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The double-standard is real.
By Isaac Serna-Diez — Written on May 11, 2022
Social media is at war right now over the state of Britney Spears’s mental health following a bombardment of nude posts on Instagram from the 40-year-old pop star.
Spears has posted several images of herself using only an emoji to keep within Instagram's community guidelines but fans are divided about what this means for the singer's wellbeing.
Many see the nude posts on Instagram and have started to claim that maybe she should have stayed in her conservatorship, but others see this as a way to say that she should be controlled.
Fans have defended her by arguing that other women, like Kim Kardashian, get praised for doing the same thing.
In 2014, Kardashian did a nude photoshoot with Paper Magazine that was titled “Break the Internet,” and while the people you would normally expect to have a problem with it did, the overwhelming majority supported the shoot and her decision to pose nude.
In 2016, the Kardashian did pretty much the same thing that Spears is doing now, posting to Instagram with the caption “When you're like I have nothing to wear LOL,” and posting a nude image of herself with her breasts and genitals covered by a black bar.
The only difference between Kardashian’s post and Spears’s post is that Spears is using emojis instead and likely got Sam Asghiri, her fiance, to take the picture instead of it being a selfie, so what’s the big deal?
Kardashian is repeatedly praised for posing nude, and is applauded for showing more, so why isn’t Spears?
"Starting to think those who were in control perhaps should have stayed in control," reads a comment from a concerned person.
But comments like these have dangerous implications.
By suggesting that Spears needs to be under a conservatorship simply because she posed nude, we are implying that all women who express their sexuality need to be stifled and controlled.
Conservatorship don't exist just to stop people from doing things you don't like.
You see, we aren’t used to seeing Spears in this way — she’s always been the mistreated pop star who needed to be freed. But beneath this “damsel in distress” image we gave her is a grown woman who has lived a life behind closed doors that we were never allowed to see.
Perhaps, Spears is now showing us who she always was, not who we wanted her to be.
Her 13-year-long conservatorship played a role in making people think she had to have some sort of innocence preserved and by holding on to this expectation we are not really freeing her at all.
Kardashian, however, has also been known as a sex symbol — she was never under anyone's control because she, like Spears, never should have been.
Seeing the flip of a switch with Spears has caused people to shift the blame somewhere else by raising mental health concerns — some of which might be valid, but not when it comes to her posting these nude photos.
People want Spears to remain as the idealized version of herself they have in their heads, but she refuses to do so, so they want to control her.
This problem also speaks to the minority who slut-shamed Kardashian for her posts and speaks to the much larger problem that’s happening in the United States right now — the oppression of women’s rights and controlling women’s bodies.
Both Kardashian and Spears have been, in different ways, victims of the same culture of misogyny and shamed for taking ownership of their bodies.
For some reason, people have it in their minds that women should not be proud of their bodies and should not be allowed to show them off.
Spears is simply a much easier target because of everything that went on with her conservatorship and her mental health struggles.
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.