heat off everyone. She is white and young and rich and lucky and healthy, and
she cleans up well, but she’s still screwing up. So we get to whisper
behind our hands—can you believe she actually married that loser?—and
forget about our own tender places, so vulnerable to injury. We like to think
it’s fluff, as celebrity dish so often is, or that we have the purest of
motives: concern for her well-being and for that of her children. But all of
us have a vindictive streak in our hearts for Britney, too. It comes from the
pressure to be perfect and the inevitability of failure. Instead of yelling at Britney we should be teaching her.
I learned the nuts and bolts of motherhood partly from my own mother but also
from the world of mothers around me—the woman at the La Leche League who
showed me how to use my sling without strangling myself, the friend of a
friend who tactfully pointed out that the buckle on my car seat was actually
padded and could be placed more comfortably on my infant son’s groin, the
mothers and fathers who modeled good nutrition and discipline for me, who
loaned me books and let me hold their children while I was pregnant and
scared, who called me to check up on me when I was depressed and isolated.
Britney doesn’t have that. She doesn’t have a tribe. She only gets the
sucky parts: the sniping and snark, the parody on the Jimmy Kimmel Show, and
the judgment. Oh, the judgment.
Now, I am not defending any of her decisions. Even I
stopped coloring my hair when I was pregnant, and I couldn’t possibly do
anything to a milkshake besides drink it. I had the nice people at the DPS
checkpoint approve my car-seat installation. I thrifted at every store in
town to find a hat that would stay on my kid’s head. I know this stuff is
important. But such schadenfreude! We take such delight in watching someone
else screw every single thing up so publicly. No matter who you are, you
probably make better choices than Britney Spears does—unless, of course,
you are Britney Spears. If you are married, you probably chose a better
spouse than Kevin Federline, fresh off having a baby with another woman. You
might have to sometimes feed your kids crap, but you are probably not widely
gossiped about as giving your infant ice cream. You might have bobbled a kid
but not dropped him—I had exactly one such misstep trying to wedge a
squirming one-year-old into a sling with some of its fabric tucked up—but
you probably didn’t do it in front of a whole lot of photographers (if a
dozen photographers or more had been waiting for me to come out of Thrift Land and bobble my kid in his sling, I probably would have had a hysterical
breakdown and cried for a gun. Well, maybe not a gun. But I’d have been a
little edgy, I think). Your parents might be controlling and nosy, but
Britney’s are worse. Her acne is worse. Her clothes are worse. Her diet is
worse. Her driving is worse. Isn’t it great?
____________________
About the Author:
Marrit Ingman is a freelance writer, film critic,
occasional educator, and constant mother. She is a
frequent contributor to the Austin Chronicle, and her
writing on popular culture has also appeared in Brain, Child, Fertile
Ground, Alternet.org, Clamor, and Venus. Her first book,
Inconsolable: How I Threw My
Mental Health out with the Diapers, describes her
experience with postpartum depression and was
published in 2005 by Seal Press.
