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Britney Spears has been much in news, yet again, thanks
to her recent 55-hour marriage to childhood friend, Jason Alexander,
and subsequent allegations about a fat annulment fee. Although her stardom
has reached dizzying heights, Britney hasn’t been able to escape
its dark underbelly. Would you find it difficult to believe that Britney
has more hate websites than Saddam Hussein, according to a survey on
Google.
While estimates range from 2000 to 200,000, punch in “I hate Britney
Spears” in Google and you will be astounded to see the number
of sites that profess to hate the pop diva come up. 193,000, to be precise,
when I last keyed in.
From “Britney is a slut” t-shirts to “Britney Spears:
All American Whore” mugs—it’s all available online.
It makes one wonder how a twenty-something advocate of bubblegum pop
can inspire such venom. Surely, a country that is so open about its
sexuality can’t possibly have a problem with an adult female willingly
exposing her body (and what a body! even an acclaimed actor like Jack
Nicholson can’t refrain from making public his desire to bed Britney).
Could it be the holier-than-thou façade that she first tried
to perpetuate that pissed audiences off or is it the in-your-face sensuality
which she flaunts with such arrogance that gives rise to the ugly green
monster?
While Bill McCullough of www.geocities.com/witchery8/ihatebritney
claims he hates her because “she steals the pop charts away from
mature women singers who have talent and sing songs with meaning”,
there is the gentleman at http://antipopmusic00.tripod.com
who feels that “her image has been continually updated from teenage
tease belting out provocative lyrics to a full-fledged slut”.
Worth checking out is www.ihatebritneyspears.4t.com.
The site is powered by a bunch of middle schoolers who are united in
their hatred of Britney. Besides the usual message board and I hate
Britney Spears Club, the site sports two interesting features:
Funny photo page and Brit Poll.
There’s one picture in which Ms. Spears is made to wear a matronly
blue dress. Says the artist: “Since it’s so hard to find
a picture of Britney with clothes on, I drew some on her!” Brit
Poll exhorts the surfers to click on the feature that best describes
Britney. Choices range from pretty to whore.
In an article, Britney moving up on the hate parade, in The
Washington Post, Laura Sessions Stepp quotes Meredith Small, an anthropologist
at Cornell University: "We get upset when our actresses turn out
to be awful people." The marketing industry that commodifies fashion
and beauty and equates sexiness with independence also gets the boot.
Britney too has not helped her cause by her daftness and shallowness.
Newsweek quotes Britney saying she's "been into a lot
of Indian spiritual religions." Is Hinduism one of them? She replies:
"What's that? Is it like kabbalah?" Further, her public war
of words with one-time sweetheart, Justin Timberlake, only adds fuel
to fire, with die-hard Timberlake fans turning even more against this
new-age Lolita.
However, all is not lost if you are a Britney fan, like my daughter
Soven who grooves to her beats. Punch in “I love Britney Spears’
in Google and there you go… 2,730,000 sites!
Do check out the slickly produced www.britneyspears.com.
Carry on surfing!
strehan@hindustantimes.com
