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Reviews Aimee Mann Lyrics and Gendered Language Patterns Policy Reflections
on Our Wounded
Identities in Law
Holy Trouble To Make a Dragon Move To Rescue or Research Pornography: Subjectivity and Gender-Identity in Cyberspace GWU Resources
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Why Britney Spears Matters
“My little sister is going to be Britney Spears
for Halloween, and she’s only nine-years-old!” Gina informed me looking
upset, afraid that her little sister might be growing up too fast.
“Did you see Britney at the MTV Movie
Awards? She was naked!”
My roommate seemed appalled when recalling the scanty outfit Spears
stripped down to on national television.
“My daughter grew up with two very feminist
moms, and she still wants to be Britney Spears!”
My professor hardly seemed happy with this fact.
When I visited my family in Los Angeles
this summer, my cousin took special pride in showing me the elaborately
choreographed dance she had worked out to Spears’ hit song “Oops, I Did
It Again.” I must admit that
I was not too excited to see her lip-synching the words “I’m not that
innocent” at the tender age of six.
These incidents indicate Britney Spears’
prevalence as a pre-teen pop culture icon.
Spears, along with her colleagues Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson,
Mandy Moore and many others, are ever present on the “Top 40,” make frequent
appearances on MTV, and can often be found on magazine covers and in photo
spreads. Spears is especially
popular among pre-teen girls, who buy her records, singing and dancing
along to the lyrics. These
lyrics often deal with love, lust, and sex—topics some consider too mature
for the young girls targeted by Spears’ marketing.
Young women today are maturing at increasingly earlier ages, and
the sexual messages in Spears’ songs may simply be satisfying an existing
demand for these types of songs.
On the other hand, her sexy image and provocative lyrics may be
creating the demand in young women, sending harmful messages about what
it means to be a young woman within American culture.
Is Britney Spears the newest manifestation of “girl power,” and
does this make her a feminist role model?
Or does she perpetuate stereotypes of thin women as sex symbols?
Does she provide a healthy outlet for girls to examine their sexuality?
Or does she force sexuality upon young girls, before they are ready?
These are the questions that I am in interested in exploring.
It is too soon to gauge Spears’ lasting influence on young women
and the feminist movement. However,
by making comparisons to girl groups of the early 1960s, who’s influence
can now be analyzed, then perhaps Spears can be better understood in the
present. In her piece Why The
Shirelles Mattered, Susan Douglas reflects on groups like the Shirelles
and their impact on the girls who listened to them. Overall, Douglas believed that these groups, while singing
about love and lust, about being assertive or submissive, were a positive
influence in the lives of women in the early sixties.
When speaking about early pop music songs, she explains “although
they were mass-produced they were individually interpreted.
The songs were ours—but the were also everyone else’s…we found
solidarity as girls” (499). This certainly holds true for Spears’ songs.
Spears is often criticized for having mass-produced songs that
someone else wrote for her. However, these songs have mass appeal which Douglas considers
a strength. Pre-teen girls,
in the midst of forging an identity among their peers can certainly find
solidarity by singing out the words to “Hit Me Baby One More Time” together.
At the very least, Spears’ music will serve to unite women twenty
years from now who will still know all the words to the catchy tunes as
they play over the oldies radio station.
At the same time, depending on each girl’s individual knowledge
and experience, the songs will be interpreted differently.
The lyrics give voice to a range of emotions that girls may have
and be unable to express otherwise.
Another positive quality of pop music is that it can give conflicting
emotions a voice, something that can aid in the process of growing up.
As Douglas put it, girl groups “gave voice to all the warring selves
inside us struggling, blindly and with a crushing sense of insecurity,
to forge something resembling a coherent identity…girl group music let
us try on and act out a host
of different identities, from traditional, obedient girlfriend to brassy,
independent rebel, and lots in between” (500).
Spears’ music serves the same purposes.
By singing along to her lyrics, girls can try out different aspects
of their emerging identity with minimal commitment.
They can be the passive, catholic school girl singing “my loneliness
is killing me…when I’m not with you I lose my mind…” or they can be the
sophisticated heartbreaker singing “I played with your heart, it got lost
in the game…I’m not that innocent.”
Like the girl groups of the sixties, Spears’ music covers a range
of emotions and identities, and young girls need to know that these conflicting
identities are normal and healthy.
It is good for them to know that someone else feels the same way.
However, there are problems with the different images Spears has
portrayed over the course of her two albums.
Some of the same praise-worthy behavior of girl groups in the sixties
is problematic by the late nineties, and that can be attributed to the
change society as a whole has undertaken in the past 35 years.
The girl groups that Douglas praises came about in a time when
no one was acknowledging that young women were sexual beings. “Sexuality emerged as an eternal ache, a kind of irresistible,
unquenchable tension. But
in the early 1960s, sex and sexual desire were still scary for many girls”
(503). Girl groups provided
answers during a time when girls were not supposed to be asking certain
questions. Times have changed.
In the present, young girls are far more knowledgeable about sex
than they ever were in the 1960s.
Since sexuality is less of a curiosity, it may be time to integrate
other themes into pop music and further expand the roles girls can take
on when singing along to their favorite pop star.
While Spears covers a range of different sex roles, she rarely
covers topics outside the realm of love and passion.
Her young fans may get the idea that while a woman can take care
on many roles sexually, her main source of identification remains sexual.
As stated in the journal Marketing
to Women: Spears projects an image that encourages young girls to identify with her, but because 6-10-year-olds are in the process of developing their sense of self, they may come away with a skewed perspective of what makes a woman admirable. Some psychologists believe that identifying with a Lolita-esque pop star like Spears can instill young girls with the belief that sex appeal is the only thing that makes a women powerful. (8) Spears
is doing the same thing that made girl groups in the 60s a positive influence
on young girls’ lives back then.
Now, the same behavior might prove harmful to a girl’s self-image
because young girls lack adequate messages about identities that are not
sexual. Were Spears to expand
her image to include intellectual, career-driven, or athletic facets,
then she would be accomplishing the same thing that the Shirelles or the
Shangri-Las did to expand women’s images of themselves in the early sixties.
The
quote from Marketing to Women also brings up another reason why Spears
may not be achieving the same type of liberation that girl groups did
30 years ago, and that is the age of Spears’ target audience.
Admittedly, young girls are hitting puberty at younger ages then
they did in the 1960s, but this does not mean that six-year-olds are ready
for the racy lyrics and sexual images that Spears promotes. While Spears’ lyrics may reassure a 12-year-old that her sexuality
is normal, cultivating that sexuality in a six-year-old is a different
matter. While the content
of Spears’ music may be aimed at slightly older girls, her marketing is
creating a large group of very young fans who, like my cousin, are becoming
indoctrinated with lyrics such as “I’m not that innocent,” when at their
age, they should be.
Girl
groups also helped make African-Americans more accessible to and accepted
by whites in the early sixties, at a time when segregation was deteriorating.
Not only were young white girls exposed to black teenagers, but
they wanted to emulate and become those black teenagers.
According to Douglas, “of the utmost importance was the role Diana
Ross played in making African American beauty enviable to white girls…[the
Supremes] made it perfectly normal for white girls to idolize and want
to emulate their idols, but with much different results.
The girl groups of the sixties may have sung about sexual topics,
but their images were far more conservative and “lady-like” than today’s
pop stars. Of course, “lady-like”
presented its own set of drawbacks back then, but the consequences were
less serious when compared to the blatant sex appeal that Britney Spears
portrays. On the one hand,
dressing and looking sexy can be very empowering.
Being comfortable with one’s sexuality is great, and women should
be allowed to wear whatever they want without being reprimanded for it.
However, this issue again ties into the age group that Spears is
targeting. While young women
of the sixties wanted to emulate the beauty standards of groups like the
Shirelles, they now want to emulate the beauty standard of Spears—white,
thin, young and sexy. Spears
dresses in a younger fashion then her predecessors, as the attached picture
demonstrates. She is trying to look younger than she is and as a result,
younger girls try to look like her.
This reinforcement of a white standard of beauty aimed at very
young girls has a very different effect than the acceptance of black beauty
had in the sixties. Some
critics go so far as to attribute the current rise in eating disorders
among ten and eleven-year-olds to the abundance of super-thin super stars
like Britney Spears (Marketing to Women).
I
must admit that I began this paper with the hopes of demonstrating that
Britney Spears was doing much more harm than good to a whole generation
of young girls. I believe
I eventually reached this conclusion, but the evidence was not as clear
cut as I had thought it might be.
Spears does contribute to the collective consciousness of the current
generation of pre-teens—they will all grow up with memories of Britney
Spears’ songs, and if solidarity leads to power, then Britney Spears is
contributing to the “girl power” that has been such a popular them in
this decade. She also allows
for girls to explore their emerging sexuality through her song lyrics,
which may make young girls feel less embarrassed and more confident about
their emotions, leading to a stronger identity as they move towards the
adult world. Ultimately though,
Spears succeeds only in defining the female identity in terms of sexuality,
instead of the other components that are critical to a young girl’s development.
The sexuality that Spears portrays, moreover, conforms to a traditional
white standard of beauty which many young girls will have a hard time
living up to, and this may hurt their self-esteem and confidence.
Despite her shortcomings as an adequate role model, Britney Spears
has a tremendous amount of pre-teen fans, who are learning about beauty,
sexuality and womanhood through her.
It will be interesting to see how this generation of girls will
contribute to the feminist movement as they grow older. These two pictures demonstrate the contrast in beauty standards and the portrayal of sexuality between the Shirelles, from the 1960s, and Britney Spears, from the 1990s.
WORKS
CITED Douglas,
Susan. “Why The Shirelles
Mattered.” From Reading Women’s
Lives, edited by Cayo Gamber.
Second Edition, 2000. “Pop
Idolization May Be Hazardous to Girls.”
Marketing to Women, 13(9): 8, September 2000.
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