What Nabokov Can Teach Us About Britney Spears
Lolita’s deranged protagonist fell in love with a fiction. Did we?
There are many disturbing moments in Framing Britney Spears, the New York Times documentary unpacking the complicated and morally dubious conservatorship the singer has been placed under for the last 12 years, but not all of them have to do with her current legal situation.
In 2008, following Spears’ well-documented public breakdown in the late ‘00s, her father Jamie Spears was appointed her conservator, assuming full responsibility for her decision-making and finances. Conservatorships tend to be temporary legal fixes, or applied in cases where the conservatee is very old or severely or mentally incapacitated. And yet, Spears has remained legally controlled by her father for more than a decade.
Framing Britney Spears does a good job of simplifying a fairly complicated legal situation and shining a light on the grassroots, community-led movement to #FreeBritney. (Spears’ most recent request to have her father removed as conservator of her estate was rejected by a Los Angeles court judge in November.) But above all, the documentary serves as a damning cultural document that concisely presents the many sins committed against Spears by the tabloid media. Some of those details have long been crystallized in popular culture—a crying Spears tormented by packs of paparazzi, or attacking a car with an umbrella—but many have been conveniently forgotten.
Those who grew up idolizing Spears will be particularly troubled by footage of journalists asking a teenage Britney whether or not she is a virgin, and of a middle-aged male chat show host openly gawping at and commenting on “the elephant in the room”—her breasts. Spears’ first Rolling Stone cover, shot in 1998 when she was still 16, is similarly unsettling. It shows Spears sprawled across a pink satin sheet wearing polka dot knickers and a pushup bra, cradling a Teletubby doll in the nook of her right arm. In other pictures from the spread, she wears underwear and a shrunken cardigan to pose in her childhood bedroom, surrounded by porcelain dolls and stuffed animals. In the accompanying profile, the writer Steven Daly refers to Spears as “bubblegum jailbait” and practically drools over her “honeyed thighs” and “ample chest.”
Framing Britney Spears dubs these images “Lolita-esque”, referencing the titular character in Vladamir Nabokov’s incendiary masterwork. First published in the United States in 1958, Lolita depicts a sexually abusive relationship between Humbert Humbert, a pedophile who “falls in love” with his prepubescent stepdaughter, Dolores Haze, then abuses her for years following the death of her mother. Humbert speaks of girls between the ages of 9 and 14 who enthusiastically engage in sexual relationships with much older men—calling them ”nymphets.” In his re-telling, Dolores is not a 12-year-old child but a nymphet named Lolita. The book has been oddly reframed in certain cultural retellings as a love story, but it is really an insight into the mind of a depraved sexual lunatic, and an exploration of the extraordinary lengths he will go to to justify his unforgivable deeds.
As luck would have it, I was midway through re-reading Lolita when I watched Framing Britney Spears, inspired after binging Jamie Loftus’ brilliant podcast series, Lolita Podcast, which published its final episode in January. Having found myself again immersed in the disturbing mind of Humbert Humbert, it was difficult not to read Framing Britney Spears as a kind of Nabokovian tragedy, replete with nymphets, teen pregnancies, and wicked father figures. Lolita comparisons have dogged Spears through much of her career, and the temptation to draw parallels is reasonable enough. Those looking to condense Framing Britney Spears into a single sentence could feasibly suggest that Spears was, like Dolores Haze, an over-sexualized teenager, carelessly discarded when she aged out of girlhood. In this retelling, Britney is Dolores and we—the public who voraciously consumed her—are a pack of Humberts. But any kind of argument that endeavours to condemn society in general as being generally bad is largely uninteresting to a writer. The truth is always more complicated.
To reframe Britney Spears as Lolita is to rob her of any personal agency—or, as Tavi Gevinson put it in New York Magazine, to argue she was “never in control.” Lolita is, after all, literally imprisoned by Humbert, her legal guardian. In possibly the most heartrending passage of the whole book, Nabokov writes: “At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.”
Is this really an apt comparison for the early stages of Britney Spears’ career? There’s certainly no question that her initial success rested largely on the discomfiting but compelling blend of God-fearing girlishness and brazen sexiness that her early songs and music videos perfected, a blending that was nymphet-esque in nature. But to believe that Spears’ entire career was manufactured by despicable quasi-pedophilic record execs, either without her input or against her will, feels slightly puritanical—particularly since it wilfully ignores Britney’s own account of events (something sorely missing from almost all of these conversations).
Take, for instance, the music video for “…Baby One More Time.” The midriff-baring sexy schoolgirl look may seem like it crawled out of one of Humbert Humbert’s sexual fantasies, but Spears devised the concept herself. “I wrote an idea which sucked,” director Nigel Dick wrote in a Q&A on his website, “so the label put me back on the phone with Britney who told me she wanted to make a video where she was stuck in a classroom thinking about boys and we took it from there.” (Spears has also confirmed the video concept was hers multiple times.) Similarly, Dick had asked the stylist to dress Spears in “jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt,” but Britney insisted she should wear a skimpy school uniform that tied at the waist.
Nigel Dick was, at this point, one of the most revered music video directors in the business. His list of credits included Cher’s “Believe”, Oasis’ “Wonderwall,” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” That Spears—a teenager working on her first music video for a debut single that she hadn’t even released yet—had the wherewithal to tell a man 28 years her senior that she hated his concept and insist they film hers, speaks to a strength of character and creative vision that she is rarely credited as having. She was five weeks shy of her 17th birthday at the time, still a schoolgirl. Should the adults in the room have stopped her, knowing the video was playing into the troubling fetishization of schoolgirls, something that Britney likely didn’t fully understand? Almost certainly. But this story pokes a hole in the argument that Spears had no say in the creation and execution of her oversexualized image.
Questions of accountability, autonomy, and responsibility present themselves in a more obvious way when it comes to the infamous Rolling Stone shoot. LaChapelle, the photographer, insists he and Spears collaborated on the concept—“we knew what we were doing when we did those photos,” he says. Spears remembered differently in a 2003 interview with British GQ. “I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing,” she said. “In my naive mind I was like, ‘Here are my dolls!’ and now I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what the hell?’”
Spears was one of the first pop stars to dabble in the Lolita aesthetic, but she certainly wasn’t the last. Lana Del Rey has long made overt allusions to Lolita in both her songwriting and her visuals—“Carmen” from her first album, recreates the song Dolores sings to Humbert the first time he abuses her. Katy Perry coos about “studying Lolita religiously” in “One of the Boys” and dresses like Lolita (the one immortalized by Sue Lyon in Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation) on the album’s cover art. Last year’s music video for the BLACKPINK and Selena Gomez track “Ice Cream” is chock full of Lolita innuendo—heart-shaped glasses, skimpy schoolgirl outfits, and cherry motifs.
Britney Spears sang about being “not a girl, not yet a woman,” and most female pop stars have occupied the chasm between childhood and womanhood. It’s no coincidence that most of the world’s most influential entertainers were introduced to us when they were children—Miley Cyrus, Zendaya, Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande, and Demi Lovato all began their careers as child stars, while Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Lorde, and Beyoncé all released their first albums when they were 17 or younger.
The natural conclusion here might be to deduce that our entertainment industry is run by a cabal of malevolent, horny record execs—there’s certainly no question that we live in a culture where youth is fetishized—but I’d argue there are less nefarious factors at play too. Teenage girls are an extraordinarily powerful consumer base. “In almost all cases, the success of a pop artist can be traced back to… the teenage girls that rallied behind them from the beginning, transforming them into megastars,” writer Douglas Greenwood declared in NME in 2018.
That same year, Dr. Francesca Coppa released The Fanfiction Reader, where she argued that the endorsement of teenage girls was essential to the success of our culture’s most revered musicians, including David Bowie, Alice Cooper, and Michael Jackson—as well as the usual suspects like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Nowadays we have Lil Nas X, BTS, and Harry Styles.
Britney Spears understood the exact audience she needed to woo to become the star she aspired to be. When she decided to sex up her Catholic school girl uniform in the “…Baby One More Time” video, she wasn’t doing it to appease ogling middle-aged men. She did it because, after months spent performing early versions of the single in malls around America, she understood what teenage girls wanted. Pop stars don’t generate cultural changes—they perceive them, they capitalize on them, and, if they’re lucky, they come to represent them. Spears was coming of age alongside the rise of so-called “raunch” culture—what Ariel Levy called the generation of “female chauvinist pigs”—exemplified by Girls Gone Wild, which had debuted a year before she released her first single. This is the reason I am so reticent to strip Spears of autonomy in the creation of her own sexual image—her success hinged on it, and it is Britney who deserves the credit.
Does this mean middle-aged men didn’t ogle anyway? Or that Spears’ hyper-sexual persona wasn’t—dare I say it—problematic? Of course not. Spears’ sexual experimentation in the public eye actually serves as a pretty good microcosm for the complexities, inconsistencies, and contradictions that make up the sexual development of teenage girls in general—particularly those who were growing up during the first wave of the proliferation of free internet porn. Most women of the generation who grew up listening to Spears will tell you the period they felt most sexualized by society was when they were young teenagers. Wolf whistling, uncomfortable staring, and casual groping were all dominant features of my own early adolescence, most often when I was in school uniform.
By the time I was in the eighth grade, run-ins with creepy older men had become relatively normalized. So much so that when two classmates regaled a story of having an elderly man aggressively masturbate to them on the bus, we all giggled and shrieked like the girls in Anaïs Nin’s Little Birds who mock the sad old pedophile trying to lure them into his lair with exotic feathered creatures. These run-ins felt disturbing, but also quietly thrilling, as if I’d found myself suddenly radioactive with a new kind of superpower—albeit one that frightened me, because I didn’t really understand how it worked. Of course, years later, I began to notice the vulnerability of uniformed teenage girls on buses, and at some point was hit with the stomach-dropping realization that I never held an iota of the power I thought I did.
When these instances become recurring parts of your adolescence, you internalize the idea that you are a sexual object to the point where you’re not sure where the fetishized view of your sexuality ends and the “real” one begins. This is the inescapable conundrum those attempting to understand Britney Spears’ cultural legacy are destined to knock heads with—how much agency does a teenage girl ever really have? How much control of her own sexuality can she exert when her presentation of that sexuality is so informed by the male gaze? How does she even know which decisions she is making off her own accord, and which are being foisted upon her, if not by individual people, then by a culture that places youth, sex, virginity, and whiteness on such a lofty pedestal?
There are, of course, no simple answers to these questions. Do I wear makeup because I like makeup or because Revlon has been conditioning me to think I do since birth? Do I shave my underarms because I prefer them shaved, or because we live in a society with beauty standards that encourage women to resemble their prepubescent selves? Do I want to marry my partner, or have I been brainwashed into embracing an outdated institution with sexist roots? Questions tackling the often imperceptible lines between empowerment and exploitation, particularly in regards to young women, aren’t going away any time soon. The important thing is that we’re finally starting to address them.
So, what can Nabokov teach us about Britney Spears? Much of Lolita’s brilliance and notoriety stem from the fact that Dolores Haze remains so unknowable to us throughout it. We are only given slight grabs at who she really is, and even these are never truly independent from the predatory gaze of Humbert. At the core of Reframing Britney Spears lies a similar conundrum. As it currently stands, Britney is unknowable to us because she either can’t or won’t speak for herself. (A documentary in which she will appear and address the conservatorship is reportedly in the works.) And so the paparazzi who made her life a living hell, a random smattering of New York Times staffers, and the hosts of a Britney Spears fan podcast are tasked with filling that same vast expanse, ultimately leaving the viewer with as abstract a picture of who Britney Jane Spears is as those who read Lolita are given of Dolores Haze.
This is perhaps the truest sense in which we can see Britney Spears as Lolita—those who have fallen in love with her fell in love with a fiction. “I knew I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.” Among the rallying cries to #FreeBritney I sometimes wonder if the media hasn’t simply turned Spears, once again, into a plaything for our culture to consume, like Humbert tracking Lolita down all those years later, trying to shove money into her hands to atone for his sins. If this is the case, perhaps the best thing we can do is—in the immortal words of Chris Crocker—simply leave Britney alone. At least until she is willing and able to speak for herself. ▩