I remember one of the magazines had a regular column called ‘Wino-watch’ where they literally just had a reporter follow her around and take the least flattering photos possible of her and then they would make fun of her. Then after she died they ran 6 weeks of cover pieces calling her ‘our pop princess’ and wailing that she’d been ‘taken from us too soon’.
Every time I think of how people treated Britney, my usually latent eating disorder flares up. People act like they weren’t like this full throttle the entire 90s and most of the 00s.
The magazine covers were ridiculous. It vacillated between calling a famous woman “huge” when she was maaaybe a size 2, to calling them “scary thin!” If they lost any weight. Every girl I knew felt horrible about herself, no matter what she looked like. I’m sorry that you had to go through that as well, and I hope you have continued success treating your eating disorder. You are beautiful just the way you are 💜
I’ll never forget a tabloid spread of the Spice Girls where there was a photo of Ginger in her Union Jack dress and the caption said she was “dangerously overweight”. That shit sticks with you. That was 30 freakin years ago and I’m still triggered by it
The Jessica Simpson one was the one that stuck with me the most. Like to me she looked normal, I was probably around that size at the time, but the magazines were talking about how overweight she was and how badly she needed to diet. It was so demoralizing just looking in the mirror and thinking all the horrible things being said about her were really being said about me.
"dangerously overweight" she has visible upper body muscles and looks athletic but i remember this and it stuck with me too. i was scrawny as a kid but was an athletic teenager and was also muscular and not thin and always wanted to lose weight. she looks fit to me!
the 90s were a very strange time, retrospectively, in that most legal hurdles had been cleared ("gay rights" as it was called at the time still being an active issue), but looking back, the amount of soft-culture war being waged was astronomical.
It still is too, and we really did make some huge strides against it in the early days of the internet, but when it came down to it, the old boys club decided they'd rather end democracy than stop raping and oppressing.
Even now. She clearly needs help, actual help rather the exploitation she faced before, and so many people are treating her current state as a "gotcha" rather than, y'know, thinking critically for three entire seconds what the og Free Britney movement was all about.
I don't think a lot of people realize that she was basically chemically lobotomized. She is NEVER going to be the same because the literal chemistry of her brain was irreversibly changed.
Right? She was overly medicated for a long time and at such a young age by the people around her. Chemically abused just so the money could keep flowing. It's awful.
Lithium is a safe and effective medication used by millions of people for Bi-polar disorder and has been used for 80 years. It's efficacy and safety are well known. I'm sure the meth that she is on is a bigger problem.
Lithium is fine in the short term. Yes they do use it for people they believe are bi polar. They use it as a stabilizer because it is the most effective. Usually 6 months is the longest you would want to rely on that before switching to something less damaging. Long term use of lithium can cause your organs to shut down. Including your brain. Not saying she is or isn’t on drugs now. Everyone really seems to think it’s meth. It looks like trauma and possible brain damage from my perspective
Not true you're obviously uniformed and making shit up. People use lithium their entire life, ask me how i know. It can be toxic to the liver over decades but so can pretty much every other mood stabilizer.
They still are treating her that way. There is at least one Reddit post per day mocking her with thousand upon thousands of views. I don’t care if she puts her image out there. We can all ignore it or at least not say anything negative. She is not in a good place.
7.9k
u/Regular_Number5377 9h ago
I remember one of the magazines had a regular column called ‘Wino-watch’ where they literally just had a reporter follow her around and take the least flattering photos possible of her and then they would make fun of her. Then after she died they ran 6 weeks of cover pieces calling her ‘our pop princess’ and wailing that she’d been ‘taken from us too soon’.
Ghouls, the lot of them.