In one breath, she was an idol for young girls; in the other, she was corrupting America’s youth one cropped tee at a time. As Spears grappled with her identity, artistry, and sexuality on the world’s stage, we grappled with her. Who was she? What did she want? Seemingly everyone was asking these questions in the year 2000. If you weren’t a fan of Britney Spears, you’d at least heard of her—and you definitely had an opinion.
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Growing up in South Carolina, Erin, 32, remembers thinking Spears was “the girl.” “She wasn’t relatable to me, but not in a bad way,” she says. “She was older and so cool and pretty and perfect. I consumed so much media about her—I was entranced.”
At a sleepover one night, Erin and her friends attempted to learn Spears’s iconic “Oops!…I Did It Again” dance, and she recalls having a specific, gnawing thought: I’m not doing this in front of my mom. “I knew by default Britney wasn’t a parent’s favorite influence,” Erin says. “That was so much of the narrative about her then.”
Michelle, Erin’s mom, was indeed aware of pop culture’s effects on her two daughters (her youngest’s name is Brooke), but she wasn’t “super judgy,” Erin says. “I wore a Christina Aguilera ‘Genie in a Bottle’ costume for Halloween one year, and she was fine with that.”
Of course, Michelle, a lifelong school teacher, had some guardrails for what she wanted her daughters to consume and wear. When she took them to see Mean Girls in 2004, she made them leave after the first 15 minutes. “She had this thing about girls being mean; she didn’t like us watching that,” Erin says. “She was aware of Christina and Britney, and ‘Are they fighting? Do they not like each other?’ I don’t think she liked that.”
Michelle also didn’t love Spears’s style at the time (nor Aguilera’s—that aforementioned “Genie” costume went through several rounds of approval). “I wanted my girls to be modest,” she says. “I didn’t want my girls to look at Britney as an idol to emulate because I didn’t want them showing their bellies or revealing their bodies.”
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The images in Spears’s music videos were “a concern,” Michelle remembers. When she’d take Brooke and Erin shopping at teen stores in the mall, “crop tops and belly shirts were everywhere.” Michelle thinks Britney’s image heavily contributed to how revealing some teen fashion got in the early 2000s.
“[These styles] were under the guise of being cute little-girl clothes,” Michelle says. “But these were not grown-up stores. I don’t know if [Erin and Brooke] would’ve seen these clothes as inappropriate at the time, but they just weren’t an option for them.”
When I ask Michelle if she worried about Spears’s influence on her daughters then, she doesn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” she says, with an important caveat: She never blamed Britney Spears herself for the images Erin and Brooke became enamored with. After all, Spears was only a teenager herself when …Baby One More Time debuted in 1998. “A 16-year-old doesn’t make those decisions,” Michelle says. “Girls like Britney [in Hollywood] needed to be protected, and they often weren’t. That makes me sad. They aren’t allowed to be children. I was sad for her and angry at whoever allowed that to happen to a child.”
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Christina Aguilera Is Only Human
It’s been 25 years since the world first heard “Genie in a Bottle” and a culture-shifting pop star was born. A lot has happened in the quarter century since, and Aguilera is opening up about it all: fame, the ruthless ’00s tabloids, bucking convention, saying no, and—her proudest accomplishment—motherhood.
As Michelle sat in her living room 25 years ago attempting to wrap her head around Spears, Erin was upstairs having simpler, more innocent thoughts. When I ask what she remembers about the “Oops” video, Erin says, “Britney’s long, long straight hair. That was the red catsuit, right? The dance moves were so good. The outfits were so cool. So many music videos at the time were so basic; the artists were just in neon boxes, spinning around. Britney’s videos were whole performances.”