Sex and Bacon (6 page)

Do I own any of her CDs? No, I do not. I have “Toxic”on my iPod because I used to perform to that song in the filthy, semilegal titty bars of New Orleans. It amused me to play such a sprightly all-American booty-shaker as an accompaniment to the desultory fucking motions I made slumped against the pole (or, if the dollar bills were flowing, on all fours). I relished performing as the Anti-Britney with my chunky legs and my heavy metal tattoos: Dancing to “Toxic” both mocked and multiplied the dismal squalor of my surroundings. I loved inflicting it on my customers the way a particularly cruel prison warden might enjoy forcing his inmates to sing carols on Christmas Eve.

But aside from “Toxic,” I don’t care for Britney’s music much.

I couldn’t tell you the name of her last album, although I understand that her celebrity derives from her ability to sing and dance. As a child, Britney acted professionally and competed on
Star Search
, distinguishing herself with her surprisingly husky little-girl voice—soon after that, she was famous. I’m sure I’ve heard Britney’s music on the radio without knowing it was her. I usually have a hard time telling pop divas apart because their vocals are so seamlessly produced, and so many of them imitate Britney’s coy, breathy style.

It doesn’t matter if I like Britney’s music, though. Her music is what she does. I love who she
is
.

Britney is one of us.

She’s a girl who likes Frappuccinos—who doesn’t?

She’s a girl who gets thick in the thighs when she doesn’t pay attention to her grueling workout schedule. Her body waxes and wanes like any healthy woman’s. Wlien she’s small, you know she’s only a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos away from swelling up again. But every lady knows that only corpses and mannequins (and the creepy, spectral Angelina Jolie, who may be one or the other) don’t gain weight the week before they bleed. When she’s pregnant, Britney tucks into junk food happily, giving the finger to snide journalists who deride her for gaining weight during her confinement (and then for not losing it promptly enough to suit them afterward).

She’s a girl famously photographed leaving a gas station rest stop barefoot, her unwashed hair in a simple knot. Who hasn’t waited too long to shampoo? Who hasn’t said “one more day”in the middle of an impossible work week, then twisted her hair into a sloppy ponytail to keep the grease and itch at bay? Granted, most of us don’t pad into public bathrooms without our shoes, but all the ensuing media hysteria over Brit’s grimy feet and lank hair seemed curiously overdone—the contrived outrage merely another way to punish a woman for being dirty in public.

But even the media can’t make us un see the obvious: All externals aside, Britney’s fucking
hot
. Britney’s healthy, curvy, strong, and feminine. Britney loves to eat, and my guess is she loves to fuck. If sepulchral Angelina Jolie represents the epitome of icy California cool with her virtuous emaciation and her causes and her smart, chic suits, Britney is hot Southern poontang—a girl who isn’t afraid to get down and dirty for her own satisfaction no matter what people say, even when their words are meant to annihilate.

Of course she’s demonized: Britney is female appetite. Britney
wants
. She wants food and sex and love and trashy, sexy, no-account boys. But it’s not the outward manifestation of her appetite her detractors can’t abide—after all, many female actresses and singers are heavier than Brit’s ever been (Kirstie Alley, Missy Elliott, America Ferrara, Kelly Clarkson, et al.). It’s the fact that Britney appears incapable of hiding her appetite the way every woman is taught to from childhood, and whether or not the truth she tells with her body is deliberate, it’s undeniably familiar to me and to every single one of my female friends. Every single one of us fights the same war, attempting to forge a tenuous detente between what we want (everything) and what we’re supposed to want (nothing). The difference is, Britney’s fight is public property. Her attempts to make peace with her own body and its desires are accompanied by a constant chorus of criticism meant to shame and punish.
You
try living with that.

Anna Nicole Smith couldn’t. Rest in peace, Vickie Lynn.

Fact: I have a picture of Britney Spears pinned to my wall, right above my desk. It’s unposed—clearly a paparazzi photo taken a few years ago during one of her more voluptuous periods. She wears a white dress with cherries printed on it and high wedge sandals that lace around her ankles. The shoes are red, to match the cherries. Her hair is canary yellow, with a defiant black stripe down her center part. She’s walking (awkwardly in those high shoes), looking back over her shoulder at someone less famous, a nonentity deliberately cropped out of the frame. Her belly is slightly rounded, and her dancer’s legs are thick with muscle. She holds a sweet frozen drink in one hand, straw askew. She’s unsmiling, perhaps caught in conversation with her anonymous companion. She’s not posing for the camera, though she’s clearly aware of it—but in that moment her body is completely hers, not ours. The photographer caught her in a rare moment of breathtaking self-possession. In that photograph, Britney is the most beautiful girl in the world.

I cut out this picture from the magazine as soon as I saw it, cropping out the derisive headline that attempted to humiliate her for her weight and her pretty sundress (apparently, women who aren’t skeletal mustn’t wear anything with less yardage than a wedding gown). I pinned it to my wall, and I gaze at it often when I’m sitting at my laptop, unable to write. It inspires me to consider the courage it took to put on that cherry-print dress, to lace those shoes, to buy that drink, and to walk into the world boldly to enjoy an afternoon with a friend, as if a million people weren’t waiting in the wings to hoot at her, pointing like apes, or to snap her picture and thus profit from another cheap insult at her expense for the sin of having desire.

I danced to “Toxic’ ironically but there’s nothing ironic about my love for Britney Spears. I think she’s beautiful, but most of all, I think she’s brave. I think she’s suffered endless humiliation for the crime of growing up—becoming a woman and taking on a woman’s struggle. If she’d stayed the same young girl who sang on
Star Search
a lifetime ago—the girl you can still see in very old pictures in which she’s dressed like a schoolgirl, hugging her own knees—;we’d have no problem with Britney. But now, grown up, manifesting need and want, representing appetite and pleasure, and, worst of all, showing us a female body that reflects a woman’s state of mind, we can’t stand to look at her; when we do, it’d better be as a hateful joke. Because for most of us (and especially for those of us who make our money by policing women’s bodies and minds), the alternative is unthinkable.

I DIDN’T WATCH
the MTV Video Music Awards that featured Britney Spears performing her hit “Gimme More.” But I saw still pictures from her performance in the magazines I leaf through at the gym. Britney appeared miserable. Her long blond weave looked uncomfortable, and her body language was sheepish and apologetic. Apparently, her lip-synching and dancing-weren’t sufficiently dazzling to prevent a slew of vicious insults from professional commentators. Her long-awaited comeback was a disaster.

Of course it was. Short of starving herself into a perfectly malleable semblance of womanhood, Britney won’t find redemption in showing us more skin. The very words “Gimme More” were tragic misjudgment: We want her to stop wanting so we don’t have to think about our own hungers —and whether or not they’re being satisfied.

A few weeks ago, Beau brought me a copy of
OK!
magazine with Britney on the cover. (He knows about my obsession and humors me like a good boyfriend should.)

The article was slanderous nonsense, implying that Britney Spears has suffered a psychological break with reality and needs immediate intervention. But it was the pictures I wanted, not the backhanded prose. I clipped out my favorite. It was another paparazzi shot of Britney walking, but in this photograph she wears tall black boots and strides like Colossus, empty-handed and alone. She wears a netted black pillbox hat over lank brown hair. Her arms and legs appear toned and strong, and her face is stony. Her all-black outfit is a defiant claiming of physical territory:
I’ll eat what I want, and wear what
I want. Fuck
all
y’all
.

I stared at the photo for a long time then added it to my collection on the wall over my desk: Dark Britney, mysterious and sophisticated, in contrast to all the pictures I have of her as a blonde. But it’s her expression that interests me, despite my undeniable attraction to her unusually subdued hair color and her hale femininity. It’s the calculating look in her eyes, as if she’s finally taking the measure of the world and finding it unacceptably lacking. It’s something in the determined set of her unglossed mouth and in the length of her gait, so different from the small awkward steps she took in her red ankle-laced sandals so long ago.

Britney Spears is all grown up, and she’s finally pissed off.

And I say it’s about fucking time.

WHAT WOULD HAPPEN
if we all decided that we were going to eat what we wanted, fuck how we wanted, dress how we wanted, live how we wanted?

What if we decided that we didn’t give a shit if someone had a problem with us walking to the store (or into a gas station bathroom) without concealer on our zits or a camera-ready smile plastered across our faces (just in case anybody should be watching us and judging us as insufficiently cheerful)?

What if we stopped pushing our appetites down into tiny little crumpled balls of unmet need and instead unfolded them, smoothed them out with our hands, and then waved them like a banner? Furthermore, what if we
demanded
satisfaction? What if we made our desires
everyone’,!
problem—a genuine public challenge, like a hurricane or a flood or any other natural phenomenon affecting a large number of human beings?

What if we said,
Hell yeah, I like to eat!
and
Hell yeah, I like to fuck!
and what if we said those things proudly, to everyone, instead of whispering them shamefully into our best friend’s ear late at night after too many glasses of red wine?

What if we admitted that women’s bodies—
our
bodies—want sex and pleasure and food and that we’d rather have a good meal and wear fat pants the next day than spend an extra half hour at the gym, peeling our bodies away incrementally? What if we danced because we wanted to, for the sheer pleasure of it, without being concerned that our moves aren’t provocative enough?

And what if Britney Spears shaved her head because she was sick of spending endless hours getting fussed over, primped and poked into everybody else’s idea of how she was supposed to look? What if she was sick of living in a world in which she was expected to betray her own physical needs in order to keep other women in line? What if she just woke up one day and thought,
Fuck it—just fuck it
, and went to McDonald’s for a sausage-and-egg biscuit and a Coke, and when the paparazzi started taking pictures of her for the obligatory “Britney—Obese and Depressed” articles, what if she stopped and said, “You know what? I’m rich enough to eat what I want,” and gave them all the finger?

What if instead of buying the magazines that call Britney Spears crazy and ugly and fat and drug-addicted, a bad mother and a slut—magazines funded by the beauty and diet industries, by the way, two conglomerates not known for their respect for women in general—what if we spent that time figuring out what we really wanted and how to get it? What if some of us liked Britney’s music and bought her CDs and others of us didn’t care for it and didn’t buy them, but what if we left Britney’s body out of the equation? Does her
voice
get fat? Do we need to know how much she’s working out before we can enjoy her latest single?

Do we really like watching Britney be pilloried for being the same as us, a real woman with physical appetite?

Or are we scared that if we don’t actively add to her public humiliation, someone will notice that we have desires ourselves?

I GET THE
strong feeling Britney Spears is about to tell us all to fuck off. The head-shaving was a pretty clear message. So are the tall black boots and her new, loose-armed strut. I like this Britney a lot, and I anticipate her explosion with a great deal of hope. If anyone can pull this off, it’s Britney.

Not Madonna. Not Courtney.

It’s Britney, bitch.

Fried Chicken Interlude: Picnic Style

FRYING CHICKEN IS A WILD, FERAL ACT OF MEAT-L0VING
debauchery involving bone and skin and sizzling fat and juices running pink to clear as the body parts of what used to be a living, individual bird cook to the point of succulence. If that’s not cool with you, go buy a box of McNuggets instead and skip this chapter. (I suspect that McNuggets are made with so little actual chicken that they may qualify as vegan.)