u/warmlobster

I feel like people in this subreddit and the internet at large overstate how much people loved Britney during her peak years. There were a couple of years about from her debut in 1999 to during the Oops era in 2000 when she was massively popular, but it quickly derailed into pure hate by around early 2002. Britney wasn’t just an artist who sold a great deal of records or made very popular hits, she was a cultural fixture. A strange [mana personality](https://junguipediaeng.miraheze.org/wiki/Mana\_Personality) type where the public collectively uploaded their own ideals and expectations onto. Everyone had an opinion about her regardless of age or what they did. It was a strange mass, para-social relationship, and unfortunately, they quickly turned on her once she became too big and/or overexposed. I remember in the early 2000s when it was actually kind of cool to hate on Britney Spears because she was “too commercial” and represents “everything wrong with music”. You were looked down on if you were a Britney Spears fan in the first half of the 2000s. I sure did. Beyonce, JLo, Xtina and other pop stars could gyrate and wear skimpy outfits till the cows come home, but god forbid Britney Spears does it. The tinniest slip-up prompted a feeding frenzy by the media and the public by extension. All her contemporaries had their own messy stuff in the public eye, but none was as scrutinized and judged and held to unrealistic standards as Britney. It started with the breast implants rumors, “how dare she get her breasts done”, then moved on to “she dresses like a skank” (I heard that term so often used about her verbatim), to of course the so-called spasm of publicity as Sawyer puts it in 2002 when she broke up with JT. In a couple of months she was a liar (she’s not a virgin after all), a cheater, and overall not the good squeaky clean girl the public projected onto her. I always said that since my teenage years: the American public treated Britney like their neighbor’s sweet, goody two-shoes daughter who they hoped she remains that way because their own kids didn’t. This attitude and vitriol kept on happening until she completely fell apart and unraveled publicly between 2007-2008. It wasn’t until her comeback during the Circus era that the public did a 180 and decided to be forgiving and give her her flowers. Perhaps the most strong example of such switch was when she swept the MTV VMA 2008 by winning 3 awards in the same night, including video of the year for Piece of Me, when she never won a single VMA award in any category in her entire career up until that very night. It’s like she had to earn their affection and compassion at the cost of going through a long, drawn-out hazing ritual to get back into the public’s good graces. It was from that moment onwards that Britney was enshrined as part of the “legends” of pop music from the 20th century and early 21st. And I feel people often forget or overlook that. You hear how often people gush about how huge she was or how much she was loved, but everyone glosses over how much she was also hated. All the negative stuff from these years were blamed on “the media”, but the public was quite critical, unforgiving and straight up hateful towards her too.