Britney Spears was treated in a way that seems impossibly gross now. Could it happen again?

Whenever we are met with an uncomfortable reminder of how badly women were treated in the past, we wave it away with one handy phrase. It doesn’t matter what brought it up – those sexist ads from the ‘50s, mention of the marriage bar, or a telly documentary about the tragic life of a starlet who was abused by the studio system and almost every man in her life.

“It was a different time back then,” we say, shaking our heads and getting up to put on another cup of tea, safe in the knowledge that that kind of thing couldn’t happen now. We wouldn’t let it, sure. We know better.

It’s been a good time to be a nosy hole with a smart TV in the last few years as documentary after documentary, each more raw, more vulnerable than the last, was released about celebrity women in the 2000s. We heard Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, Victoria Beckham, The Spice Girls, Katie Price and more talk about how they were subject to cruel intrusion and exploitation, as the rest of us wished we could be them or at least look like them.

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When their intimate tapes were stolen and aired to the public for someone else’s profit, they were the ones criticised and cruelly mocked in comedy host monologues. Television and radio presenters asked them about their breasts, their sex lives and their underwear on air. They were expected to do nothing but take it, after an uncomfortable giggle.

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Watching them back is teeth-itching, and leads us grasping for the comfort of “it was a different time back then”, but that works better for eras where women weren’t allowed to open bank accounts and there was only black-and-white telly. Proper old-timey periods. Not the late 1990s/early 2000s, when we already had the internet and mobile phones and in many countries the same legislative rights that we enjoy as women today.

We thought we were so progressive. It was the era of girl power and Charlie’s Angels reboots. Everything was considered “empowering” – getting a degree, pole dancing, buying a house, wearing a G-string pulled up over your jeans and not worrying about yeast infections. We could have our cake and eat it too, but not too much because these were the “size 0″ years where the ideal body was a non-existent one.

When Jessica Simpson dared not to be the size she whittled herself down to to wear the denim underwear required for the cinematic masterpiece Dukes of Hazzard, headlines blasted her as “fat”. Her size at the time – a UK 8.

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It was as if we made young female celebrities sign a contract to always be pretty and willing in return for success. Then we were cruel to them for being “too sexy” or “too image obsessed”. All the intrusions and disrespect could be excused – because who can feel too sorry for someone young, hot and rich? They deserved it. But if they stopped playing the game they were punished more.

If “Most Wronged Women of the 2000s” was a pageant title, Britney Spears would be a top contender for the crown. The pop star emerged from her controversial 13-year court-ordered conservatorship in 2021. During that period, she claims, she was forced to take medication, work and stay on birth control, and was denied access to her money, with her father and other co-conservators making millions from their position.

Journalists thought it was professional and appropriate to ask her, a teenage girl, whether she was still a virgin

But Spears’s new book, The Woman in Me, goes beyond the harrowing conditions of the last decade because her mistreatment started long before that – years before she shaved her head and attacked a paparazzo’s car with an umbrella.

The most shocking titbit released is her claim that she had an abortion while dating fellow teen heart-throb Justin Timberlake at his request – something she describes as an “agonising” experience.

“He said we weren’t ready to have a baby in our lives, that we were way too young,” read the excerpt in People Magazine.

They started dating when she was 17 and he was 18. Around the same time, journalists thought it was professional and appropriate to ask her, a teenage girl, whether she was still a virgin. Timberlake was made to seem the victim in the eventual break-up, something he capitalised on in the Cry Me A River music video where he discovers his Britney lookalike girlfriend cheating.

In a televised interview shortly after the split, respected investigative journalist Diane Sawyer asked in an almost scolding tone, as if she was talking to a toddler, not a best-selling artist: “You did something that caused him so much pain, so much suffering. What did you do?” At one point, Sawyer held up a magazine cover featuring Spears and demanded “What happened to your clothes?” – as if she was a judgmental elderly relative at a church gathering, not a member of the press.

It all seems impossibly gross and foreign to us, looking back. But it was normal then

In the memoir, Spears describes the interview as her breaking point.

She was constantly hectored for the kind of role model she was presenting to young girls when she burst onto the scene as a 16-year-old in pigtails singing Baby One More Time, released in 1998. We held her, a child, responsible for being “too sexy”, rather than the adult, presumably male record company executives who made the creepy decision to market a teenage pop singer in a short schoolgirl uniform. Or the middle-aged male television host with a comb-over who asked the stunned 17-year-old live on air, “Everyone’s talking about it… your breasts?” Or the photographers who used to upskirt Spears for magazines to run in “Stars without Underwear” spreads. How did we even know what was under women’s dresses without paps lying strategically on the ground waiting for them to get out of cars at the right angle?

[ Britney Spears’s father and security firm ‘bugged singer’s bedroom’ ]

It all seems impossibly gross and foreign to us, looking back. But it was normal then. Which means we should question how we treat young women today in the press and in our lives to see whether there’s anything we can change now.

That way, we won’t have to look back on our behaviour now and shake our heads with a trite “it was a different time then”.