Book review Spears' indictment of system used to exploit her

Over the course of Britney Spears' career, she was repeatedly subject to narratives constructed to  disempower her.

- Laura Snapes

The Woman in Me
Britney Spears

The teenage pop star presented as a virgin was scolded for a sexualised image sold by those same forces. After her breakup from Justin Timberlake she was vilified and forced to undergo a grilling from Diane Sawyer so severe you might have thought she was a war criminal, not a doubledenim-wearing singer.

It made her suspicious of entertainment's gendered double standard, she writes in her highly anticipated memoir, though that was nothing compared with the legal disfranchisement she later experienced.

She was advised to divorce her husband Kevin Federline to avoid the humiliation of him doing it first, only to take the flak for fracturing their family. Her 2008 breakdown was conveniently framed as a sign of madness, not a proportionate response to exploitation and losing custody of her children.

Once she was placed under the conservator-ship that would rule her life for 13 years, she became trapped further: "If I became flustered, it was taken as evidence that I wasn't improving. If I got upset and asserted myself, I was out of control and crazy." The contradiction reminds Spears of medieval witch trials, she writes. As the most famous young woman in the world, she admits she "never knew how to play the game". But at 41, her understanding of these archetypes and their link to wider systems of power is more astute than any of the tawdry spin that did her dirty.