All the Lives I Want: Essays about My Best Friends Who Happen to Be Famous Strangers(4)

I rarely purchase these magazines. It is not because I am ashamed of my predilection for gawking at famous flesh but because I feel it would draw attention to my own body. I fear that looking at other bodies would magnify the existence of mine, making me somehow more material than I had been before. But when they were available in the piles of reading materials at nail salons, I would pick them up and feign defeat at the selection, as if I were positively beleaguered by some duty to read it. At drugstores with self-service kiosks where the magazines are situated directly next to the machines, I would pick up a copy and swipe the bar code across the scanner in one motion. Once I had the tasteless contraband in my hands, I skipped directly to the section of the magazine where the selections for the “best” bikini bodies were printed. I marveled at how symmetry of muscle and bone in the legs could be as striking as symmetry in the face. I wondered how abdomens could be exercised to so precise a point that they were completely flat but showed no visible muscle definition that might masculinize the effect even slightly.

There are a handful of mainstays that one can expect to find in these magazines year in and year out. Charlize Theron and Jessica Biel both make regular appearances among the best in bikini bodies. Their relentless athleticism makes their bodies appear free of the cellulite that plagues 90 percent of adult women, as beauty magazines are always quick to remind us when we seek out cures for this blight. There are other celebrities who remain in constant rotation on either side of the list because they have gained and lost weight. Nicole Richie was despised for having the audacity to appear on television and not hate herself when she was heavier, as she was later despised for losing a dramatic amount of weight. Jessica Simpson incurred similar wrath for her flagrant refusal to stay thin while gestating a human.

Jessica Simpson was the least famous third of a trifecta whose bodies I grew up gazing at alongside an American public that was absolutely rabid for opportunities to scrutinize them. The other two were Christina Aguilera and the legendary Miss Britney Spears, of course. These women came into public life as girls, barely out of puberty and eager to please a public that demanded they be pleasant or face extreme consequences. It was Britney’s famous midriff that led the charge of sexualized teen pop stars into lives in the late 1990s with “… Baby One More Time,” an anthem that remains nonsensical nearly twenty years after its debut while its accompanying video grows more iconic. Christina entered the public consciousness singing, “My body’s saying ‘Let’s go,’ but my heart is saying, ‘No,’” on the hit “Genie in a Bottle.” Whether it was prescience or accident that a pop star’s heart would be considered separate from her body, I am not sure. Then there was Jessica Simpson, who emerged at the tail end of the 1990s as the wholesome response to Christina and Britney but whose own father famously told GQ in 2004, “Jessica never tries to be sexy. She just is sexy. If you put her in a T-shirt or you put her in a bustier, she’s sexy in both. She’s got double D’s! You can’t cover those suckers up!”2 But while Christina and Jessica have been given opportunities to respond gracefully to their detractors, there seems to be no rest for the body of Britney.

It was Britney whose performance of “Oops!… I Did It Again” at the 2000 MTV Video Music Awards made history, when the only thing that could upstage the rhinestone-studded nude pants and bustier she wore was the incredible fitness of the body that wore it. I recall watching the VMAs and envying the tautness and smooth tan of her figure, then envying her twice over when boys at school the next day recalled its perfection. More than once that day, a boy declared, “Her body is insane.” It was an apt description: Maintaining that particular ratio of muscle tone to fat while retaining some level of feminine curves requires round-the-clock diligence, an obsessive single-mindedness, and a kind of madness that I have little confidence these boys knew or cared about.

When Britney married young and began having children, her weight gains and losses became a sport that has not since receded from the public imagination. After Britney’s second son was born in 2006, People published a workout and diet regimen that she was allegedly adhering to in order to lose her pregnancy weight; however, this was unsubstantiated by Britney or anyone on her team. People then had the audacity to shame her for its rigor. The regimen involved the standard fare of “secrets” that are not secret at all: six small meals in lieu of three hardy ones, cardiovascular exercise, and removal of white flour and processed sugar. Before launching into the piece, there is the benevolent caveat: “The last thing a brand new mom should be concerned about is weight loss. This is the time to take care of your baby and yourself. The weight will come off later. Even celebrities whose job it is to look good should keep this in mind. Your baby will only be a baby once.” It takes just one sentence for the writer to go off script. The narrative goes from a focus on new mothers taking care of themselves to revealing that this is actually all about a neglected infant whose mother resides in one of the world’s most frequently dissected bodies. “We are worried about the message that this sends to new moms, that it’s safe to exercise like this following a birth and that this kind of weight loss in a short period of time is normal,” they write, judgment oozing from so brief an admonition.3

It is common to say that “the years were unkind” to a person, but in the case of Britney Spears, it is irresponsible to blame nonsentient time for unkindness when there was a wealth of people being unkind to her. From her harrowing breakdown to her ongoing weight struggles, the tabloids do not relent and do not forget. In the lower-brow selection of tabloids that report on the weight of celebrities, one statement that follows women struggling with their weight around more than any other is “She got her body back.” Here you’ll find near-constant Britney coverage. But barring any transcendent out-of-body experiences, these women were never separated from their bodies. They’ve occupied them across various weights. This phrase is not about a woman getting back something she lost as much as it is about our approval that she has returned to something we want her to be. What is meant by this phrase is “We got her body back.” We got the body we felt entitled to. In the case of Britney, that is the impossibly lean and limber body of a teenage girl, a body that was enthusiastically characterized as “insane.”