Britney Spears is ready and finally able to share her story in her own words. Her memoir, The Woman in Me, comes out on October 24 and if the excerpts shared prior to the book’s release are any indication of what else is in the book, get ready for some bombshells. For so long, Britney Spears has been tabloid fodder. Her behavior—like the time she shaved her hair off in 2007—has been judged, ridiculed, and used to paint a picture of her as an unhinged person. So much so that in February 2008, her father petitioned the courts to give him control of Britney’s life through a conservatorship.
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That conservatorship lasted for 13 years. During that time, even if Britney had wanted to tell her side of the story, she couldn’t without her father’s permission. Think about that for a second, she was a grown woman of 26 with two children and an incredibly successful career when the conservatorship went into effect and she was not allowed to control her own narrative. All that changed when the conservatorship ended following a court ruling in November 2021. Now that Britney can speak and advocate for herself, she’s not holding back. Keep reading to see why she shaved her head back in 2007 and more.
Shaving her head was an act of rebellion.
Here’s what Britney shares regarding her motivation to shave her head in 2007:
“I’d been eyeballed so much growing up. I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they thought of my body, since I was a teenager. Shaving my head and acting out were my ways of pushing back.”
It's kind of laughable now that everyone made such a big deal out of it.
Everyone at the time acted like she was out of her mind for shaving her hair off, but is it even that big of a deal? It’s just hair, people! It will grow back and women are allowed to shave their head if they want to.
The conservatorship basically turned her into a child.
Women get to make decisions for themselves, children do not. “The conservatorship stripped me of my womanhood, made me into a child. I became more of an entity than a person onstage,” Britney shares.
She calls out the sexism in how she was treated.
“Think of how many male artists gambled all their money away; how many had substance abuse or mental health issues. No one tried to take away their control over their bodies and money.” She is not wrong.
Supposedly, she couldn’t take care of herself, but somehow, she could still perform?
It is very strange that she was deemed unable to take care of herself, but was still perfectly capable of thriving professionally. Britney explains: “I sometimes thought that it was almost funny how I won those awards for the album I made while I was supposedly so incapacitated that I had to be controlled by my family.”
All the control that was imposed on her killed her creativity.
“The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time.” It’s unnatural for a grown person to not have a say in what they want to do, not only that, but creativity is all about having choices, making choices.
Her memoir also shares that she had an abortion when she dated Justin Timberlake.
In an excerpt of her book, published by People, Britney explains that during the time she dated Justin Timberlake, which was from 1999 to 2002, she got pregnant. Although she was not planning to be pregnant, for her “it wasn’t a tragedy.”
Justin did not feel the same way about the pregnancy, though.
“But Justin definitely wasn’t happy about the pregnancy. He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young," she writes. And so she had an abortion. "If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it. And yet Justin was so sure that he didn’t want to be a father.”
Why has it taken so long for Britney to tell her story?
“Since I’ve been free, I’ve had to construct a whole different identity. I’ve had to say, Wait a second, this is who I was—someone passive and pleasing. A girl. And this is who I am now—someone strong and confident. A woman.” She was basically a prisoner and had to learn how to exist once she was let out of prison.
There’s bound to be so many more revelations in her book.
Even though Britney has been a public figure since she was 11 years old, so much of her personal life and what she has been through has remained a mystery…until now. You can preorder The Woman in Me ahead of its October 24 release.
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