The first time Britney Spears saw the snake, she was scared. It was 2001 and she was a 19-year-old backstage at the MTV Video Music Awards, preparing for her now-famous performance of “I’m a Slave 4 U” with an albino Burmese python draped over her. The snake was disgusting – “yellow and white, crinkly, gross-looking” – and enormous. “The girl who handed it to me… was very tiny, with blond hair… I remember thinking, you’re letting us two little munchkins handle this huge snake…?” On stage, her image beaming on to television sets around the world, Spears felt vulnerable – even afraid for her life. Presented with the snake, “All I knew was to look down, because if I looked up and caught its eye, it would kill me.” The image is almost too Freudian – of course America’s teen-girl pin-up, burdened with the sexual fantasies of a nation, would be made to walk across a public stage carrying a giant angry snake on her shoulders.
Reading Britney Spears’s memoir, The Woman in Me – an account of how a woman declared the most powerful celebrity in the world by Forbes in 2002, could, less than six years later, be trapped against her will in a “conservatorship” so restrictive that she was not allowed to feed herself, spend her own money or drive her own car – at times feels like being told a dark fairy tale. A young girl, both adored and vilified for her beauty, talent and fame, is preyed upon by the avaricious, imprisoned by her jealous, controlling father and overworked by her cruel, selfish family. Her confinement lasts for 13 years.
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