Britney Spears v The Patriarchy

The American pop superstar Britney Spears wants the freedom to control her own fertility. She’s a grown woman, an accomplished professional, a self-made multi-millionaire, and rapidly approaching forty years old. What patriarchal control-monster could possibly object? Yet “the patriarchy” stands accused of standing in her way. Even worse, one of the men standing in her way has been her own father, backed up for thirteen years by the full power of the state. It’s the twenty-first century, or so we thought. Why in the world would the state, especially a state as progressive as California, allow anyone to interfere with a woman’s right to have a baby—let alone her father? It all sounds so … biblical.

The internet is aghast at Spears’s treatment. A California judge placed her worldly affairs under the conservatorship of her father in 2008. At the time, Spears was undergoing treatment in a mental health facility, having only recently been released from a drug rehabilitation clinic. This was the time of her famous head-shaving and the child endangerment that led to her losing custody over her two young children. But between 2008 and 2019, Spears returned to active professional life, recording four studio albums, earning a recurring role on television, and headlining her own Las Vegas show. Throughout that time, she retained the conservatorship under which her father managed her worldly affairs. Had she requested its cessation, there is no reason to think a judge would have refused.

In early 2019, Spears was once again hospitalised, and she has been in and out of residential mental health facilities ever since. Although mostly keeping to herself, she has communicated sporadically with her fans, decrying her persecution and pleading for justice. Fellow celebrities have sprung to her defence. The single-name singer Cher accused Spears’s father of “giving her drugs so she could perform,but made sure she couldnt have a life,but no one could get 2 her” (sic). Fellow single-name singer Madonna compared Spears’s situation to modern slavery, calling for “Death to the greedy patriarchy that has been doing this to women for centuries. This is a violation of human rights!” Many other entertainers tweeted similar slogans of support.

The #FreeBritney movement (yes, it has its own hashtag) has gone viral, and even made its way to Congress. The bipartisan Freedom and Right to Emancipate from Exploitation bill (the “FREE” bill; Congress is so clever these days) would allow incapacitated individuals to replace private conservators with public guardians. This political gesture was immediately rejected by #FreeBritney activists, who saw in it only the changing of the guard. They want Spears sprung, and they want it now. Most of all, the internet is aghast that, although until very recently resident in a mental health facility, Spears should be prevented from conceiving the third baby she so desperately desires.

Well, maybe the internet should take a deep breath, step back, and consider how well qualified it is to judge what’s best for Britney. The internet might ask itself why Spears is under court supervision in the first place. The internet might well wonder why courts have repeatedly committed her to hospitals against her will—“sectioned” her, in Australian parlance—and rejected her pleas for liberty. Notwithstanding the fact that Spears is now thirty-nine years old, the internet might reflect on the immediacy of her sudden need to have more children, and contemplate the possibility that a further delay of a few months might not be so onerous. And the internet might just consider the possibility that Spears was mentally fully competent when she decided to go on birth control, and might later be very upset if the state allowed her to go off it.

Britney Spears has had something of a hardscrabble but ultimately wildly successful life. Her mother ran a daycare centre in a small Louisiana town of just over 2000 people. Her father, who reportedly suffered chronic problems with alcohol abuse, was a welder who later ran a gym in the same small town. They divorced after daughter Britney made it big. Britney Spears herself, like many popular entertainers, has a history of erratic behaviour and failed relationships. Since 2008, her affairs have been locked into a conservatorship, first under her father, then under a lawyer, then under her father and a lawyer, then under her father after the lawyer resigned, and (as of this writing) under a new arrangement to be determined. The conservatorship restricts her autonomy to take decisions for herself. She has signed away the management of her career, her fortune, her health, and even her fertility.

For birth control, she is apparently using an intrauterine device (IUD), a fully reversible mechanical intervention designed to prevent pregnancy through mechanical means. The IUD is widely used as an alternative to the contraceptive pill. It is the preferred intervention in cases of personal incapacity (for example, due to mental illness or mental retardation) since it doesn’t require the attentiveness of taking a daily pill and is not easily removed like a cervical cap. According to United Nations estimates, the IUD is the second most widely used method of non-permanent birth control, following only the condom and slightly outpacing the pill. Approximately 159 million women worldwide use an IUD.

Spears wants hers removed. The conservatorship has refused, and Spears is seeking to have that decision overturned in court. The court is only involved because of the conservatorship arrangement; otherwise it would be up to her doctors to decide whether she was competent to decide to have her IUD removed. The strange thing is that Spears could have ended the conservatorship and taken full control over her life at any moment—while she was well. The only reason the state would not end the conservatorship now is if a judge ruled that Spears was not mentally competent to request its revocation. It is a grave matter for the state to take away an individual’s liberty or property, and in the United States (as in Australia) it is a step not taken lightly.

No one outside Spears’s immediate family, her caregivers and a California court knows the full details of Spears’s health. Her health is her own business, and none of ours. But her erratic public behaviour, history of mental health hospitalisations, and (prescribed) use of lithium (which she has revealed on numerous occasions) are all consistent with the experiences of people who suffer from serious bipolar disorder. Spears may or may not suffer from bipolar disorder, but for us to learn from her experiences, her exact diagnosis is beside the point. Few of us will ever be or even know pop superstars who are struggling to cope with the pressures of fame and fortune. But many of us know (and may not even know that we know) ordinary adults who are struggling to cope with serious mental illness.

Bipolar disorder is one of the most serious—and most difficult to recognise—forms of mental illness. Sometimes called manic depression, bipolar disorder is characterised by severe mood swings that can last weeks or months at a stretch. Bipolar mania (the “up” phase) is commonly associated with heightened enthusiasm, delusions of grandeur, and potentially self-destructive over-confidence. Bipolar depression (the “down” phase) is even more dangerous, sometimes ending in suicide. People with bipolar disorder may have normal, level moods for years at a time, or may experience extreme up and down swings several times in a single year. And in an unfortunate catch-22, people who suffer from bipolar disorder often do not recognise their mood swings when they are in the midst of them, even though they know that they are subject to them.

One common feature of bipolar mania is hypersexuality. For men with bipolar disorder, this can get them in serious trouble, increasing the chances that they will engage in improper sexual behaviour or even sexual assault. Sexually aggressive, mentally ill men can cause serious harm and end up in prison for behaviour that is, ultimately, beyond their control. The insanity defence is well developed for murder, but little tolerated for rape. Perhaps because men are widely stigmatised as being sexually aggressive in general, the heightened sexual aggression of a man suffering from bipolar disorder is all too easily stereotyped as an extreme form of typical male misbehaviour.

For women with bipolar disorder, the threat of hypersexuality is even greater: they may unintentionally become pregnant with inappropriate or undesired partners. Of course, it takes two to tango. But although the stereotype of male sexual aggression is wildly exaggerated, the stereotype of male sexual promiscuity is much closer to reality. It is not difficult for a sexually aggressive woman, particularly a young woman, to find a willing partner. When that young woman looks like Britney Spears, the queue of eager partners runs to the millions.

It is technically illegal to have sex with someone who is incapacitated by mental illness, and men bear equal legal responsibility for the consequences of pregnancy. But, practically speaking, the one carrying the fetus is the one with the problem. It is hard to imagine a court convicting a man of rape for having sex with someone who expresses the “enthusiastic consent” of a woman in the grip of bipolar mania, and in the unlikely event that a court were to intervene, it would be far too late. Even in a protective hospital setting, sex is never entirely preventable. Thus the value of an IUD. It may not solve the problem of regretted sexual intercourse, but at least it reduces the potential consequences.

We don’t know whether Britney Spears has bipolar disorder, has ever exhibited hypersexuality, or truly wants a child. Some commentators have dismissed concerns over unwanted pregnancy, pointing out that people accidentally get pregnant all the time. They imply that forcing Spears to keep her IUD is akin to forcing all women who are not seeking pregnancy to have IUDs inserted, just in case. In this line of reasoning, Spears is no different from the teenager who accidentally gets pregnant after the school formal or on a carelessly chaperoned field trip. In this universe of the imagination, regretted sex is no big deal. Any residual problems can be cleared up with a timely abortion.

Thus the internet as a whole seems convinced that Spears’s IUD is the modern equivalent of a medieval chastity belt. Columnists in several reputable newspapers have made exactly that comparison. They might consider the alternative possibility that Spears, while of sound mind, had an IUD inserted in order to ensure that she would not, while not of sound mind, get herself pregnant. They might also consider the curious fact that, at no point during the decade or so when she was well enough to achieve multiple career milestones, did she choose to revoke her conservatorship. Instead, she waited for a moment when her conservators and the state of California felt that she was sufficiently ill as to be incapable of making important decisions about her own life.

But, the internet objects: “the patriarchy”. Forget that it was a female judge who denied Spears’s most recent request to end her conservatorship; we all know that, with rare exceptions like Julia Gillard and Jacinda Ardern, women are only allowed to reach positions of authority by embracing the patriarchy themselves. Forget that it was Spears herself who must have had her IUD inserted, since no doctor would risk the malpractice of forcing one on her under involuntary anaesthesia; we all know that vulnerable women can be bullied into giving coerced consent. Men have sought to control women’s fertility for millennia (so we are told), and we all know that what fathers really want isn’t grandchildren, but to control their little girls forever.

Or it may be that the patriarchy’s supposed obsession with contraception is just as much a modern fiction as the chastity belt, which historians assure us never actually existed. Many of the articles on Spears’s confinement remind us that the forced sterilisation of women with severe mental disabilities continued in the United States up until the enlightened reforms of the 1970s (and indeed it is still legal in Australia). They rarely mention that the practice only began in the early 1900s, and that many of its leading advocates were women: not women under the thumb of the patriarchy, but powerful, autonomously acting, highly capable feminists like Margaret Sanger in the US and Emmeline Pankhurst in the UK. Far from being the legacy of an age-old patriarchy, forced contraception and sterilisation were the inventions of an earlier generation of modern social reformers.

The patriarchy—such as it was—certainly attempted to control fertility: of both men and women. Under the ninth-century laws of Alfred the Great, a man could be killed for committing adultery; no punishment was specified for the woman. This was confirmed in the eleventh-century laws of William the Conqueror. In the later Middle Ages, the maximum penalty for adultery was reduced (or increased, depending on your point of view) to excommunication. By the seventeenth century, this was reduced to a matter of monetary damages. Again, only the male adulterer had to pay. The adultery of a queen consort might be construed as treason by Henry VIII, but for everyone else, the days when a Roman patriarch could kill his daughter to prevent her falling to the wrong man are long, long gone.

As it happens, it was the supposedly patriarchal Roman Catholic Church that introduced the novel notion that marriage could only be entered into as a voluntary contract on both parts. Anyone who has ever said “I do” at the altar has Christianity to thank. The medieval church may have sought to control extramarital sex through the application of severe penalties (women with shame; men with death), but it was the first major institution in Western history to firmly establish the principle that “no means no”. There are many ways in which medieval Christian concepts of consent fell short of twenty-first-century expectations, but in many ways the patriarchy of our deep history came closer to embracing today’s sensibilities than did the progressive reformers of the early 1900s.

Lacking genuine knowledge of the past, social critics routinely make the mistake of conflating historically recent reforms with age-old injustices. It’s the same with mental illness as with fertility control. The involuntary confinement of the mentally ill only began in the nineteenth century, and even then only as a humane alternative to imprisonment for people who could not be held mentally responsible for their crimes. Men have always been more frequently confined than women; in California, men make up 85 per cent of the population confined in state psychiatric hospitals. Spears’s most recent hospitalisation was apparently voluntary and brief, and as of this writing she is out and vacationing with her romantic partner, the twenty-seven-year-old model Sam Asghari.

Australia’s own Julia Baird has written that Spears is “symbol of women who, for millennia, have been declared mad and incapable of managing their own affairs, then locked up, sterilised and drugged by relatives who wish to gain control of her money and assets”. So much for Spears the symbol. Spears the living, breathing human being is a more complicated matter. Maybe we should let her be that for now, and ask her about it when she is better able to answer. It just might turn out that her family, the court that overseas her conservatorship, and the doctors who oversee her treatment have her best interests at heart, after all. As her father has pointed out: “it’s up to the court of California to decide what’s best for my daughter. It’s no one else’s business.”

Salvatore Babones is The Philistine