‘Framing Britney Spears’ hits close to home, highlights mental health impacts of sexism
“Framing Britney Spears,” viewers saw a gifted female pop star brought to her knees by a sexist culture that never let her freely live. Many women of the ’90s also saw themselves.
Culture held Spears up as an all American girl, but had her walk a tight line: look stunning but embody the girl next door, act sexy but remain virginial, be articulate but never opinionated.
“I mean, it’s just all too much to ask of one girl,” said journalist Allison Yarrow, who authored a book about feminism in the 1990s.
On its surface, “Framing Britney” is a bruising look at the extraordinary demise of Spears – her explosive success marred by a mental health struggle which led to the legal conservatorship that stripped her of autonomy. But while Spears’ story is magnified by her wealth and fame, the impossible standards to which she were held are familiar to the girls who idolized her.
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Gender experts say the ’90s was a decade of contradiction. Women continued to break barriers in male-dominated professions, daughters of second wave feminists came of age and the riot grrrl movement pushed for social change. But there were also the empty promises of “girl power,” the narrow beauty standards of teen magazines, and a hostile 24/7 media machine that sought to objectify and demonize girls and women at every turn. From Monica Lewinsky to Anita Hill to Lorena Bobbitt to Spears, women were the story – and often the punchline.
These unrealistic expectations didn’t just have consequences for Spears’ own mental health, but for other girls who followed the spectacle.
gender stereotypes lead to harmful outcomes, which for girls can include depression and exposure to violence.
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These stereotypes pre-date Spears, but at the time she came of age the structural forces of misogyny and sexism were thrust onto a larger stage, Yarrow said, in large part because of the 24/7 news cycle.
“Women were at the center of these major ’90s stories, and now they were being told, on television, on this new medium, all the time, in this really infotainment way,” she said.
The rise of teen magazines were also damning for girlhood in the ’90s, Yarrow said.
“Seventeen and Teen and YM, these magazines all exploded in the ’90s, and they really sold girls on this image of perfection that was thin, white, blonde, giving off the appearance of being sexually pleasing and available without actually having sex,” she said. “I subscribed to those magazines.”
The media reduced women to caricatures. It was bad for white women like Spears and Lewinsky – who has said her public treatment after an affair with former President Bill Clinton led to post-traumatic stress disorder – and worse yet for Black woman, like Hill, who faced the dual forces of misogyny and racism.
In her reporting Yarrow found 70% of elementary school girls at the time said magazines influenced their idea of the ideal body, and half said the kinds of pictures they saw in magazines contributed to their anorexia, bulimia and self-harm behaviors.
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“We focused on the pop star, as opposed to this extremely sexist culture and machine behind the pop star which had very little concern for how that person as a human being was doing,” Gruys said.
Spears deteriorated in the public eye, her demise culminating in what many of us perceived as a mental health breakdown – the shaved head, the infamous incident with the green umbrella.
It was shortly after that Spears’ father was given legal control of Spears’ estate, her career and her personal life, including the management of her mental health. Spears has for years tried to remove her father from this role.
