Leave the Girl Alone

BACKGROUND: Access Hollywood broadcast a video of Britney crying and begging the paparazzi to "please, just go away." As always, they refused and continued to film as she sat down alone and cried. This is the address where the video can be found, but please, only visit if you must, the more times her footage is viewd, the less likely that she will ever be left alone. I can't in good conscience link to this. Please think twice before visting. http://www.accesshollywood.com/article/8215/Lynne-Spears-Feared-Britneyand039;s-Death;-Hospitalization-A-Relief-For-Family/

This is so infuriating. The way the paparazzi just won't leave her the fuck alone. Everyone in the modern world knows she's not dealing well with her life and fame right now. But when she stands up for herself she makes headlines as having “gone psycho" and being violent and dangerous. Fuck, these people haven't seen anything. If I, or thousands, maybe millions of other women, other mothers with children, were stalked like this and relentlessly pursued for any crumb of interest that could make a good juicy story when blown completely out of proportion....Well, I wouldn't be damn near half as nice as Britney still is to these unscrupulous leeches after 10 years. Also, I don't think I would last half as long as she has before I snapped and went off the deep end.

So many naive, narrow-minded, unsympathetic jerks out there just won't lay off her. In their minds she is the girl who has everything, who has no reason to ever be sad, angry or make mistakes. All I can figure is that these people are too stupid to see through the Hollywood facade. They think that celebrity status solves all of ones problems, making their skin, hair, nails and interpersonal relationships picture perfect and invulnerable to common homo-sapien downfalls. Thus stripping them of their rights to be human, have human feelings and make human mistakes.

Everyone, whether or not you’ve given a damn about Britney up until now, needs to take notice and realize what happened to her, because the way she was whored out as a sex object at 16 is only just one high-profile case of the objectification of teenage girls that is too accepted and never questioned in this society. The double standard is staring us right in the face and yet no one is talking about it. In all 50 states pornography of a minor is illegal, in many the age of consent to have sex is 18, and anyone at least 3 years older than their younger partner can go to jail for statutory rape if they are over 18 and their partner isn’t. The law says that it is wrong to involve or portray anyone under 18 in sexual acts, because they are still children. Why then, is it OK to dress girls from 5 to 17 in pseudo-miniskirts designed to show off their underwear during routines of leg-spreading jumps, kicks and poses at football games in front of countless middle-aged men? I have issues with this. Just because it’s so ingrained in our culture, because we’ve all grown up with it and so have the last 5+ generations, we don’t see it for what it is.
When Britney was 16 years old her beauty, innocence and sexuality were sold to the American public. Grown men drooled over her, made sexual jokes about her; her parents dressed her in fetish school-girl costumes to shoot videos, pose on sluty magazine covers and perform in front of thousands. I don't know what Britney felt about all of that, but it doesn't matter, because even if she was loving it at the time, she is not to blame for what her parents did to her, or what they let her do (however you want to look at it). Nearly any teenage girl would revel in that kind of attention and dress the way she did - if they were allowed. Britney can't be blamed for her parents whoring her out to record labels, MTV, the perverted minds of men older than her father.

Britney is blameless for what she was put through. I was a teenage girl once, and although I never jumped on the Britney Bandwagon, I totally indulged in fantasies of being as desired, famous, and as empowered as she seemed to be. Nearly every girl dreamed of some kind of similar fame and male-attention, and any one of us who did would have gone along with it just like Britney did if we lived the same life. Now, looking back at 24 years old, would I have swapped my unspectacular adolescent existence for an ounce of the exploitation and manipulation Britney saw at that age? No fucking way.

America, and the rest of the Britney-obsessed world, needs to wake up see her life for what it is - the tragic story of a girl who was literally prostituted mentally, emotionally and physically to an entire nation and by her own parents.