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Jessica Simpson was the least famous third of a trifecta whose bodies I grew up gazing at alongside an American public that was absolutely rabid for opportunities to scrutinize them. The other two were Christina Aguilera and the legendary Miss Britney Spears, of course. These women came into public life as girls, barely out of puberty and eager to please a public that demanded they be pleasant or face extreme consequences. It was Britney’s famous midriff that led the charge of sexualized teen pop stars into lives in the late 1990s with “... Baby One More Time,” an anthem that remains nonsensical nearly twenty years after its debut while its accompanying video grows more iconic. Christina entered the public consciousness singing, “My body’s saying ‘Let’s go,’ but my heart is saying, ‘No,’ ” on the hit “Genie in a Bottle.” Whether it was prescience or accident that a pop star’s heart would be considered separate from her body, I am not sure. Then there was Jessica Simpson, who emerged at the tail end of the 1990s as the wholesome response to Christina and Britney but whose own father famously told GQ in 2004, “Jessica never tries to be sexy. She just is sexy. If you put her in a T‑shirt or you put her in a bustier, she’s sexy in both. She’s got double D’s! You can’t cover those suckers up!” But while Christina and Jessica have been given opportunities to respond gracefully to their detractors, there seems to be no rest for the body of Britney.

It was Britney whose performance of “Oops! ... I Did It Again” at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards made history, when the only thing that could upstage the rhinestone- studded nude pants and bustier she wore was the incredible fitness of the body that wore it. I recall watching the VMAs and envying the tautness and smooth tan of her figure, then envying her twice over when boys at school the next day recalled its perfection. More than once that day, a boy declared, “Her body is insane.” It was an apt description: Maintaining that particular ratio of muscle tone to fat while retaining some level of feminine curves requires round the-clock diligence, an obsessive single- mindedness, and a kind of madness that I have little confidence these boys knew or cared about.

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When Britney married young and began having children, her weight gains and losses became a sport that has not since receded from the public imagination. After Britney’s second son was born in 2006, People published a workout and diet regimen that she was allegedly adhering to in order to lose her pregnancy weight; however, this was unsubstantiated by Britney or anyone on her team. People then had the audacity to shame her for its rigor. The regimen involved the standard fare of “secrets” that are not secret at all: six small meals in lieu of three hardy ones, cardiovascular exercise, and removal of white flour and processed sugar. Before launching into the piece, there is the benevolent caveat: “The last thing a brand new mom should be concerned about is weight loss. This is the time to take care of your baby and yourself. The weight will come off later. Even celebrities whose job it is to look good should keep this in mind. Your baby will only be a baby once.” It takes just one sentence for the writer to go off script. The narrative goes from a focus on new mothers taking care of themselves to revealing that this is actually all about a neglected infant whose mother resides in one of the world’s most frequently dissected bodies. “We are worried about the message that this sends to new moms, that it’s safe to exercise like this following a birth and that this kind of weight loss in a short period of time is normal,” they write, judgment oozing from so brief an admonition.

It is common to say that “the years were unkind” to a person, but in the case of Britney Spears, it is irresponsible to blame nonsentient time for unkindness when there was a wealth of people being unkind to her. From her harrowing breakdown to her ongoing weight struggles, the tabloids do not relent and do not forget. In the lower-brow selection of tabloids that report on the weight of celebrities, one statement that follows women struggling with their weight around more than any other is “She got her body back.” Here you’ll find near-constant Britney coverage. But barring any transcendent out‑of‑body experiences, these women were never separated from their bodies. They’ve occupied them across various weights. This phrase is not about a woman getting back something she lost as much as it is about our approval that she has returned to something we want her to be. What is meant by this phrase is “We got her body back.” We got the body we felt entitled to. In the case of Britney, that is the impossibly lean and limber body of a teenage girl, a body that was enthusiastically characterized as “insane.”

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The public consumption of Britney did not stop at her figure. The media and those of us who consumed it were obsessed with her sexualities, with a particularly pathological focus on her claim to be a virgin. Though Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit most crudely detailed exactly how she was not a virgin on The Howard Stern Show, even the most sophisticated critics couldn’t help but indulge in Britney hymen mythology. A profile of Britney by Chuck Klosterman that appeared in Esquire in 2003 is now downright painful to read. In it, not a single song or album name from her catalog appears, while no less than seven references are made to the fact that she was not wearing pants at the photo shoot where they met to interview. It is a labored but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to make the case that Britney is “not so much a person as she is an idea, and the idea is this: you can want everything, so long as you get nothing.” Obviously, “Britney is the naughtiest good girl of all time.” But what makes her so different from previous incarnations of jailbait purity — Tiffany, Brooke Shields, Annette Funicello, et alia — is her “abject unwillingness to recognize that this paradox exists at all.” He recounts asking her why she dresses provocatively, noting her present attire reveals “three inches of her inner thigh, her entire abdomen, and enough cleavage to choke a musk ox,” but not reminding readers that they’re at a photo shoot that doesn’t involve pants. It is a cloying interview where she protests at his questions about her feelings about starring in men’s sexual fantasies but he pushes her on it anyway, dissatisfied with her refusal to be salacious. Britney does not own the truth about her own feelings, nor does she own her own body from this vantage point, because the public mistakes their all-consuming need for Britney as her desire to be consumed this way.

For the first several years of my adult-sized life, I was an American size 4. It is a size that sounds small but means average and felt huge, especially among peers whose size 0s casually hung off them throughout college. Though my envy migrated from teen pop stars to couture models, the specters of Britney’s former perfection and her fall from grace remained in my periphery. It still does. When I shrank to size 0 and later a 00 and then to a 000 when J.Crew introduced the size in 2014, I looked at all of these famous bodies with a different set of eyes, both literally and figuratively. My already large hazel eyes had been made more prominent on a face lacking fat, where they protruded more hungrily and took up more real estate. Figuratively, I look at the bodies that were considered so perfect and realize the precariousness of that perfection as I struggle to maintain a size that is attractively delicate without being repulsively bony.

I have been called “perfect” far more often when I am below a healthy body weight than when I am at a normal one. I have heard and read the word “insane” to compliment my body and am driven mad by it. I have heard my body referred to as a “buffet of bones” and a “little rib buffet” by two very different men. The idea of being actual meat is at once thrilling and infuriating: Being eaten bears the promise of no longer existing physically at all. It is when I am caught up in these feelings that young Britney is instructive. Though it was the 2000 performance at the VMAs that cemented Britney’s body in my mind as the most aspirational, a perhaps more famous display of her figure was on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1999. She was a rising teen sensation giving what seem to be safe, canned answers about ambition and music in her childhood home, but there is a single moment that feels especially off script. In response to questions about romantic rumors, her reply is printed as “ ‘I have,’ she says, ‘no feelings at all.’ ” I read those italics and see the heart of the story, the crack in her voice well before she cracked. It is a well-rehearsed girl who has been all but mandated to be consumed without biting back, not to cause a fuss so that people will fuss over her. It is a sad surrender but one that makes her queen in the country of popular culture. I wonder now if she knew just how heavy that would feel.

This is an excerpt from by Alana Massey, .

Copyright © 2017 by Alana Massey. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

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