From Breasts to Boobies
On Britney's Internal Age
Britney turned 42 on December 2, but in her post about her birthday she says fuck 40, she actually just turned 6. She says it while wearing a pink bra she just got from Victoria’s Secret, a bra she loves; she’s finally found a bra she loves. My fellow 6-year-olds, who can’t relate?
Listen. All bras are great the first 1 to 5 times you wear them. Even the bandaid-colored one I got from Target that I now have to wind around one shoulder and fasten with a chip clip—even that one worked like a charm at first.
It’s hard not to wonder who Britney is imagining as she’s making a video of her body, her hand running over her pushed-up boobies, tugging her underwear down a little, getting up on her knees and moving her hips—and she likes that little clip so much it repeats—then back to the bed. Is she picturing a faceless audience, or Colin Farrell, or Christina Aguilera, or her father, who, in a chilling moment in her memoir, said, “I’m Britney Spears now.” Is she just watching herself in selfie mode, filtering what she sees through the best currency she has, sex appeal, and the bone-deep lens of Hot or Not? It’s in the caption to this overtly lusty video that she says she’s 6.
The thing about time is that at a certain point in your life, it begins collapsing in on itself. You’re embodying all the ages you’ve ever been. Claire Dederer wrote eloquently about this in Love and Trouble.
A 6-year-old’s idea of womanhood is spinning really fast on her toes, shaking her booty, laughing at herself, wearing pretty underwear from the underwear store.
Could you be 6 again? Not the booger-eating, scared-of-the-dark 6-year-old you, but the one who didn’t know so much about the world yet. The you that couldn’t ride a bike, but knew the day would come. The you that was practically brand new. Birth is an explosive event. Being only 6 years out from that, there has to be part of you still tethered to that other you, the one that hadn’t yet been born. The one that lived among pure possibility. There’s power in not knowing so much.
If Britney Spears’s internal age is 6, that means she was born in December 2017. December 2017 is the last time Britney performed live.
I get these terrors from time to time, like my face is too plain, or that it’s not interesting enough of a face. Like if you were at Target and picking out a clock, and there was the cheap Target-brand clock with a white face and black numbers. My face is like that. It’s as generic as a clock. And I think, no, there’s still time for me to be the Safavieh clock, to be attractive and to attract, before I have to settle into being the waiting room clock with a thin fuzz of dust on my brow. I’m only 43! And I think, I will buy the funkiest lipstick at Sephora. I will cut my hair off. I will invest in a push-up bra. My breasts—a heavy, gelatinous word—will become boobies—a word that lives perkily in the year 1999. In these thoughts I can feel both my 43-year-old self and my 6-year-old self. Like a child, I can imagine the possibility of carrying myself like someone beautiful. Someone hot. I will maybe get Botox; I have heard women my age talking about Botox with the casualness of a hair appointment as I slouch in my oversized novelty t-shirt. I will become close with my nail tech. I will wax many areas of my body. Then, like an adult, I get tired of imagining, and I go online to research affordable eye cream.*
If Britney is letting her 6-year-old self live right alongside her 42-year-old self, if she is making room for both, that feels revelatory to me. The child playing at being a woman, welcoming to and curious about her body; the woman doing her damnedest to make a home there, in her body.
*does not exist
I recently did a photo shoot and I told the photographer I didn’t know what to do with my face and to let me know if I looked wacky. This is after she left, when I tried to recreate the faces I made in a series of selfies and… IT IS THE SAME FACE. Maybe bottom right, though…she’s the $34.99 Safavieh clock.
I want to thank Aubrey Hirsch for designing the banner and logo for TBM. She’s a writer and illustrator and you’ve definitely seen her work ev.ery.where. I’m honored she made such perfect designs and you should subscribe to her Substack so you can keep up!