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On what...this is
Sometimes Britney Spears posts an image or a video on Instagram and I want to write about it. I want to talk about how she is aging; that she is showing us her aging, which feels revolutionary to me. She is roughly my age—in her early 40s, while I am shuffling toward my mids—so she is aging in that sense, but she is also aging in the sense that parts of her are trying to catch up. At times it feels like her rage is appropriately 42 and her sexy photos and kittenish videos are 19. I see someone trying to locate herself in those realities. I see someone—a mother, a middle-aged woman—attempting to wrest control of her image, both from the endlessly suckling public and from her internalized male/patriarchal gaze. She offers her body and she watches herself, in selfie mode, imagining you looking. This is mine, she is saying. She is trying to say. I am me.
The other day Britney posted a video of herself in bed. She is holding her phone up close to her face, and her body appears to be naked, one arm held tight across her breasts, and she is smiling and giggling into the camera, looking into her own eyes, looking into your eyes. Suddenly, she opens her mouth and snaps it shut. A bite. Her eyes shift; she is looking away from our eyes and seeing her face. She is playing a role. Your lover. The lover she wants you to see. Her lover. She is sexy, playful. She is sexy and playful, goddammit. Britney has always been the poster girl for something: for the good girl with that glint in her eye, for the bad girl with that snake wrapped around her, for the mother who makes too many mistakes, and now for the way we watch ourselves, preparing to be watched. She can make her own videos now. She can wear whatever she wants. She often reminds me of the neighborhood women around the table in my southern childhood, lamenting their flabby arms, celebrating their trim waists. This was before I lost some weight, she’ll say, or something like it. Or, I look so tiny in this! Always, she is aware, the way those women around the table were, that her body is being assessed. She can do it in record time, cut you off at the pass. Most women can. Her body is hers. She knows that. Do you know that?
Britney has said many times that she doesn’t like the documentaries that have been made about her, the people who speak for her, the footage of the hardest times in her life looping endlessly. I take her at her word. I watch her spinning in her tiled foyer in a pair of underwear and a pretty top; I read her breathless raging captions about her family’s betrayal. It seems like we’ve only ever been able to see her clearly years after the fact, the way you’ll find a photo of your younger self that you used to hate and think, God, I was beautiful.
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Okay, so, sometimes I have stuff to say about Britney. She is flawed, wild, nearly feral. She is clumsy and enigmatic. At times she resonates pure, unbridled power. And rage. I used to pity her; now that I’m paying more attention, I no longer do. I am trying to treat my aging self with the same care. If you think about Britney a lot, about what it means to be a woman and a sexual being and an artist, then this is the Subby for you.
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I’d also like to mention some things—aside from Britney Jean—that have captivated me recently. I just finished Susie Boyt’s Loved and Missed, and if you have loved ones who’ve struggled with addiction, it’s a must read. Or if you have nurtured, attempted to nurture, been nurtured. If you’ve ever tried to know someone, or be known. If you like reading about small domestic comforts, the beauty in a simple meal. Susie Boyt is a nepo baby, so I avoided the book for too long, but I have since learned my lesson.
Another book I am sad to have finished: Helen Garner’s This House of Grief, which I have mentioned to everyone I know. It’s true crime, and harrowing at times as it deals with the death of three children, but is absolutely, evisceratingly, human. Garner writes about attending the trial of Robert Farquharson, a man who drove his car into a dam with his three sons strapped in the back, all of whom drowned, while he survived. Garner never leaves herself out and we feel her sadness, her rage, her confusion, her grace. It’s not reporting; it’s writing. It’s seeing, true seeing.
I am nearly finished with Derry Girls, which is going to end up as one of my favorite shows I’ve watched this year, and not just because they talk about their holes a lot. (The Irish are always getting a kick up the hole, or admiring someone’s hole in their pants…what a people, I tell you.) The show takes place in the 90s as the Troubles are winding down, and the way the violence is a quiet backdrop to these teens’ lives is so well done. It’s hilarious and sweet.
It’s the holiday season so I’m eating chocolate-mint flavored whatevers at every meal. We’ve put up our pink Christmas tree and have a Vegas-theme going on in our front yard. I remember driving through a wealthy neighborhood years ago and seeing someone had a massive, bright red palm tree in their yard for Christmas. It was unexpected, absurd, exactly right. I am not wealthy, but now I have my own Christmas palm tree. Wal-Mart sells them. Who knew?
