It's interesting, sometimes, the evolution of an incredibly commercial album like this one, that you buy almost expecting you're going to get screwed by its most-likely-schlocky excess, but which can occasionally sneak up on you because of that very same please-let-me-please-you attitude. And so, finally, after avoiding the rest of the album and simply playing " ... Baby" over and over again, I accidentally let the disc run its course a couple of times and decided it wasn't so bad. In fact, I actually surprisingly liked a couple of the songs, including "Sometimes," Britney's second single, which, like its predecessor, had equally double entendre lyric, but which I took with a grain of salt (or, shall I say, sugar?) at the time. "Sometimes I run/Sometimes I hide/Sometimes I'm scared of you ..." she sang and I, again, as innocently as Britney herself purported to be, sang along.

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And so it was that way for a while. I became a fan, a guilty-pleasure admirer through her rise from red- to white-hot that summer and then through the fall, and I began following, in the casual way of a celebrity magazine reader, the news and gossip about her. There were rumors, in the wake of the Rolling Stone cover, about breast implants: Had she really grown up that fast? Many media voices wondered out loud, and it was true: The "RS" pictures did strike one as quite different than her relatively "undeveloped" pictures on the album and its bonus poster inside.

"Yup, I did grow up that fast!" she said delightedly whenever asked, guileless and serious. And in the age of the Wonderbra ("Hello, boys!" its ads had been proclaiming since Spears must have been about 14), it wasn't so hard to believe. People also started to, quietly, question the lyrics on " ... Baby," but few did it too explicitly or in-depth. "Hit me," came the justifying reply, wasn't meant literally. (Duh! was the teen get-a-grip vibe.)

After a while, a few media outlets even began questioning Spears' persona more loudly as, for example, when she graced the cover of People enveloped in the headline, "Too Sexy, Too Soon?" But inside, Britney and her mom insisted that she was just a good Baptist girl from Lousiana who just seemed to want stardom so bad her parents let her go for it. They also let it be known that the Britney, from her lavender-bedspreaded bedroom on her constantly-in-motion tour bus, still scribbles down her daily prayers in a diary she calls her "Bible Book." So, was she a puppet? No way. It was Britney's idea to dress that way in the " ... Baby" video: She'd wanted to bare her belly because she thought it was cute and girly.

Now, in a way, for awhile, this could all be seen as Madonna-esque. Madonna, in fact, was one of Britney's idols, and it seemed plausible that she was simply objectifying herself in the manner patented by her model. It was an idea that had been perverted, so to speak, before (see Fiona Apple's "Criminal" video and that cool-rocker-girl's apparent decision to exploit herself before anyone else had a chance), but there seemed something beyond that going on here. There seemed, in fact, to be something going on that, if you read -- as no doubt millions of us last year and this year did -- interview after interview, pull quote after pull quote, and if you looked at picture after picture of Britney, was beyond the pop phenom's grasp.

You might have caught it in the odd media moment with Spears: The time on a late-night talk show when she wide-eyedly told the host that fame was great, if you just avoided the older men who -- could you believe it? -- seemed to be fans too.

But mostly, you'd glimpse it in the oddly angry sentiments elicited by Spear's name among her supposed fan base: When, as happened one night on Los Angeles' Top 40 station, 102.7 "Kiss" FM, a Britney-aged girl called up regarding a rumor about the pop star and N'Sync's Justin Timberlake having bought a house together, and the caller predicted in judgmental tones that, if they had, their place was no doubt a "fuckfest." Or when, as a study of teen girls' attitudes last year reflected, young women proclaimed that they didn't actually like the No. 1 girl act of their time and demographic. When questioned, during this study, about what celebrities they'd like to hang out with, they had pricelessly characterized Spears as someone whom they probably wouldn't want in their social group, but then amended it: OK, they might, but only because she'd attract the guys. (The idea was that she was dirty and it might rub off, and it even seemed to be supported in reality: When "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" star Melissa Joan Hart began a high-profile friendship with Spears, within a month or two Hart had shed her goody-goody image and shown up barely clothed on the cover of a lad magazine). So, unlike Madonna, Britney's boy-toy behavior was alienating girls rather than liberating them. Why?

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