How can we make it right for Britney Spears and the victims of Marilyn Manson?

Watching ‘Framing Britney’ as a fan and as a woman was no easy task.

I saw accusations about her being a bad professional, a slut, a bad role-model, a bad mother, a bad daughter.

She is the best example I can find of how media can turn you from queen to monster in the blink of an eye, the pleasure of it, the sad face when pretending to be sorry about it.

In times where we are seeing so many women come forward with accusations against Marilyn Manson, it is impossible that nobody knew.

The same way it is easy for those paparazzi and journalists to speak about how “sorry” they feel that Britney has gone through all of this.

Everyone that is complicit to any kind of abuse and violence is an abuser.

Everyone knew Britney was about to break. No human can cope with being controlled 24/7, being used by everyone around you, being pushed to the limit of rehearsals, world tours, losing weight, dealing with post-partum depression, a divorce, two divorces, the constant accusations of not being pretty, skinny, nice enough, of lipsyncing when your own record label makes you sing lyrics that mean nothing to you in a tone that has nothing to do with your voice. And no matter how many awards she gets, how many titles you give her, how many residences in Vegas she makes, she will never stop being the one that went bald.

It is now 2021 and we have memes all over the internet with Britney bald and an umbrella in her hands: if Britney made through 2007, you can make it through today.

Justin Timberlake is married and has two baby boys _that I pray to God he doesn’t raise to be the kind of man he is, that goes on radio stations saying that he f*c*ed Britney. Someone that release a music video with the sole purpose of offending her and showing her as a cheater and to destroy her career and reputation.

It is now 2021 and he never apologized.

Everyone knew Marilyn Manson was an abuser. Women were provided to him by his staff and friends. Evan Rachel Wood has been claiming she was abused ever since she managed to leave and now, just because the proportion the accusations took, record labels and agents are dropping him. They knew. They fed him. They gave him the opportunity to do all he has done. The women he abused are not the ones to blame.

Victims are not the ones to blame.

In “For the Record”, Britney said she doesn’t like sitting around and complaining or the title of ‘victim’ of her own success _and I am not using this term to refer to her in the same way I call the survivors from Manson’s abuse.

However, it is difficult not to feel sorry for the Britney we lost.

In an article published by Guardian in 2018, this piece really made me sad about all her dreams taken away from her.

It was …Baby One More Time that convinced Spears of the merits of pop. She initially saw herself as making “Sheryl Crow music, but younger”, while Larry Rudolph, an entertainment lawyer friend of Spears’s mum Lynne who had been tasked with getting her signed (he’s now her manager), had her record a clutch of songs originally recorded by Toni Braxton. It was those recordings that lead to auditions for Mercury, Epic and Jive (the first two labels said no; she signed with the latter) which included Spears covering Whitney Houston’s version of I Will Always Love You. With the more R&B-leaning early material not working, and with a clause allowing Jive to terminate her contract after 90 days if they felt an album wasn’t on the horizon, A&R Steve Lunt approached Martin, who had already delivered success for Jive’s boyband the Backstreet Boys. A meeting was set up with Spears in New York. “I was pretty young at the time, so I was nervous,” she says, “but he was so nice and put me right at ease.” For Martin, his song had finally found its home.

The megahit was not her initial intention. It was shown to her as a way into the world she wanted.

In all documentaries, such as “Framing Britney”, we see people saying she was always sure of what she wanted. Many videos on YouTube show how she wanted to be heard, how she always knew what was best for her. They talk about her using past sentence, and so do we.

My biggest fear is someday watching a documentary like Amy Winehouse’s one. The kind of story that kept me wonder: who was there for her? Who is there for Britney? Not her dad, not her mother, not her sister or her brother, her son’s were taken away from her, her exes pretend they never met her, her friends… Does she even have friends?

Britney is a woman in her 39’s, a mother, a person that has tried so many times to show the world about feminism and empowerment and that had one episode 12 (twelve) years ago.

Britney was also the woman that spoke about losing her virginity to the guy she thought would spend his life with her (who can blame her? A lot of us did the same). She is also the woman that spoke about female masturbation and was criticized by the whole media, that aimed to ruin her ‘In The Zone’ record. She was shamed for a french kiss in freaking Madonna when Diane Sawyer interviewed her and asked what “kind of example” she set for those girls. I mean… How homophobic is that? And they never apologized.

I repeat. Everyone that is complicit to any kind of abuse and violence is an abuser.

How can we make things better not only for Britney but for all survivors of different types of abuse?

• Stop victim-blaming
• Stop body-shaming

Most of all, let’s stop pretending that all this internet hate has nothing to do with us and we have no blame on it.