Brand-Name Virginity
Beyond the limitation of adopting middle-class blindness as an artistic platform, the problem is that neither Britney Spears nor her fans are innocent. Sexual innocence is an open sham here, and everyone knows it. They may be virgins in a strict sense, but this is a mere technicality that relies on a limited physical definition of virginity. Britney’s song lyrics and dance performances are quintessentially anti-virginity … Together with her smile and thrust-out breasts, Britney Spears’ midriff is a calculated sex substitute: sexual purity meets pure sex … [Virginity] is the physiological point of heteromasculinist title claims and insidious demands for a verifiable female ‘purity’ …
Britney Spears has her political-world analog in Jenna Bush, whose good-girl sham as a presidential daughter falls apart anew with each court appearance for underage drinking. The public stage appearances of Jenna and Britney both profess a clean-living morality that is too good, too clean … Jenna nor Britney have any real purchase on public credulity; they are party girls and everyone knows it. This is the good-time conservatism of the Days of Dubya, where social proprieties are honored rather than practiced …
None of this is new … Given the near-complete civil disenfranchisement of women, this celebration of female chastity might be more dryly discussed as a property management strategy …
Every come-take-me move Britney makes says that she learned early what too-proud Lily Bart [of Edith Wharton's House of Mirth] discovered too late: sex is everything. As her albums and videos spin to their finish, Britney Spears subverts her own official message: she testifies that even while sexual Victorianism persists as an idea, her world has moved on.
- Joe Lockard, “Britney Spears, Victorian Chastity and Brand-name Virginity”, Bad Subjects Magazine
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