Enough Britney bashing already

The celeb we love to hate is self-destructing before us all. Maybe it's time to realize that Britney Spears is actually a human being for whom things aren't going very well.

By Rebecca Traister

Read more: Media, Britney Spears, Celebrities, Rebecca Traister, Life

Feb. 23, 2007 | A question: At what point will people notice that the Britney Spears story has become rapidly less funny?

While tabloid press stalwarts -- I'm looking at you, Andrea Peyser -- have been reluctant to curtail the guffawing and censorious finger-wagging that began when the singer spent the holidays flashing her cooter and kicking off a three-month bender, the ribaldry surrounding her unraveling is beginning to feel extremely tacky. In fact, this week's Spears news was so grim that you could practically hear the national laugh track fading to a few awkward giggles.

Rosie O'Donnell has renewed her offer to adopt Spears (in free verse, naturally); Gwen Stefani has expressed her desire to "scoop her up and give her a kiss"; late-night comics are pulling their Britney punches. It seems to be dawning on at least some people that the 25-year-old mother of two is actually a human being for whom things are going very badly.

Spears has taken a semester-long descent into addled behavior: A typical night might include a lie to her young sons' minders about how she's just popping out to the drugstore, a trip to some clubs where she gets so looped that she decides she must change into the ill-fitting bikinis worn by the waitresses, a substance binge that lasts until she vomits on herself, and, in a boot-and-rally move worthy of the Delta Tau Delta brotherhood, some 5 a.m. phone calls about what venues might still be open for her continued partying pleasure. All of this has been conveniently captured on celluloid for the perusal of the public.

Last weekend, things took a darker turn when she checked herself into rehab in Antigua only to beat a hasty retreat the next day, heading to a salon where she shaved her own head in full view of cameras and then melted into bald and tearful fretting about how her mom would be so mad. Spears then got a pair of lips tattooed on her arm and a black-and-pink crucifix on her hip; some outlets reported a middle-of-the-night visit to Cedars Sinai Medical Center, but whatever may or may not have happened there, she was awake the next morning by 10, when she reportedly appeared alone at the pool at the Mondrian Hotel to sunbathe, drink mojitos and ask fellow guests to trade bathing suits with her.

Among the most pitiful of the recent Britney stories has been the Daily Mail scoop that Spears, whose funds have reportedly been cut off by her family, attempted to rent a room at the Mondrian armed only with a scrap of paper with half a credit card number scrawled on it. When denied, she reportedly bayed, "Nobody wants me anymore." On Tuesday, Spears checked herself into rehab at Promises in Malibu, only to check out again the next morning, making a beeline for another tattoo parlor, which was (thank god for small mercies) closed. But by Thursday, Spears had decided to give rehab the old college try once more, reportedly averting an emergency custody hearing with her ex by checking into a program that is supposed to keep her for 30 to 45 days.

There's no denying that these recent chapters of Spears' tale have been riveting in their own way. Her story is so rich that it might serve as a text on which to base a master's thesis about the projections of sexuality on a female body. (Lips on her arm? Bubble-gum cross on her hip? A shorn head and sweats on a girl who used to writhe onstage clad only in a nude body stocking and an albino snake? Paging Judy Butler!) The saga is also a little noir, a little Marilyn Monroe-Hollywood-Babylon; just last week Us Weekly predicted that an elderly Spears would most resemble the drug-puffed Liza Minnelli, our second-generation symbol of what America's celebrity factory does to its famous young girls.

Of course, we're still in the throes of last week's Babylon narrative, one that ended with a dead body being rolled out of a hotel room under a sheet; that particular body is rapidly decaying as Spears' story unfolds. Perhaps it is Anna Nicole Smith's recent demise that is casting an unflattering pall on Spears' otherwise compelling tale -- though wasn't Princess Diana's death supposed to remind us that it's all fun and games until someone loses a life?

Maybe it's simply that in a celebrity universe in which their problems -- controversial adoptions of African babies, multimillion-dollar divorces, affairs with backup dancers -- seem deeply unreal to those of us back on planet Earth, the Spears saga reeks of familiar all-too-human ick. Shaving her head and then blubbering that her mom will be mad? Getting so crocked that she vomits over her nice jeans? Sad attempts to trade clothes with other women? Mutilation of a body that once made her famous and that is now called puffy and pudgy? Trying to figure out who she is and what she wants and who she loves, all while being threatened by the sharpest of American aspersions -- that she is a bad mom?

Next page: You just can't fake the kind of bilious unhappiness that drips from Spears