Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The Senate moves forward with former President Trump’s impeachment trial, Michelle Obama will star in a Netflix cooking show for kids, and the new Britney Spears documentary prompts some difficult reflections. Have a wonderful Wednesday.
– Changing the frame. Has anyone else watched Framing Britney, the New York Times’ documentary about Britney Spears? I finally put it on this week—and found it every bit as essential and brutal a watch as you’ve heard.
I’m a little older than Spears, but I was definitely consuming pop and celebrity culture during her rise and heyday, so there wasn’t much in the documentary that was new to me, per se. But revisiting those events now felt like seeing them as a different person, and made me wince to think about how willingly I’d accepted the unrelenting misogyny that bore down on Spears from the moment she stepped onto the public stage.
One of the less savory artifacts of the Britney era unearthed by the documentary is a 2002 cover of Details magazine featuring Justin Timberlake (apologies—this is the best image I could find online). The cover asks: “Can we ever forgive Justin Timberlake for all that sissy music? Hey, at least he got into Britney’s pants.” And I ask: Can we ever forgive ourselves for accepting this level of casual sexism and homophobia in our culture less than two decades ago?
We are still a long, long way from eliminating those scourges—much less racism!—from our media and our lives. But I will admit that I get a little hope from the latest issue of a different men’s magazine, GQ. (The two actually have a lot of shared history. Details was published by GQ parent Conde Nast until it was shuttered in 2015 and some of its content lives on GQStyle.com) The publication’s “modern lovers” issue includes this wonderful cover story on “cross-sport lesbian power couple” Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird, who seem almost too charming to be real humans. I encourage you to read it, fantasize about being best friends with the gold medal-winning soccer icon and basketball superstar, reflect on the progress we’ve made since 2002—and what we still need to achieve.
Kristen Bellstrom
[email protected]
@kayelbee
Today’s Broadsheet was curated by Emma Hinchliffe.
