Stop expecting Britney Spears to be “normal”
About two weeks ago, the dramatic saga of Britney Spears’ volatile home life became fodder for public scrutiny once again when headlines published claims that the pop princess was being investigated for “battery.”
Initial headlines were alarming, however, the details which followed revealed much murkier territory of wrongdoing. From what’s been currently made public, the incident at hand involved a dispute between Britney and her household staff. According to TMZ, two weeks prior, Britney’s dogs had been taken from her home for a veterinarian visit and had yet to return. When Britney confronted her housekeeper, supposedly under the impression that the missing dogs were a part of a plot directed by her father and legal co-conservator, Jamie Spears, the housekeeper attempted to show photos of the dogs being ill on her phone, expressing that members of Britney’s staff thought her pets were being neglected and needed to be removed. Britney then allegedly slapped the phone out of the housekeeper’s hand, prompting her to file battery charges.
The Ventura Country Sheriff who received the complaint expressed that the media attention was overblown and called the dispute “extremely minor.” Just a few days ago, the District Attorney’s office announced that no charges are to be filed against Britney, citing insufficient evidence that a crime had been committed as well as a lack of injury or significant damage to the alleged victim. Despite this victory, Britney’s reputation hasn’t gone completely unscathed by the incident, especially given that her mental stability is a front-and-center concern in the ongoing battle to end her 13-year-long conservatorship.
What may be worse is the allegations that followed. On August 21st, two days after the initial battery accusations became public, TMZ published claims from the housekeeper alleging that Britney’s dogs were so mistreated they were “near death” due to poor diets and dehydration (for the record, there are plenty of legal ways to report animal abuse and neglect that don’t involve literally stealing someone else’s dogs).
As a Britney stan and dog lover, reports that Britney might be a shit pet parent are certainly disappointing, but we should first take them with a grain of salt. For one thing, while they have no proven financial ties to Britney’s conservators, it’s long been suspected that TMZ has been working as a mouthpiece for Jamie Spears’ agenda for much of the #FreeBritney uprising; they regularly gain “exclusives” from Britney’s camp, headed by Jamie, and the spin of their articles is almost always pro-conservatorship. Apart from that, though we don’t know which journals and tabloids he has in his pocket, we do know that Jamie Spears remains the conservator of Britney’s estate–meaning that all of Britney’s employees work at the discretion of Jamie. It’s vital to remember that everyone on the Britney Spears payroll would be financially wise to consider the interests of Jamies Spears above the interests of his conservatee, making the actions and motivations of Britney’s housekeeper (and her security staff in an adjacent story) a little suspect.
Suspicious circumstances aside, as much as I find the allegations against Britney’s dog parenting disappointing should they be true, I can’t say I’d be all that surprised if they were. Celebrities often make terrible pet parents. Content warning for grossness: Justin Bieber had his pet monkey confiscated in Germany after he insisted on bringing the animal (who belonged to an endangered species and should not have been kept as a pet in the first place) on tour with him, despite “everybody” in his camp warning him not to. Frances Bean Cobain alleged in court documents that her mother, Courtney Love, was responsible for two of her pets’ deaths–one getting tangled in trash inside their home and one swallowing Courtney’s prescription pills. After failing to get him neutered for six months, Paris Hilton once allegedly abandoned her cat at a veterinarian’s office for over a week until the cat was rescued by the Kris Kelly Foundation. Following that news story, Gawker published claims that Paris was known by household staff for locking pets in closets until they died (not for funzies–it seems she just forgot about them).
It’s apparent that the closer one gets to the upper echelons of celebrity, the further they are from the average adult’s sense of entitlement and responsibility. Mariah Carey supposedly forces her assistants to wash her hair in the shower and “cannot operate a microwave.” Do you really think she’s going outside with her dogs, little poop-bags in tow?
Now, who should actually claim the responsibility for taking care of Britney Spears’ dogs is up for debate. Mariah Carey might not be picking up her own pets’ poop, but she probably has someone hired to do that. Britney evidently has a pet-sitter as the current allegations of theft claim her pet-sitter is the one who housed the dogs in the weeks that they were missing from Britney’s home. We don’t know the parameters of their agreement, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that if Britney’s dogs really were dehydrated and “near death,” the dog-sitter might be partially to blame depending on the role they’re supposed to be playing in their wellbeing.
More important than that, however, we have to consider the fact that Britney, since 2008, has been legally deemed incapable of taking care of herself. While claims that she’s too incapacitated to exercise her basic rights as an adult are obviously exaggerated given her very public professional output over the last 13 years, she’s essentially been treated as a non-functioning person for over a decade. She cannot make purchases, see friends, parent her children, or exercise her reproductive rights without her conservators’ approval. By that fact, it’s kind of unreasonable to assume that the responsibility Britney is unable to exercise over her own body should somehow translate positively to the responsibility she apparently exercises as a pet owner. Why should we expect sensible decisions to come from someone unable to make even the most basic personal decisions for a majority of their adult life?
This is the biggest conundrum Britney Spears will face the closer she gets to freedom. Mistakes are a human right that every single one of us uses as a catalyst for growth and learning, but Britney’s conservators maintain control by asserting that Britney’s mistakes would be too massive to overlook. It’s up to them to oversee every aspect of Britney’s life because she supposedly can’t be trusted to make reasonable decisions; but if she isn’t able to make any decisions, how can she prepare herself to behave as an informed, responsible adult once the conservatorship is eliminated?
The notion that Britney Spears should just somehow act responsibly when she’s had next-to-no practice being responsible for her own person is absurd. It’s also absurd to expect Britney to be “normal,” and yet every time she uploads a selfie or dancing video onto her Instagram, messages of “concern” flood social media. There’s a prevailing notion online, even within the #FreeBritney movement, that Britney Spears’ Instagram posts are exceptionally odd. Britney can hardly upload a simple selfie without legions of commenters claiming they’re worried about her mental health–comments like “she’s not alright guys” and “her head is seriously f’ed up if she thinks this is okay” (that last comment came on a video of Britney innocently doing yoga at the beach). Exploitative tabloids often make these comments into headlines, publishing articles like “Britney Spears’ latest Instagram post leaves fans worried” or “'The scariest one yet': Britney Spears' latest Instagram videos have fans more alarmed than ever.”
What the standards are for truly weird social media output is hard to define. Britney isn’t posting anything violent or obscene; her captions are sometimes difficult to parse grammatically with her over-use of emojis, spaces, and ellipses, but they’re never incomprehensible. Her posts are usually just at-home selfies, photos taken from Pinterest and other IG accounts, or videos of her dancing unchoreographed in her living room. In a world in which Britney Spears isn’t constantly being assessed by strangers convinced she’s in a nonstop mental health crisis, it’d be easy to imagine her Instagram posts being recognized as charming content coming from a somewhat sheltered mid-to-late-thirties mom. The break-through #FreeBritney podcast, Britney’s Gram, previously deemed her Instagram “the happiest place on the Internet,” Vulture called it “pure,” and yet it’s often used as proof that Britney is mentally unstable.
Granted, sometimes her uploads do seem strange for a person of her status–with all the re-uploads and sporadic emoji placements, you’d wonder what her social media manager is even hired to do–but I’d hardly classify Britney’s Instagram updates as the weirdest social media output even of other celebrities. Cher’s tweets are far more incoherent (love you, Cher), and Kanye West is known for going on random Twitter tirades so loaded in emotional baggage that he blows up his own personal relationships for public view. Even celebs known for having their shit together occasionally get kinda sloppy online:
Some Britney stans are convinced that her Instagram posts are illegitimate, asserting that most or all are created by Britney’s social media manager alongside her conservators in a plot to make her look “crazy.” Admittedly, there are a few that are suspect–not necessarily because they’re so odd, but because they read as conservatorship-approved PR while Britney has indicated some of the account’s positivity is a farce–and until she regains full control of her life and career, we should consider that not everything released under the Britney Spears brand necessarily comes from Britney Spears herself. It is also very likely true, however, that Britney Spears just doesn’t care to have a polished social media presence, and strange Instagram posts (at least “strange” by the caliber we’re currently discussing) should never be used as reasoning for a measure as extreme as a conservatorship. Maybe Jamie Spears is trying to set Britney up, but if not being social-media-savvy could be used as a basis for the removal of one’s rights, quite a lot of our boomer relatives should be seeking guardianship right away.
Really, your grandma who hasn’t uploaded a profile picture since joining Facebook six years ago and keeps signing her name at the end of comments probably has more experience using social media apps and websites than Britney Spears. Stories have varied, but most sources indicate that Britney's access to the Internet is limited and on a varying basis. During an interview with US Magazine in 2011, Britney claimed to not own a cell phone. In 2012, it was reported that her co-conservators–at the time, her father, Jamie, and her then-fiance, Jason Trawick–agreed to “restrict” and “heavily monitor” Britney’s phone usage as well as block certain websites on her computer. In May of 2019, The Washington Post claimed that she did not have an email address. That same month, TMZ alleged that Britney again does not have a phone due to her father’s concerns over social media; Britney allegedly voiced a complaint about this to the judge in her conservatorship case, but the judge sided against her.
Differing reports about her technology use lead to some questions about Britney’s exposure to social media. Sure she’s creating at least a portion of the posts uploaded to her accounts (even if you’re really down the rabbit hole and think Britney is not writing her captions or choosing her photos, she clearly is taking selfies and recording the videos in which she’s addressing the camera, meaning she is making some contribution to the content), but how much does she get to browse? If you’re really worried about her social media output (which is already a comical concern given its absolute harmlessness), exactly what knowledge of Internet culture and online PR is Britney expected to be exercising given her limited experience as an unrestricted user?
The fact is, Britney Spears has had an extremely unusual life with circumstances most people could never imagine themselves in, nor would many wish to. As plenty of 2000s retrospectives–likely catalyzed by the release of Framing Britney Spears–have pointed out this year, Britney has been the victim of fame and a vulturous celebrity culture since she was a sixteen-year-old girl. The trauma that came along with this has been exhaustingly documented as it accumulated into Britney’s infamous “breakdown” of 2007. Since then, she’s been victimized and traumatized many times over, first with the loss of her basic rights in 2008, then continuously within the ongoing conservatorship she’s deemed abusive, comparing herself to a human trafficking victim. Britney Spears has been made to take lithium, undergo treatment in a psychiatric facility she claims abused her, and keep an IUD in her body against her will, all while being threatened with loss of custody of her children should she speak out or misbehave according to her conservators’ guidelines.
Through their own influence and privilege, the average celebrity gains an outlook on the world and their place within it that already doesn’t adhere to the average person’s sense of personal responsibility, and Britney’s case is even more dramatic. She likely has no sense of responsibility for her life, not just because of her privilege as a celebrity, but because those with legal authority over her life have actively prevented her from being responsible. The expectation that Britney Spears should always be acting “normal” or even emotionally stable is not only ridiculous in its logic, it’s actively harmful to her fight for freedom. Abusive conservatorships thrive on the perceptions that the conservatees they entrap are mentally unstable, but abuse breeds instability. Britney’s conservators can isolate her completely, preventing her from gaining the skills of a fully functioning adult and traumatizing her until she acts out; they’ll then use her abnormal behavior as proof her captivity is necessary for her own safety.
When or if Britney makes it out of her conservatorship, she will make mistakes. Maybe even colossal ones. Her Instagram could get weirder, she might trust the wrong people or say the wrong things in interviews, and I shudder to think about what may happen should she get exposed to Twitter (I wish I hadn’t been for the sake of my own mental health). None of that will mean she hasn’t earned her freedom. It’s her right to fuck up and be a little strange sometimes; I just hope she gets a more involved pet-sitter in the future.