Tavi Gevinson On Britney Spears, The Sexualization of Teen Girls, And Abusive Relationships
“Why did I ever believe a teen girl could hold all the power?” @tavitulle writes https://t.co/AmxRAeYIYN
- The Cut (@TheCut) February 23, 2021
Tavi Gevinson took to The Cut today to write a piece spurred by the recent documentary, Framing Britney Spears. It's very good and I recommend reading the whole thing!
But since ONTD doesn't read, here are some choice quotes:
[On Britney]
• "By suggesting she once had complete control, the documentary fuels the sense of injustice when that control is then taken away. The result is a documentary eager to characterize Spears’s early image as an expression of female power rather than the corporation-sanctioned sexualization of a 16-year-old. [...] The filmmakers do not acknowledge how Spears’s agency may have been compromised by her age, the stakes of wealth and fame, or the influence of the adults around her. They also do not engage the messier implications of the virginal-but-sexy archetype: Here is a girl who can perform sex for an audience’s benefit, but who, thank God, has not yet been tainted by experience. America’s response to Spears was puritanical, but so was the fantasy her image fulfilled."
• "There is no need to believe it’s either Everything was Britney’s choice, and therefore she was always a sex-positive feminist or Nothing was Britney’s choice, and the evil adults made all her decisions. Both assertions sound desperate to protect her respectability - another version of her purity, in fact - as a prerequisite for compassion. They remind me of how readily conversations about abuse and assault focus on the moral character of the victim in order to confirm that they have indeed been victimized."
[On Her Own Sexualization As A Teenager]
• "When I entered the world of adult men as an 18-year-old, I was aware that I’d been granted access, visibility, and currency through my whiteness, thinness, cis-ness-what Janet Mock calls pretty privilege - as well as my social status. I could not reconcile my awareness of my power - and all the safety it promised - with the idea that I was also vulnerable in any way. But at the same time that beauty can confer currency, it also enforces, rather than cancels out, male dominance."
[On Her Own Past Abusive Relationship]
• "One of them already had a good handle on this argument when I was 18. He seemed to believe that, given my professional credentials, I was above harm or that my purported emotional maturity implied consent - because if you are really mature, you are a willing and enthusiastic sexual partner, and if you don’t already know that, perhaps a few rounds of badgering, defying your “no” and “That makes me uncomfortable,” will teach you; surely, no one as powerful as you would ever actually do something she didn’t truly want to do. He also seemed to believe, like I did, that my status in the world canceled out the power he wielded as an adult man. Perhaps people around me also worried they would be doubting my autonomy if they suggested I was in an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship."
• "When my abuser said he thought that it was I who “had all the power” while he was a hapless, insecure, wealthy, much-older-than-me man who didn’t know what he was doing, I at first believed him. I was in a splashy phase of my career. I did get us into parties. I was insecure, too, and terrified of appearing naïve, but I was also aware that my youth was an asset, no matter how uncertainly I wore it, and from that I could muster up a performance of self-assurance, and so: I was outwardly confident. But as the writer Anna Wiener put it to me, “Confidence is not a vector of power.”
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