But what about No Doubt's Gwen Stefani and Mariah Carey, someone else might say, both of whom, respectively, are no strangers to slamming sounds or desperate ballads? Again, the differences are key: For Stefani, even in all her "Just a Girl" glory, works into her ska and new wave-y hard sounds, echoes them, plays along with her songs instead of getting beaten up by them. She's a tough girl, and she's got the style -- the flamingo-pink hair, the braces-as-a fashion-statement moxie --and one-of-the-boys energy in her performances to prove it. And Mariah? Mariah's just a girl with a crush, over and over again, a girl who wants to be pretty and keeps trying harder and harder to be ever more so, who promises to give it up but still always remains, in all her Sony-studded armor, a version of a virgin.

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So no, Britney's different. What she's doing, in the end, seems much more murky, and more real, and more subtle, and -- finally and perhaps most crucially -- more unknowing. In that latest issue of Rolling Stone, for example, she appears to be finally getting a whiff of what may actually be going on, but she's still holding her nose, saying, "I don't think about [it]. ... I don't want to be part of someone's Lolita thing," she tells the magazine. "It kind of freaks me out." So Britney doesn't really want to know what she's doing, and she appears to be committed to keeping her innocence, at least in that regard, intact. She wants to remain shielded from her own reality.

And perhaps luckily so. For Spears' appeal, in the end, seems to be exactly that: That who she is, or more precisely, what she's doing, is beyond her own understanding. Her new album, in fact, expertly plays upon the same "Who, me, sexy?" guilelessness as her first one, from the title on down: Oops ... she's doing it again. (The media, of course, only plays this note further: "The Girl Can't Help It" is one recent and typically dutiful headline.) And yet, of course, the truth is that the "Oops" title alone is confirmation that someone has zeroed in on her double-entendre underage appeal, and decided to slam it all the way to the bank.

And so the question remains: Who does know what Spears is doing? Jive Records' shockingly dirty old man-esque impresario? Her Swedish hitmaker Svengali, Max Martin? Britney herself, secretly? Her millions upon millions of fans?

I've come to suspect that it's probably all of us, and perhaps also none of us at the same time. Yes, it's possible. Because it's simply unspeakable, this girl's persona, like so many things these days in the media-saturated air. It's like the odd (and unacknowledged) reality of a movie like last year's "The Talented Mr. Ripley," a clearly gay romp marketed as a clearly hetero one; or the unending but also secretly marketed homoerotic appeal of a Brad Pitt or a Tom Cruise or the unspoken but inescapably odd institution of crooked-toothed but implanted-galore porn star Jenna Jameson in a reporter's spot on "E!" recently; or, cutting even closer to the chase, the way "no one will talk about porn but everyone rents it," as another adult film star recently told an interviewer on a "True Life" special on MTV.

It's true life alright, stumbling upon moments, media and otherwise, that are the exact opposite of what they promised to be. And it may not just be odd, it also may be dangerous. In fact, it's supposed to be a leading cause for schizophrenia -- being sent mixed signals, being told (or, in this case, sold) one thing, and shown another. It screws with your sense of reality. It makes you, in a sense, split right down the middle. It cracks you in two.

And so we have Britney, a girl for our times. A virgin and a whore. A girl who doesn't know what she's doing, but boy does she do it. A girl who lets you hurt her, and who pretends, and maybe even believes, that she likes it. A girl whose pain is our pleasure. A girl who gets even, but only as long as it's hot. A Mouseketeer turned near-kiddie porn star. A girl, finally, who feeds something black and blue in all of us, but who wraps it up in a pretty pink bow.
salon.com | May 22, 2000

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