Am American Britney

Yes, we’re amusing ourselves to death with the physical and spiritual deaths of two non-blonde blondes. Neil Postman was right when he said this would be the death of us, the obsession with entertainment, at the price of paying attention to what's actually killing us (ourselves, by way of environmental suicide and warring).

But then again, maybe something needs saying here that's not being said. There’s something else going on in the stories of Britney and Anna Nicole that is all but verboten to utter in the current manly climate. Ridicule rules the day. What passes for feminism these days consists of blaming young women for dyeing their hair and dancing around on stripper poles, and then wondering why no one takes them seriously. It’s all their fault, the whores.

But in the last several days I’ve talked to two women—grown women, in their 40s, both successful—who got really upset when talking about Anna Nicole. One, a friend who works in L.A., called me from her car crying. “I can’t believe this!” she said. Since I’ve never known her to be an Anna Nicole Smith devotee, I was rather surprised. And then I was having lunch with another friend in New York who informed me, “I am just devastated by this."

What the hell? Obviously, this is all “about something else.” But what was the something else that was making them so sad? I think it was the thing we’re not allowed to say anymore, lest we come off like ballbusters, bitches, victims: It was woman pain. It was, as the biggest ballbusting victim bitch of all time, Madonna, said best when she said, “What it feels like for a girl.”

One of these women I was talking to had a man leave her pregnant when she was 16; she raised the boy himself and now he’s all grown up (happy and successful too). My other friend was raped in her college dorm room when she was 19. Yes, everybody has pain; sh— happens to everyone, you say. O.K. But there are things that happen to women that don’t happen to you. But now I’m saying things we're no longer supposed to say...

To even have to argue all this again is tedious, but necessary; it seems like we have to do it all over again and again until things change. But things have changed, you say. Somewhat. O.K. Still, we’re hardly all the way there. Women still don’t make as much money as men; they're still beaten, killed in domestic violence situations every day; they're still left alone with children, with no help from anyone. The current administration would actually like to overturn Roe v. Wade—although they would not like to do anything for single mothers (I mean sluts). America provides its mothers with no affordable daycare, or even housing or health care. Women are just expected to make do. And how does all that feel, for a girl?

As for the media, I think things are actually worse there than when I was a girl back in the Middle Ages. I don’t remember seeing anything like “Girls Gone Wild” ads on TV. Barbie was weird enough. I don’t remember anything like Bratz dolls or Paris Hilton. Where is all this coming from?

I picked up an issue of Newsweek recently, the one with the “Girls Gone Wild” cover (Feb. 12), which said: “Paris, Britney, Lindsay & Nicole. They seem to be everywhere and they may not be wearing underwear. Tweens adore them and teens envy them. But are we raising a generation of 'prosti-tots'?”—which may be the most offensive catchword I've ever heard. The article spent a lot of time delineating the titillatingly bad behavior of these young women. “A recent Newsweek Poll found that 77 percent of Americans believe that Britney, Paris and Lindsay have too much influence on young girls," it said (and what about the Bush Twins? Just asking).

But it went nowhere near any sort of analysis of how big corporations also capitalize on this same sort of sexual advertising (even the magazine itself, selling issues off pictures of the girls). It seems we aren’t allowed to talk about exploitation anymore. It’s all Paris and Britney’s fault; oh, and Nicole’s. Forget about any wider suggestion that the powers-that-be benefit from Paris and Britney et al distracting us to death. Much more fun to think about their lack of underwear than the latest roadside bombing in Iraq. You could talk about how a militaristic society needs to kill the feminine in order to continue murdering; but then you might sound a bit uppity.

I heard from a former schoolmate of one wilding starlet that this girl's father sexually abused her when she was a child. I don’t know if it's true. But if it were, would it make any difference in how we view her strutting around? Instead of hating her, might we not just want to throw our coat over her and put an arm around her? And what about the average girl who yearns to be like her? I remember when I was doing a piece on Hugh Hefner, the young women who were living in "the Mansion" told me it had been their dream to be in Playboy since they were little girls. What kind of a household—or country—had they grown up in that they’d come to think that this qualified as “a goal”?

Anna Nicole Smith dreamed of being in Playboy too; so it was her"choice," her "fault," you say. But maybe nobody ever told her she could do something else. Maybe it wasn’t always that easy to find something else to do. I’ve seen the “Driven” on Britney Spears; she wanted fame, she wanted it bad, from the time she was a little girl. But why? Maybe because our society tells kids that fame is a wonderful heaven on earth, full of adulation and money and toys—and that you should prostitot yourself in any way possible to get it, because boy, are you gonna love it. Then real life creeps in, you have a couple of kids, a man uses you to get some fame of his own, your heart gets broken; and you find yourself on the cover of the Daily News, bald and beating up a car with an umbrella… Poor Britney. But look at it this way, it's probably the realest thing she's ever done in public, her best performance.

When judging celebrity meltdowns, America has always experienced a tension between the compassionate determinism of Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and the bitchy mean-girlism of The Star (“Given her recent behavior,” it polls online today, “do you think Britney is mentally ill?”). Since the days of Ronald Reagan—coincidentally, when the gossip press exploded—we tend to lean towards the latter. In response to this I'd like to pose another poll, composed by our Lady Madonna: “Do you know what it feels like for a girl/Do you know what it feels like in this world/For a girl?”