Get in the kitchen, Britney!

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The guilty party: OK! Espanol 16 April 2008

This pissed me off so much I’ve had the magazine folded open to the same page for over a week. Whenever I start to feel complacent I look down at it and feel my blood return to a fine simmer.

The article is headed “This is daily life in the house of Britney Spears”. So you’ve got the obligatory reference to weight-loss (through diet and exercise, it assures us. No pill binges on Daddy’s watch) and pictures of her kids. Then you have, above the caption ‘the other face of an idol’, a three-snap spread of a frumped-out Britney (tatty extensions, horrible pink boots, baggy tee-shirt) cleaning garden furniture. I shit you not. (“She loves to clean and put things in order” the sub head murmurs, sinisterly.)

This is a woman who one of the richest stars in the world. A woman who has broken more music biz records than most artists have guitar strings (her debut album alone sold 25M copies). Probably the most recognizable female celebrity on the planet. And what does she do in her downtime? Break out a fucking bottle of Windex and wipe down the patio table. Jesus loving Christ. Is this what the 21^st century has come to? Is this where the suffragettes, The Feminine Mystique and 40 years of so-called feminism has got us – to where the world’s most famous woman is only able to be publicly rehabilitated by doing fucking housework?!

Don’t tell me to calm down because “those shots were obviously staged.” That’s the whole fucking POINT. What’s so infuriating it makes me want to stop breathing is that in this day and age these are the pictures you have to stage to prove that a woman is “good”. Had a bit of a bad time? Gone off the rails? Been caught in “un-ladylike” behaviour? Just go tidy up like a good girl and all will be forgiven. Forget bra-burning, by this mentality we should still be wearing corsets and petticoats.

How fucking ridiculous. When Pete Doherty (an artist of far lesser stature, by any means of comparison) wanted to make a good impression at court hearing 4958 or whatever it was he turned up carrying a guitar case. When Michael Jackson was acquitted of child molesting he got on top of his limo and busted a few dance moves to prove it was business as usual in Neverland. Clearly if men fuck up their path to redemption is exercising their talent. Women though? They’d better get back to their char duties.

The message about Britney is as loud and clear as one of the Times Square billboards that used to advertise her fame: if she’d just stayed in the kitchen where she belonged none of this unpleasantness would have happened.

-Cila Plastik

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Filed under britney spears, culture, feminism, housework, mothers, women's mags

Tags: pop culture, britney spears, OK!, women's magazines, feminisim, Spain