Like the Other Girls: On Louise Chennevière’s ‘Pour Britney’
2000s nostalgia should not make us forget the cruelty against women of their and our times
I was thirteen, I think. I had finally figured out how to sync my iTunes library to the iPod Nano my dad bought me in the States, where he lived and worked for months at a time to sustain our six-person family. My dad wanted to see the songs I put in this little quirky gadget. At the time, I loved pop music the best of all genres — I was a devotee of MTV’s music videos programming, jotting down songs to download at the cyber café later that week. “What is she doing here?” exclaimed my dad. It was a song from Britney Spears’s Circus (2009) album, her much anticipated return to stardom after her public meltdown in the last two years. I didn’t know much about that. I thought the song was catchy, though I can’t quite remember what song it was. What I do remember clearly my dad’s reaction — I, a boy, was not supposed to have this song in my iPod. She was a bad influence, that much I knew. I did not quite know why.
I was too young to pay attention to Britney Spears’s peak when she was America’s biggest pop music export to date. Years later, it is surprising to read about her meteoric rise to global stardom when she was barely sixteen. Her face was everywhere from California to Iraq, her voice everywhere from New York City to Shanghai. What does it feel, I wondered, to be this exposed from such a young age? The latest book by Louise Chennièvere’s, an essay titled Pour Britney (2024), explores Spears’s story as a prism for a number of issues surrounding girlhood and femininity. Evoking other savant pop culture critics like Paul B. Preciado, Virginie Despentes or Wendy Délorme, Chennevière reintroduces us to the objectification that millions of women, if not all, continue to go through. Chennevière’s analysis goes beyond the obvious observations about objectification, tying her personal experiences to those of Spears and of the Québécois writer Nelly Arcan. Its fast-paced and serious despite its subject matter coming across as a mere reflection on 2000s celebrity culture.
Chennevière, like many of us, enjoyed Britney Spears’s music at some point. Upon realizing her music was shallow and lowbrow, she left her, not unlike Emily abandoned Jessie in Disney Pixar’s Toy Story 2. She was but a discarded toy. Two decades and a half later, Chennevière realizes that her enjoyment of Spears as a girl was innocent, and that she was ignorant of the power dynamics at play. Spears’s agency was limited by the spotlight on her, one so big that she could not escape it even by shaving her head. In 2024, after releasing her memoir, Spears continues to evoke public reactions. This time, however, it is not desire and outrage, but rather pity. How did she dare grow old? Why does she dance alone in her bedroom holding knives? Is she insane?
Chennevière points out that the experience of being a woman is, in spite of the apparent progress of the last two decades, still one of being defined by one’s body, how it pleases or displeases men. At some of the strongest moments in the book, Chennevière comes across as a disciple of Andrea Dworkin — not the Dworkin who condemns all relationships with men, but the Dworkin that knows that gender, as a systemic structure, shapes everything we consume. This was as known in 1999 as it is in 2024, yet we can still look back at the careers of Britney Spears and Nelly Arcan and wonder how many watched passively, condemning them as individuals for a systemic issue that transcended them. There was no ambiguity about what was happening with both women, so we can only look back ashamed of our complicity with their tragic endings. (Well, Arcan’s tragic ending, at least; Spears has just relocated to a Mexican resort town to flee the paparazzi, where I hope she is enjoying a good life).
Chennevière’s essay may be bleak in tone, but it ultimately hints that pop culture may be ready to acknowledge its slut-shaming problem. Britney Spears and Janet Jackson are no longer witches set against the unproblematic Justin Timberlake, for instance. Other women in pop music who “fell from grace” like Amy Winehouse and Lana Del Rey have finally been uncritically accepted as musical geniuses. Genres that used to be boys clubs, like rock or rap, are continuing to become more inclusive. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves: women die daily because of their gender. Femicide goes on every hour in every corner of Earth. Britney Spears and Nelly Arcan are iconic, but not unique in their plight.
