Britney Spears Apologizes for That Weird Post Fat-Shaming Christina Aguilera’s Back-up Dancers
"What I posted is a projection of the insecurities I deal with all the time," the singer admitted in a mea culpa on Instagram.
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Welcome to another episode of “After Being Locked Up in a Conservatorship for 13 Years, Britney Spears Learns How to Function in the Present Day.” The singer, 40, apologized on Tuesday for her cringey Instagram post earlier this week about the size of Christina Aguilera’s backup dancers.
The post heard ‘round the world was an image from PictureQuotes.com (whatever that is! Britney loves ripping watermarked imagery off Google) that read, “I found there was only one way to be thin: hang out with fat people,” a quote from comedian Rodney Dangerfield, I guess. In the accompanying caption, Britney confessed she wished she “could have chosen the nannies for my children … my dancers … I mean if I had Christina Aguilera’s dancers I would have looked extremely small.” Addressing her long-held (and systemically induced!) insecurities about her body, she continued, “Don’t you think my confidence would have been a bit better if I could choose where I lived, ate, whom I called on the phone, dated and who was on stage with me !!!” Yikes, indeed.
After Spears’ metamorphosis from a muzzled, money-making puppet to a beautiful butterfly who has spread her wings and flapped them far, far away from her exploitative family of leeches, the pop icon found millions of fans in her corner—41.9 million on Instagram to be exact. This time, however, her fans had some choice words for their Queen Mother. “Ooop this is far from cool, brit,” one commenter wrote. Another encouraged her to speak her truth “without making an effort to offend someone.” And a third, which garnered over 5,000 likes, read, “Britney, this ain’t it. I know you’ve missed a lot, but it’s 2022. We don’t care about that shit anymore. And we don’t fat shame ourselves or others.” Aguilera has not yet publicly commented on the incident, but Page Six reports that she has since unfollowed Spears.
Watching Spears try to function on the internet with newfound and uninhibited access to her phone (and by nature, a direct line to the…entire world!) has felt a lot like watching a bumbling baby giraffe try to stand right after rocketing out of the womb. She’s shared a hell of a lot of her body—as is her right—with the general population, many of which seem to be creeping in the corners anticipating her next gaffe, cough, TMZ, cough. She’s also endured criticism about her parenting both from nosy online parents and her own family: her two sons and their father, Spears’ ex-husband Kevin Federline. But the thing about Britney is that she’s never “too dirty to clean [her] act up.” She will always apologize the second she realizes she done fucked up:
She first clarified that she never meant to criticize “Christina’s beautiful body,” just that she had noticed the “difference of our people on stage.” Then came the admission of guilt. And this, my friends, is how we do celebrity apologies:
“To be honest, I’m not trying to be critical of anybody. What I posted is a projection of the insecurities I deal with all the time as a result of how my parents and the media have treated me … I would never intentionally body shame anybody because I know what it feels like … I struggle with this because of how I feel about myself, not because I hate how anybody looks … I feel like my family knew I was insecure and people were trying to purposefully feed into this insecurity by not letting me have a choice in the people who were on stage with me. I appreciate you all being understanding with me as I figure out this new life I’m living !!!”
While Spears is an adult who is accountable for her actions, we also can’t forget the context that her body, career, and contact with the outside world was limited and manipulated for over a decade of her young life. There’s just no way in hell she was wading in on fatphobic discourse online when the rest of the world was. We’ll give the woman a minute and accept her apology.
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