Britney Spears and The Good Girl Double Bind
Britney Spears and The Good Girl Double Bind
Britney Spears is 10 years old, Ed McMahon is 69.
She has just given a jaw-dropping performance in a TV singing competition. He approaches her.
He comments on the 10-year old prodigy’s “pretty eyes”, rather than her powerful voice, and then asks: “Do you have a boyfriend?”
“No, sir” she retorts politely. “Why not?” presses Ed, “because they’re mean” insists little Britney.
He leans over her. “But what about me?”
And in that moment, 10-year old Britney Spears is on the spot.
She freezes, and you can see it onscreen for a fraction of a second. She's stuck. Pinned. The light in her dims. Her eyes dart to the side, searching for an answer that will not incriminate her, that will not make her sound rude, that will not give him the wrong idea, that will not give the audience the wrong idea.
Searching for a way out, she lands on, “it depends.”
As Britney shrinks and shrinks, the audience laughs and laughs. In this moment she is learning how to hide her feelings, dishonor her truth, and generate the least offensive answers she possibly can.
Her tremendous achievement? Gone.
All the attention focuses on her being.
She is learning to walk the tightrope of the Good Girl Double Bind.
In the context of the times, this moment was dismissed as funny and innocent. But the erosive effects on a woman of being pinned this way and losing her ability to speak honestly about a situation has a damaging psychological effect.
It's crazy making, and we all know it.
Language, or a lack thereof, inhibits the ways in which women are able to speak to their experience.
It is why one of our challenges at The Academy is to invent new language, terms like Freeze, Silent Expectations, and Good Girl Double Bind.
The Good Girl Double Bind describes the precarious ledge most women live on to be socially acceptable, teetering between “too much” and “not enough.”
It is a compression that has a detrimental effect on how we communicate.
A Good Girl doesn’t want to seem pushy or domineering, but she doesn’t want to seem helpless or pathetic, either. Contortions—verbal, physical, energetic—ensue.
As I watched ‘Framing Britney Spears’, the New York Times documentary, what really stood out to me is how well it captures the architecture of the Good Girl Double Bind and its erosive effects over the course of a woman's life.
In The Good Girl Double Bind, a woman can be neither too bossy nor too weak, too sexy nor too prudish, and so on and so forth.
And Britney Spears walked that line masterfully...until she no longer could. In a world where we are obsessed with how women are, and what men achieve it's really easy to see what we, as a culture, did to her.
We're so used to talking about who women are being than about what they achieve.
And we’re so accustomed to putting attention on what men can achieve (or are perceived to achieve) versus who they are being.
We take this state of affairs so much for granted, that it’s almost invisible. Just think how much a woman running for office is scrutinised for how she speaks and dresses versus what she's achieved in her decades-long career.
Meanwhile, a man can be a genuine predator, yet what he has done and what he's perceived to be able to get done comes first and foremost in how he’s evaluated.
We are obsessed with what men *do* and how women *are*.
Men are verbs; women are nouns.
This socially acceptable way of putting attention onto men and women differently is one of the essential ingredients of the Good Girl Double Bind.
I wish I had been there to tell little Britney how to flip that power dynamic. I wish I could have trained her the way I trained my students, and told her:
“This is the moment you put attention on him by turning the spotlight, by asking a question back: ‘Are you, a 69-year-old man, asking me out on a date? Are you interested in dating a 10 year-old girl?’”
Too sophisticated for a child, you might say?
Even, “why do you ask?” would have put her in the dominant position for a moment and made her feel more in charge of her life.
Because this isn’t about just one uncomfortable question. It wasn’t for Britney Spears, and it’s not for the millions of women who are silenced and shrunk in this way every day.
Death by a thousand reminders that we should police ourselves.
Jameela Jamil posted this beautiful series on Gaslighting to her Instagram Stories highlighting how we just love to put a woman on a pedestal and then tear her down. I couldn't agree more.
And what I'm most interested in is the architecture of how we do it. The specifics of how it happens. So that we can see it, recognize it, and know how to rewrite the script when we find ourselves in another one of many moments of shutdown, of being pinned, of freeze.
So how can we reclaim our power, find our voices and change the direction in which the attention is placed?
One is to do just as Jameela Jamil models in her posts: we can publicly call out when we notice another woman being pinned in an uncomfortable situation, being forced into a Good Girl double bind, and rally support.
Two, is to let that woman know that we see her, and that we know the impossible situation that she’s in. And make it understood that if she can’t speak in the moment, it's not her own weakness or a sign of self betrayal, just as it wasn't for 10 year old Britney Spears.
I wish we could all go back in time and talk to Diane Sawyer, to Ed McMahon, to Anderson Cooper, to Justin Timberlake, and to the culture at large of which they were a symptom, and open their eyes to what is so obvious to us today.
We can’t do that. But what we can do is continue to question and challenge the ways social conditioning continues to bind little girls in ways that may seem “cute” today, but will be regarded with justified horror tomorrow.
Good Girl conditioning has hamstrung women for millennia. But we have a choice in how the future unfolds, and we all get to play a role.
How to break the Freeze
If you find yourself pinned by someone’s attention or uncomfortable question like Britney Spears, the tool for flipping a power dynamic is surprisingly simple.
Ask them a question back. Anything.
“Why do you ask?”
“Are you aware that’s an impolite question?”
“What exactly are you proposing again?”
It’s simple enough in theory. But it's not easy in practice.
To use these skills in your day-to-day life, on command, it takes training and preparation.
And that’s exactly what the Verbal Self Defense Dojo offers.
Our Verbal Self-Defense Dojo is the first and only training to specifically tackle the Freeze and retrain the socially conditioned behavior that keeps women from accessing their full power and agency.
From ZOOM meetings to family conflicts, dating and everyday micro-aggressions, use these simple but potent techniques to get off the spot in any communication where you feel powerless.
Throughout centuries, women have been trained to give away their power.
The Academy teaches women to take their power back.