Warning: I have a very odd sense of humor so you may or may not find the following essay funny.

i. the era of longing

If you operated a Tumblr blog between the years of 2012–2015, you should be entitled to financial compensation.

Tumblr was a cesspool of drama. Imagine the worst teenage girls you know sitting in a group discussing their depression, self-harm habits, eating disorders, and Superwholock. Then multiply that by three, and you’re at the beginning stages of trying to understand Tumblr’s power in its heyday.

Looking back, I think having access to that much information likely didn’t help as I was going through puberty. I was definitely saving photos of girls with self-harm scars on their legs to my tablet.

(If you’re worried, I never actually was a cutter because I tried one time and it hurt, so I stopped. I did scratch myself with pen caps for attention. No one cared.)

Oh, and those pro-ana diet graphics that I never actually remembered to try.

G-Eazy said it himself: “I’m in love with those Tumblr girls with skinny waists and drug habits.” See what I mean?

Music was a defining cultural landmark for the average Tumblr user. Your iTunes probably went as follows:

1. Blue Jeans by Lana Del Rey

2. Video Games by Lana Del Rey

3. Teen Idle by Marina and the Diamonds

4. Sweater Weather by The Neighbourhood (honorable mention)

5. New Americana by Halsey

Tumblr didn’t invent female fragility. It curated it. It was cool and different to be the sad girl obsessed with her boyfriend or some random guy in her English class.

Were you really online if you weren’t ruining your own morning before even making it to first period? Sigh.

By the time Lana Del Rey arrived, the aesthetic of beautiful suffering had already been rehearsed. She simply gave it production value.

ii. lana as archetype: the patron saint of beautiful suffering and romantic devotion

I often wonder if Lana’s image is very good marketing or if she’s just simply… like that.

Her meteoric rise is similar to Gaga’s; she just happened to hit the scene at the height of something. For Gaga, the Internet was really taking off when Just Dance started receiving radio play. With Lana Del Rey, Tumblr was on the steep climb toward… something. Her appearance solidified it for what it was.

It established this generational idea for young women that to be in love was to suffer. You are designed to orbit this one man and hopefully he gives you love back. Even if he smacks you around a bit or calls you names, you earned a sliver of happiness for your efforts.

submission as romance

In 2012, empowerment was loud. “Lean in” feminism promised ambition, corporate dominance, self-branding. Pop music echoed it — roar louder, shake it off, run the world. “Girlbossing” was one of many phrases used to describe the corporate woman of the time:

Basically, women wanted to freely be bitches in corporate settings like men get to be. Ironically, it became a joke term used to describe white women who buy monogrammed pillows from Target and listen to Taylor Swift.

Lana did the opposite. She longed.

Lana Del Rey’s aesthetic was this amalgamation of Lolita, Americana, and the 1950s. Her entire first album seems to even be dedicated to the idea of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie O, who are, in their own right, tragic figures.

“He hit me and it felt like a kiss…”
“It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you… everything I do…”
“Love is mean, and love hurts…”

Critics called it anti-feminist. Teenagers called it honest.

Lana explores this cinematic drama on her album Born to Die — and it became the exact theme she was criticized for. There was no space for a woman to sing about how painful her love life seemed to be. No adult woman wanted to listen to a woman singing about the exploitative parts of heterosexual relationships. Or fantasizing about being a stripper (Gods & Monsters). Especially because women were not at that point culturally. Relationships were all sunshine and rose petals in 2012, and to suggest otherwise was unheard of.

In a way, it’s not really vulnerability, is it? Her lyrics describe a type of individual who centers their partner in everything: his approval, his violence, his absence. She describes the women, characters, or herself as these wild, free spirits who know nothing and long for everything.

Her music mimicked the intensity of many teen relationships. You fall fast, fall hard, and it explodes into a million little pieces of pixie dust. And in a way, that’s why she was so impactful. I keep hitting this idea with a hammer, but Lana Del Rey’s music was for teenagers. How vulnerable can a teenager be? What depth do they truly possess? The antics of the lovesick and downtrodden are really only normal at fourteen, but when you reach thirty, it might be time to grow up.

iii. why it worked then

Many critics argued that Lana Del Rey was anti-feminist, and from her own mouth, she kinda was.

In 2014, she told The Fader, “For me, the issue of feminism is just not an interesting concept… I’m more interested in, you know, SpaceX and Tesla, what’s going to happen with our intergalactic possibilities. Whenever people bring up feminism, I’m like, god. I’m just not really that interested.”

She added that her idea of a feminist is a woman who can do what she wants. And, sure. We must have different definitions of the word.

You take a depressed woman in her mid-20s, layer in music about abusive relationships and claims that she doesn’t care for feminism… come on, you have a recipe for disaster.

For millennial women, adulthood still promised the good job, the good husband, the neat conclusion. Lana’s fatalism clashed with that optimism. Boyfriend culture was very much aspirational, and dating apps were just beginning their ascent. For millennial women, the goal was to get the good job, the good husband, and settle down.

Now, you have “The Other Woman” singing on a public platform about not caring for your lifestyle and that she loves being a mess.

And according to Pitchfork, the music wasn’t that good anyway (Born to Die has a 5.5 rating).

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iv. the cultural shift

A decade later, the romantic landscape looks different.

Within the last few months, two articles have gone viral based on the state of relationships:

Chanté Joseph’s Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?

Bindu Bansinath’s I Love My Husband (Who Hates Me)

We’ve reached a fever pitch in conversations about “decentering men.” Women are acknowledging that many of their romantic prospects are kind of awful. Young men are leaning into the manosphere. Women are focusing on their careers. And we have reached a gendered cultural divide.

Where many women are typically willing to settle, we get short-form content of men essentially bullying their wives and women “ha-ha-ing” along with it. We’re seeing the reality of the woman’s “biological destiny” — unhappiness and burnout masked as contentment.

As a result, these unhappy wives and mothers kick and scream at single or child-free women, when they should probably just ask their husbands to pick up their socks.

What was once controversial is now absorbed into the mainstream. Once Tumblr fizzled out, the cultural urgency around that archetype did too. If Lana thrived in an era where romantic devotion felt aspirational, she now exists in a moment where romantic detachment feels intelligent. Perhaps that explains her country music pivot.

Lana Del Rey captured an era when longing felt like destiny. She turned romantic suffering into spectacle, into sound, into something girls could wrap around themselves. The hunger has shifted. The girl who once ruined her morning to Blue Jeans now wonders whether she needs a man to ruin it at all.

I. Opening

Fame is built on desire.

The desire to be seen, to be chosen, to be forgiven when the culture inevitably turns. Most pop stars spend their entire careers either chasing that desire or bracing for its expiration date.

Beyoncé does neither.

She does not ask for relevance, nor does she fear irrelevance. Her work arrives complete—unbothered by reaction, immune to backlash. She exists in what I can only describe as the afterlife of fame: a space beyond audience approval, where success is no longer fragile and attention is no longer currency.

Pop superstardom requires accessibility.

In the early 2000s, that access was mediated—tabloid covers at the Walmart checkout lane, a carefully managed TRL appearance. Today, access is constant. With the click of an app, you can track your favorite celebrities in real time. Their thoughts, homes, relationships, and insecurities are all available. They are no longer aspirational. They are, in many ways, normal.

Famous women are expected to want the audience.

They thank us. They reassure us. “I wouldn’t be here without my fans.”

Famous women are expected to need forgiveness.

They apologize preemptively. They self-flagellate. I understand I’m a role model.

Famous women are expected to perform relatability—inviting fans into their homes, planting Easter eggs in their work, writing songs about high school heartbreak well into their mid-thirties, clinging to youth because the industry has taught them that relevance has an expiration date.

You are either young and on the cusp, or aging and expendable.

In an industry as cutthroat as entertainment, women are told they expire at thirty.

Beyoncé is the anomaly.

Not because she is more famous—but because we do not really know her. And that is not an accident. It is the design.

II. From Woman to Institution

After the release of BEYONCÉ in 2013, she largely ceased participating in the traditional celebrity economy. No confessional interviews. No explanatory press tours. No attempts to narrate her own image in real time.

In the age of Substack posts and TikTok captions, we are reminded daily how easily words are misinterpreted. You can say you like pancakes and someone will ask why you think people who enjoy waffles deserve to die.

Now imagine that impulse—misreading, projecting, demanding clarification—at a global scale.

How do you remain true to yourself in an industry built on misunderstanding?

You limit access.

In another reality, her career might have ended quietly after 4. After I Am… Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé was exhausted. She fired her father as her manager and retreated in search of creative clarity. The result was 4—a soul-driven return to classic R&B that many critics dismissed as underwhelming.

In 2011, the consensus was lukewarm. 4 was good, but not groundbreaking. Beyoncé sounded incredible—because of course she did—but the music felt out of step with its moment. The pop landscape was dominated by EDM maximalism: Avicii, Calvin Harris, Swedish House Mafia. The culture was partying. Club music ruled. Beyoncé’s restraint read as absence.

By 2011, Beyoncé the celebrity was beginning to fade.

By 2014, she would no longer be one.

When you occupy that level of cultural altitude, people begin waiting for you to fall.

Around Beyoncé, rumor doesn’t circulate—it metastasizes. Conspiracies fill the vacuum where access should be. She is accused of worshipping Satan. Of being part of the Illuminati. Of faking her first pregnancy. Of moving through the same shadowy social circles as disgraced men. The theories are often absurd, sometimes grotesque, and always revealing.

What matters is not that these rumors exist—but that she never corrects them.

She does not sit down for a clarifying interview. She does not rehabilitate her image in real time. She does not explain herself to Diane Sawyer or Dateline, the way Britney was once made to. She does not offer a carefully managed apology tour, the way Rihanna was forced to after 2009.

Instead, she withholds.

When Beyoncé finally offers access, it arrives years later, transmuted into art. You learn about her miscarriages long after the grief has been metabolized. You learn about the fractures in her marriage only after they’ve been reframed as myth, confession, and survival. Her interiority is never raw—it is processed, curated, and intentional.

Many artists today prefer you to suffer alongside them in real time.

Beyoncé insists on privacy until pain can be shaped into meaning.

That delay is not coldness.

It is authorship.

III. Scale, Distance, and the Evidence of Containment

Meanwhile, compare her to the pop stars of today. We live in an attention economy. I could open Instagram and scroll through dozens of photos of Dua Lipa on vacation. Sabrina Carpenter and her friends in Paris or spilling out of some NYC nightclub. Artists in their bedrooms, half-asleep, mid-workout, offering intimacy as proof of authenticity.

Accessibility has replaced mystique. Overexposure is framed as honesty.

By contrast, Beyoncé’s Instagram is curated and edited. You don’t catch her living her life in real time. When a photo surfaces of her on vacation, it doesn’t feel exciting—it feels like a violation. Even the phrase “Beyoncé in the wild” carries an instinctive sense of disrespect, as if the public has crossed a boundary it knows exists.

That boundary is not symbolic. It is logistical.

Beyoncé has spoken about arriving at events in disguises. There are documented moments of award shows pausing as lines form simply to meet her. She cannot attend public events without separation, security choreography, and containment—not as spectacle, but as necessity.

I could dedicate paragraphs to her cultural impact—how she reshaped album releases, redefined modern performance, and altered the visual language of pop. But that scale is precisely why comparisons become unavoidable.

This is why arguments erupt when she is placed alongside Taylor Swift. Why people reach for Michael Jackson when trying to contextualize her. Not because the careers are identical—but because the distance is.

Fame at that altitude stops functioning like celebrity and starts functioning like containment.

We don’t know Beyoncé because access to her has been structurally eliminated. Her life is sealed so her work can endure. In a culture that demands constant explanation, her refusal to explain herself has become the point.

She didn’t disappear.

She transcended the need to be known.

Introduction

Pop music is no longer a genre — it’s a system. And I can feel the system working on my brain in real time.

This series has been an effort to show you how it used to function: you walked into the industry with moldable talent and a desire for fame, and emerged an icon.
Britney. Miley. Taylor. Rihanna. Ariana.

Labels used to manufacture icons; now the algorithm manufactures visibility — and we mistake visibility for iconhood. And fame is not the same thing as a popstar.

The popstar has mutated into something faster, closer, more participatory, more disposable: part musician, part meme, part brand, part ongoing livestream of a self.

the algorithmic accident

Coincidentally, that is exactly what happened to Addison Rae. She tapped into the feed long before she ever picked up a microphone.

If there’s a 2020s term for TikTok stars akin to the “Brat Pack” of the 1980s, that would be Addison’s claim to fame. She was your average pretty girl with an iPhone recording videos of herself dancing during the pandemic. There were at least a dozen copies of her at the time — same ring light, same choreography, same bedroom background — and most of them slowly faded into an abstract irrelevancy.

Addison didn’t. And it wasn’t because she was the most talented or the most interesting. It’s because she was willing to pivot — and embarrass herself in the process.

It reminds me of this quote from Beyoncé about artists being afraid to rehearse:

“This is why people don’t like to rehearse. You gotta be humble. You gotta be willing to look awkward and you gotta study. Be a student.”

The willingness to be vulnerable with your mediocrity — this is why Beyoncé is the greatest living performer of our time. Not that any of these women are mediocre, but none of us are masters of our crafts when we’re just beginning. The internet has just decided you should be. Immediately. On camera.

The TikTok algorithm swept Addison Rae up and she almost got lost in it. So she did what the new popstar is trained to do: she mutated. Quickly, she made her pivot into acting. He’s All That, Thanksgiving — the key to longevity is being hard to miss.

Her first foray into music spawned “Obsessed,” a dated TikTok clip-farming song about being obsessed with yourself. She followed it up with an EP that was openly mocked on Twitter and turned into a meme. Overall, it was terrible and her heart clearly wasn’t in it — but the bones for who Addison Rae is today were there.

After that, her projects continued to garner the same reviews: Addison Rae actually isn’t that bad. Her acting was okay and we’ve seen worse. Her singing was forgettable, but she’s a decent dancer. Which sounds like a drag, but in the algorithm era it’s basically a compliment. “Actually not that bad” is how you survive.

So she went back to the drawing board and completely reinvented herself. She overhauled from the pretty “baddie” Instagram aesthetic into this esoteric freak weird girl who’s obsessed with Britney and meditation. And somehow it worked. It worked so well that now I’m sitting here like: wait. Addison Rae is kind of an icon, actually.

Her appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon is what convinced me to take her seriously. She’s not the strongest singer, but she’s a performer. And I could feel her passion for her craft behind my iPhone screen.

The next day I listened to Addison in its entirety on my way to and from Pilates.

Addison Rae isn’t the best at any one thing, but she’s the most adaptable — and that’s the new definition of talent. She’s not chasing pop; she’s proving she can’t be deleted.

the algorithmic mutation

If Addison is the algorithm’s accident, Charli XCX is the algorithm’s mutation on purpose.

Charli dominated last summer. If TikTok and Twitter hadn’t joined forces within the last few years, Brat probably would have come and gone like her last few albums — beloved by the people who already love her, invisible to everyone else.

But Charli promoted Brat in a way that zeroed in on the meme-ability of the concept. After the cover went viral, she and Atlantic dropped a “Brat generator” website so anyone could make their own version. She turned the album into a language. Everyone wanted to be considered “brat.”

It meant you were cool, messy, and hedonistic but in a fun way. High fashion, but drugged out. You care about nothing, but everything all at once. It was an identity you could try on for the weekend — like a micro-era you didn’t have to earn.

And that’s the magic of Brat: underneath the chaos, there’s an undercurrent of honesty and insecurity laced throughout the record. “Sympathy is a Knife” is so deeply vulnerable. The brand works because it’s not just branding. It’s real. It’s performance, but it’s not hollow.

Charli successfully morphed Brat into a brand identity that feels authentic — and it catapulted her into the stratosphere of serious artistry. Not because she finally “proved” she can make good music. She’s been doing that. But because the system finally rewarded her for understanding it.

And it’s the same earnestness that has allowed Addison Rae into rooms she would have been previously banned from. Her branding is perfect for the freak weird girl that daydreams about some distant fantasy life.

Brat worked because it doesn’t beg to be liked — it assumes you’re already late.

finally, why now?

I’m bringing politics into this because it applies, unfortunately.

Women want to be seen as freaky and weird like we give men permission to be. We want to discuss our bodies, be loud, be ugly and off-putting. We want to be imperfect without judgment.

As women’s rights continuously get stripped — Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, after all — women are scared. Many young women don’t realize that this defiance — not shaving, or simply posting that “ugly” picture — is all in defense of “brat.”

Addison Rae appeared on Chicken Shop Date barefaced and makeup-free with a cute outfit. She was giggly and open and I thought it was so sincere.

Charli and her friends shoving food into their mouths at a nice restaurant. Charli singing about coke and sympathy feeling like a knife.

It’s why Gone Girl, Black Swan, and Ottessa Moshfegh have gotten so popular within the last few years. Women are exhausted.

Although that’s the irony of Addison, Brat, and existing in the online stratosphere: you’re still performing for someone.

The makeup is bad on purpose, the patterns on your clothes are distracting. You tell us your current reads — Moshfegh, Sontag, Didion. All in the name of being a “weird girl.”

Maybe it’s not mutation. Maybe it’s evolution. The idea of the girl — the woman — has evolved in the last few years, because it had to. The defiance is feminist even when it looks stupid. Even when it’s “just” not shaving. Even when it’s “just” posting the ugly photo. Even when it’s “just” calling yourself brat and acting like you don’t care.

Pop music is a system now. The popstar mutated to survive it. And maybe that’s why it hits so hard: because we did too.

fin. 🫶🏽

i. introduction

Truthfully, I was more of a Disney Channel girl than a Nickelodeon girl.

This was likely because my mother never wanted to pay Comcast extra so I could actually watch Nickelodeon — but that’s okay, I’ve gotten over it.

Drake Bell was my first crush. Beck from Victorious was my second (Avan Jogia, if you ever read this, I love you — tell Halsey I said hello). Naturally, I stopped watching Nickelodeon when Victorious was canceled, because I refused to watch The Thundermans.

The fascinating thing about being a child star is that not everyone survives the process. You are either mediocre — good enough and promptly forgotten — or excellent and punished for it through prolonged public humiliation.

Disney was simply better at the machine of child stardom. Record deals through their own label. Branded merchandise with your face in every mall in America. Television crossovers, DCOM cameos, morning show appearances. They did not play games with their talent.

If you wanted to be famous, you were going to work.

Disney Channel made stars. Nickelodeon did not. Trust me — they tried.

Miranda Cosgrove.
Jeanette McCurdy.
Victoria Justice.
Jamie Lynn Spears.

No one was rushing out to buy their latest record.

Nickelodeon, by contrast, was messier. Louder. Less polished. Its stars weren’t trained to scale — they were exaggerated, caricatured, and discarded once the joke wore thin. Which is why Ariana Grande never looked like a survivor of that system.

She looked like an accident.

Which is what made her so efficient.

ii. cat valentine and the safety of infantilization

Much of my writing is framed through the lens of a child who lived through these moments. To me, Ariana Grande was Cat Valentine — and for years, I didn’t understand why people cared so much about Cat from Victorious at all.

Even now, in her early thirties, Grande has never fully shaken the ditzy redhead image Nickelodeon stamped onto her. Her early brand existed as a kind of kaleidoscope: baby-faced ingénue, cartoonish femininity, and a Mariah Carey–esque voice that felt almost incongruent with her presentation.

The high ponytail. Puffy skirts. Crop tops and tights. She stood with one foot still wedged firmly in the Nickelodeon door and the other hovering just shy of legitimate pop stardom.

Her sexual appeal wasn’t threatening — because, in a sense, it didn’t really exist yet. There was no urgent need for handlers to panic over a chaotic Britney Spears– or Rihanna-level implosion. The public didn’t perceive her as volatile, dangerous, or even particularly adult.

She wasn’t a scandal waiting to happen. She was safe.

Her appeal, at the time, was closer to Christina Aguilera in theory — vocal talent first — but without the aggression, hunger, or visible rebellion. Grande’s image didn’t ask to be taken seriously.

To this day, the most persistent criticisms surrounding Grande are almost entirely about her body. In her early twenties, she was “too small,” “too thin,” “too childlike.”

As body image conversations shift toward neutrality and acceptance, Grande’s body continues to surface in online forums, dissected with an almost clinical familiarity. Rather than entertaining the possibility of chronic illness, stress, or lifelong struggle, the discourse defaults to blame. Control must be intentional. Discipline must be rewarded or punished.

What’s striking is not that her body remains a topic of conversation, but that the conversation never evolves. There is no scandal attached to it. Her body is not a site of rebellion or refusal — it is proof of maintenance.

And this is where the machine becomes visible.

Grande’s image is curated so meticulously that even transgression feels inert. Her romantic scandals register as background noise. There is no fall from grace because there is no grace to fall from — only consistency.

This is the paradox of Ariana Grande: her image management is so effective that it renders her almost boring and nonthreatening. Beyond her undeniable vocal talent, there is very little left to interrogate — because every potential point of intrigue has already been neutralized.

iii. the body as proof of discipline

The structure of any body-based mental illness — and any body-based performance — hinges on the idea of discipline. Maintenance requires consistency. Visibility requires control. To successfully sustain a body under constant public scrutiny is to signal obedience to routine, restraint, and labor.

A pop star is nothing if not disciplined. Rehearsals. Appearances. Paparazzi shots. Photoshoots. Meet-and-greets. Brand deals. Acting pursuits. Every output is another moving part in the machine of legibility. To show up repeatedly, polished and precise, is a form of work not everyone survives. Many break under it. Others disappear.

In 2013, Ariana Grande was labeled “too thin” — not because of widespread concern for her health, but because men no longer found her body desirable.

Strike one in the pop star playbook. If men don’t want you, you can’t sell fantasy to that market.

In 2025, she is thinner still, and the tone has shifted to outrage. Not care, exactly — but condemnation. Having an eating disorder is no longer culturally transgressive or romanticized the way it once was. Now, thinness reads as irresponsibility. The pop star turned actress becomes a threat to public health rather than an object of desire.

Women on the internet have spent the last several years dissecting Grande’s appearance with a fixation that feels less like concern and more like surveillance. The tone resembles that moment in a zombie movie when someone in the group has been bitten — and everyone knows it — but no one says anything outright. Instead, they watch and wait for proof.

The body becomes evidence. A future collapse is imagined, rehearsed, and almost desired. Not because the audience wants harm, but because pop culture is conditioned to expect consequence. A visible breaking point would confirm that the machine has limits.

iv. dangerous woman as a reframe

When Dangerous Woman was released in 2016, many critics noted its lack of cohesion. Caitlin White, writing for BKMAG, observed that it was “rather ironic” the lead single was titled Focus, because that’s exactly what the record lacked. The critique wasn’t about Grande’s ability — her voice was, as always, unimpeachable — but about credibility.

Quinn Moreland’s Pitchfork review pushed this idea further. Grande was praised for her technical skill but faulted for emotional distance. She remained guarded, withholding, difficult to access. What was meant to be a sexual pivot felt strangely safe — not because of prudishness, but because nothing about the album threatened her existing image.

This was not a rebellion. It was a resize.

The latex bunny ears, the monochrome visuals, the sultry production — all of it signaled adulthood without risk. Sexuality was introduced as aesthetic, not behavior. There was no public unraveling, no tabloid spiral, no visible loss of control to accompany the shift. Desire was presented carefully, as something to be looked at rather than lived through.

Critics struggled to believe the persona because belief requires exposure. Dangerous Woman asks the listener to accept intimacy without ever offering vulnerability. The album flirts with R&B — a genre that depends on emotional proximity — yet Grande keeps herself at a deliberate remove. The songs are technically excellent, often thrilling in isolation, but resistant to confession.

At the time of Dangerous Woman, Grande was still in transition: no longer Cat Valentine, not yet a figure capable of rupture. The album does not mark a break in her career, but a test of its elasticity. How much adulthood could be layered onto her image without destabilizing it?

The answer, it turns out, was quite a lot — as long as nothing actually changed.

Ariana was often viewed as a kind of Barbie doll — talented and pretty enough, styled in girlish outfits, but curiously hollow beneath the surface. She sings about sex with a sense of remove, marked by a limitation of lived experience rather than transgression.

Her albums are tonally fractured — oscillating between innocence and sensuality — yet consistently yield excellent singles. Grande is a master of surface-level precision, even when the interior world remains carefully sealed off.

Her voice performs exceptionally well under R&B instruction — Sweetener received an 8 from Pitchfork, after all — but R&B as a genre demands a certain intimacy, a willingness to be emotionally legible. The result is music that is technically impressive, often beautiful, but deliberately withholding.

v. desire without scandal

This is likely why her image registers as boring.

Even as fans spend years piecing together her relationship timelines and labeling her a homewrecker, no one ever really cares. It mostly lives online as a running joke. People would rather circle the conversation back to her body, or to the fact that they think Ethan Slater is ugly.

The narrative never sticks.

In an era of Notes app apologies, Ariana simply never acknowledges it. She and Ethan are rarely photographed together. She’s never publicly discussed him in any way that reads as romantic or intimate.

She doesn’t perform shame. She doesn’t engage in public self-flagellation. And without those things, the punishment never arrives.

Instead, she increases her output.

The brand of Ariana Grande is never interrupted. The machine keeps chugging along. If she existed fifteen years earlier, her face would have been plastered across every OK! magazine in the checkout aisle. She would have sat for a Good Morning America interview. There would have been a Diane Sawyer special.

Now, output rinses tabloid fodder out of the news cycle.

Singer transitions into beloved, Oscar-nominated actress.

R.E.M. Beauty.
Wicked.
Eternal Sunshine.
A world tour.

Two things she once swore she had no plans to do anytime soon. She made it clear — this tour is a last hurrah for what we understand to be the Ariana Grande brand.

In 2024, she appeared on The Zack Sang Show and said she had no intention of releasing an album during Wicked. She claimed the 2023 Writers’ Strike simply left her with extra time, and she “decided” to record new music.

Coincidentally, that was also the year news of her relationship with a married Ethan Slater broke.

Was her album Eternal Sunshine image control? What is there to criticize if Grande consistently and successfully proves her cultural value?

vi. outro

Ariana Grande didn’t escape the system that consumes women in pop culture. She learned how to survive it by never giving it what it wants most.

Sexuality, for women, only matters when it devastates you. Desire is only legible when it collapses your interior world. Tragedy only registers when it derails the machine entirely. Grande never lets it get that far.

Her body is maintained, not sacrificed. Her relationships are absorbed, not punished. Her sexuality is staged rather than lived through in public. Every potential rupture is redirected into output, and the machine keeps moving quietly and efficiently.

Ariana Grande remains intact because she never allows herself to become narratively interesting in the way pop culture demands of women. She has been able to do what Taylor Swift cannot. She has ruled her career with an iron fist that has transitioned her from good girl into an adult woman. She’ll get that Oscar one day and she’ll have rightfully earned it.

The pop machine didn’t break her.

It made her sustainable.

i. opening: the myth of rihanna

Oh, Rihanna.

The woman, the myth, the alternative popstar legend.

Rihanna gave us some of the greatest singles of the 2010s, but her story is one wrapped in an undercurrent of tragedy. When you become one of the most consumed women on the planet, the line between survival and self-reinvention gets blurry.

You probably read the title and thought, “Hm. She’s definitely about to talk about Fenty, the billionaire arc, and her seven-year musical disappearing act.”

But I’m not starting there. I’m zeroing in on 2009–2012 — the era where Rihanna didn’t just evolve; she had to save her own brand from public annihilation.

This was the period where she learned the choreography of “not caring.” Not because she naturally embodied that energy, but because the alternative — vulnerability, softness, public grief — would have gotten her crucified.

In those years, Rihanna wasn’t crafting a persona. She was performing emotional armor. She was building a version of herself the world couldn’t destroy so easily.

ii. 2009: the cultural violence of the chris brown incident

I was nine when I first saw those photos. Nine years old when I quietly learned that the world will always disrespect the Black woman.

The idea of going to the police in your darkest moment and having someone sell those photos to a tabloid. Turning your pain into content for a quick buck. It still sickens me.

It’s one thing to get your face beaten. It’s another to have the entire world pass it around like a spectacle. Yes, there was outrage when the images leaked — but the damage was already done. Her most private, horrifying moment was immediately absorbed into the entertainment cycle.

The official court documents describe the assault in detail. He beat her with his fists for roughly thirty minutes as he attempted to drive their rented car. For years, people tried to debate the “truth” of what happened — she kicked him, he claimed she spit on him — but the actual record states she kicked him only in an attempt to get away after he punched her repeatedly and put her in a headlock.

The public, of course, was ruthless.

Abuse victims are always trapped between a rock and a hard place. Both Rihanna and Brown went on their own image-rehabilitation tours, but Rihanna’s ABC interview with Diane Sawyer remains one of the most heartbreaking moments of her career.

Sawyer interrogates her, demanding to know why she went back, demanding she “explain herself” to young girls. The subtext is unmistakable:
justify your pain, or we will blame you for it.

How dare Diane Sawyer place the burden of abuse on the victim?

The public wanted a perfect victim. They still do.

iii. rated r and the reinvention of a survivor

Revisiting Rated R with this added context is upsetting.

Russian Roulette is an obvious nod to an abusive relationship. Hard is a young woman letting the world know they can’t break her. How heartbreaking is that? This young woman needed comfort but couldn’t receive it — because it would likely cost her career.

Rated R was recorded in March of 2009, mere weeks after the incident. Ne-Yo and Justin Timberlake helped her write a few songs. Speaking about the album, Ne-Yo told MTV:

“Rihanna is not in the same place mentally. She’s more comfortable in her skin now... it’s refreshing to watch.”

Ah yes. She’s assaulted, publicly humiliated, and forced to rebuild her entire persona — and the takeaway is that she’s “comfortable in her skin.”

In 2009, a survey of 200 teenagers in Boston found that 46% believed Rihanna was responsible for the violence inflicted on her. 52% believed “both parties” should be held accountable.

Notice how it’s never the man’s fault?

What makes all of this even more tragic is that Rihanna’s response — the hardness, the unbothered attitude, the bad-bitch armor — became the very thing the public celebrated her for. But that persona wasn’t rebellion. It was survival.

When the world decides you’re not the perfect victim, the only acceptable option is to be strong, silent, and untouchable.

Rihanna didn’t set out to embody the stereotype forced onto Black women. She was trying to protect herself from a culture that refused to see her humanity.

And the worst part? The more she performed strength, the more people pretended it was natural to her — as if she hadn’t been pushed into it.

As a recurring theme of this series, I’m trying to articulate how we force women in the spotlight to perform sexuality in order to signify maturity. Britney was sacrificed for doing it too early. Miley appropriated Black culture to make it palatable. Taylor Swift refuses to make the transition at all.

Maybe Rihanna would’ve reached Rated R on her own. She began exploring edgier music with Good Girl Gone Bad two years prior. But it’s no coincidence that this album was written weeks after the assault.

She had something to say.
And maybe the world wasn’t really listening.

iv. the machine keeps moving: jive records and industry complicity

In Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s, Sarah Ditum never outright names a villain. She doesn’t need to. Instead, she traces patterns — quietly, carefully — and allows the reader to sit with what keeps repeating.

One name keeps resurfacing (for myself as I write and research for these essays, anyway).

Jive Records.

And guess who was signed to the label?

Aaliyah and R. Kelly.

Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake.

Chris Brown.

Ditum doesn’t argue that Jive orchestrated abuse. What she implies is more unsettling than that: the label repeatedly positioned young women inside power dynamics that benefited male collaborators, romantic partners, or cultural foils — and then stepped back when those dynamics curdled into harm.

These women weren’t protected as people. They were managed as assets.

The relationships were branded as chemistry. Synergy. Storyline. When they produced hits, they were celebrated. When they produced damage, responsibility disappeared. No one person was at fault. No one intervened. The machine kept moving.

Because the industry’s real priority isn’t safety. It’s continuity.

Albums must be released. Tours must go on. Narratives must stay on track.

Grief is inconvenient. Trauma is disruptive. Abuse is only a problem when it interrupts profit.

And we have proof. Jive Records knew about R. Kelly’s behavior — at least by the late ’90s — and did nothing to stop it. He stayed with the label until 2011, when they were absorbed into RCA.

In 2018, the Washington Post published an article stating that executives at Jive were aware of Kelly’s actions for years but didn’t intervene because of how much money he was making the label. Larry Khan and Barry Weiss — both former Jive execs — even said on the record that his personal life wasn’t their responsibility.

So, is it really that absurd to assume Jive didn’t care about Chris Brown beating Rihanna?

Or about Justin Timberlake’s public humiliation ritual of Britney Spears? Janet Jackson?

R. Kelly earned Jive hundreds of millions of dollars over the years.

Britney did too — especially after being vilified in Cry Me a River, a music video that gave the public permission to treat her like a joke for the next twenty years.

And that makes Rihanna’s options pretty clear.

She could be the battered, empowered survivor. Or she could become irrelevant.

A punchline. A warning. Another cautionary tale like Britney.

When there’s no one willing to defend you — not your label, not the press, not even your own sex (Diane Sawyer, I’m looking at you) — what would you choose?

v. performance, pain, and the “perfect victim”

In that context, Rihanna’s experience begins to look less like a singular tragedy and more like a familiar outcome.

Once again, a young woman absorbs the fallout. Once again, the man’s career survives. Once again, the public asks her to be strong about it.

Once again, we ignore the functional reality of millions of victims. It’s proven that it takes seven tries to leave your abuser. Rihanna was in an on-and-off relationship with Brown until 2012.

Brown’s behavior wasn’t a one-off either. There are dozens of reports of violence perpetrated by Brown and main of those reports involve women.

Rihanna was a young woman that needed some form of guidance but received public scrutiny instead. She was antagonized by Diane Sawyer on national television, photos of her battered face were released for public consumption, and the common opinion is that she deserved it.

Rather than accept facts presented to us as they are, culturally, we prefer to jump through hoops to dismiss them.

The concept of the “perfect victim” is a sad one.

For your trauma to be justified, it must be horrific and violent. You must barely survive it and walk away with noticeable bodily injury. It must completely and visibly alter your individual state. It must change you permanently for the rest of your life. When the world looks at you, they must see a victim. Not a survivor.

Just ask Amber Heard.

During the Depp vs Heard trial, the conversations that were happening online were abhorrent. To watch someone be forced to testify in a case she technically already won in the U.K. and to have it aired live every single day — is dehumanizing.

Every tear, runny nose, readjustment, huff, eye rub was screenshotted and turned into a meme. Youtubers and podcasters made MILLIONS dissecting and disrespecting Amber Heard.

The photo evidence wasn’t enough. Previous testimony wasn’t enough. Her becoming emotional on the stand wasn’t enough.

In the minds of millions, especially women, she was a liar. A fake. A gold digger. She was a manipulative femme fatale that chose Depp as her victim. She wanted his money, his fame, his life. His alcoholism and drug use was all her fault. Despite dozens of reports that Hollywood was growing tired of Depp and his washed-up actor shenanigans, another beautiful woman was left hung out to dry.

And here’s the wildest part: the public eventually forgave Chris Brown.
He released hit singles, won awards, collaborated with every major artist. And in response? Rihanna forgave him too. Not for him — maybe for herself. Maybe for the sake of control. She knew the world wouldn’t let her linger in pain. So she got to work.

Between 2009 and 2012, she released four albums in three years.
She gave them bangers. She gave them fashion. She gave them “Unapologetic.” She tried to make them forget she was ever a victim. To see her as Rihanna again.

But the question is — did it work?
Or did she just become something else — a version of herself the world could stomach?

vi. the price of surviving

This is the trap.

If you’re not likable, no one believes you. If you’re not silent, you’re manipulative. If you’re not inspirational, you’re damaged. If you stay, you’re an idiot. If you leave, you’re a liar. If you cry, you’re hysterical. If you don’t, you must not be telling the truth.

We’ve made it impossible for victims to exist. So instead, we give them two options: disappear quietly or survive loudly enough to entertain us.

And Rihanna chose survival.

She left the music industry behind and ascended. Now she’s a businesswoman among the echelons of Beyonce and Jay-Z.

She appears publicly but never long enough to be consumed. And as the years pass and the people that exist online get younger, 2009 becomes a distant memory.

Untouchable. Powerful. Sexy. Unbothered. She walked away from the industry that consumed her and re-emerged on her own terms — as a billionaire, a mother, a mogul. A woman who said: you don’t get to watch me suffer anymore.

Not because the pain vanished. But because she finally had the power to protect herself from it.

That’s the triumph.

She didn’t just survive what the world did to her — she built something lasting out of it. And in doing so, she showed other women what’s possible when you stop asking for permission to heal.

Rihanna didn’t just become a brand. She became a boundary. She drew a line and said: this far, no further.

She became a blueprint.

And this time, the cost wasn’t her.

**For my fellow Swifties, the following analysis is brought to you by extensive Googling. I’m too poor for 382 vinyl variants and iTunes downloads that explain the meaning of the same song thirty different times.

i. the myth of the successful rebrand

Taylor Swift. Icon to many, capitalist nightmare to some (me).

For the past few years, Swift has been terrorizing the general public with her frantic, almost manicured dedication to charting every fiscal quarter like she’s running an arts-and-crafts version of Amazon. Every year needs a No. 1. Every album needs a Grammy submission. And every era must be sold in twelve colorways.

CD variants, vinyl variants, limited editions, deluxe editions, “oops, another deluxe edition,” thirty-seven iTunes exclusives, a cardigan, a different cardigan, three jackets, a tote bag that disintegrates on purpose so you have to buy the upgraded tote bag — if it can be consumed, collected, hoarded, or turned into scarcity-driven merch panic, Taylor has already thought of it.

It’s genius. It’s exhausting.
It’s capitalism with a friendship bracelet attached.

The white female popstar goes through many phases.

Virginial teen pop.
The slut era.
The Neptunes feature.

But Taylor never quite made the jump. For the last decade and thirty million albums, she’s been suspended somewhere in the middle — an uncanny valley of womanhood. Is she eighteen or thirty-five? Is she the last good girl in America or a schoolteacher with three kids and a dumb husband who coaches JV baseball?

She is both. She is neither.
She is forever narrating the diary entries of a girl who never actually grows up.

White girlhood, especially white celebrity, is such a fascinating American phenomenon. It’s taking the naïveté of youth and broadcasting it on a mass scale.

It’s also where every popstar of the last twenty-five years started their career.

Britney Spears and her plea for her baby to hit her one more time.
Christina Aguilera and her need to be rubbed the right way.
Jessica Simpson and her horrible rendition of “Take My Breath Away.”

Taylor’s first taste of the “bad girl” life? Her first official pop album, 1989. Taylor Swift was 24 when we all collectively agreed that “Shake It Off” was the most annoying song to receive radio play in 2014.

She pop-and-locked and reminded the haters — or mainly just Kanye West — that she shakes them right off. Perfect song for your middle school daughter to blast after getting shoved into a locker.

But as a reinvention? As a pivot into adult pop stardom?

It was aggressively… safe.

ii. the attempted pivot

Oddly, the greatest thing that ever happened to Taylor may have been the 2009 VMAs.
If Kanye never got on that stage and permanently placed her in the Professional Victim category, we likely would have stopped caring about Taylor after Red.

What a humiliating experience to have as a 19-year-old girl. A grown man stealing the spotlight from you to say you were inadequate. It was mean. And in the following years, Kanye continued to harass her.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth — not Taylor’s fault, but still true:

The cultural optics of “Black man bullies innocent white girl” activated America’s oldest instinct.
It cemented Taylor as a symbol of purity and vulnerability.

She spent the next fifteen years benefitting from that blindspot.

While other artists had to pivot — strategically, emotionally, artistically — Taylor remained relatively consistent and, quite frankly, boring. She never had to sell sex. She never had to evolve. Her music is what plays in the background of a Netflix show when the protagonist kisses her crush for the first time.

1989 is a hood classic, as they say. It went triple platinum in my house — but it’s not a revolutionary pop record. And as a Black woman, it’s certainly far removed from my lived experience.

Watching the videos for “Blank Space” or “Bad Blood,” you can’t help but giggle a little. It’s so obvious how hard she was trying. The girl squad, the Kendrick Lamar feature — everything felt curated to the point of hiding something.

And then there’s the personal style. The twee era. The Kennedy cosplay. The pearls, the pie-baking, the Hyannis Port debutante fantasy. She was caught in the middle, but perfectly packaged for middle America.

She was blonde, thin, pretty, and had a quantifiable level of talent. She was publicly humiliated by a Black man. She dressed like a 13-year-old whose mother let her roam the mall alone for the first time. She had a large group of female friends to prove she was a “girls’ girl.” Her music preached girl power, acceptance, ignoring the haters. Because of her age and cycle of boyfriends, you assumed she was sexually active.

The difference?
She wasn’t a “slut” about it like Britney and Christina.
She didn’t spit in the face of your working-class family from Michigan.

She paraded around NYC and Europe with clean-cut white boyfriends, but she kept her clothes on.

She’s Britney if Britney hadn’t been allowed to successfully make In the Zone.

The Taylor Swift Industrial Complex worked brilliantly when she was 19, endearing when she was 25, tolerable at 28 — but at 35, the innocence shtick has started to curdle. Because the truth is simple: the ingénue narrative only works if the ingénue stays young, and Taylor Swift is no longer young enough — nor culturally naïve enough — to sell the innocence that built her empire.

Taylor Swift losing the rights to her music was almost too perfect for her image — Scooter Braun (another man) swooping in to humiliate and punch down on the young woman.

Oh, if I were her PR rep, I would have been foaming at the mouth, because you couldn’t script better branding if you tried.

iii. her image worked…until it didn’t

Club culture reached a fever pitch in the early 2010s. My president was Black, my lambo was blue, and the economy was finally on the up-and-up. We were tucked safely into bed at 10 p.m.

Pop music was horny, chaotic, and fun.
Gaga in a latex leotard singing about riding.
Britney whispering about going “all the way.”
I vividly remember my mother screaming at me for singing “LoveGame” in the car — it wasn’t “appropriate” for children.

This was the era where the pop girl grew up fast and unapologetically.
Sexuality wasn’t marketed — it was demanded.

And then there was Taylor Swift, whose entire career felt like the sonic equivalent of a library scene in a Netflix teen drama.

As we moved deeper into a high-stakes, technology-drenched society, art started mutating. The public developed a taste for chaos, transparency, and self-awareness. The age of the girlboss fizzled. The boyband industrial complex collapsed. We stopped craving perfection and started craving authenticity — mess, anger, ugliness, honesty.

That’s why Taylor’s image began to falter: the world evolved, but her persona didn’t.

We’re living with a criminal for a president, a crumbling economy, a housing crisis, a generation pursuing therapy instead of marriage, and podcast men reminding women that they’re whores who deserve to die. The culture is too bleak for fairy tales.

So of course Charli XCX and Addison Rae are having their moment.
Of course they are.

We’re attracted to women who are a little unhinged, a little unserious, a little rebellious — because rebellion reads as honesty now.

Charli and Addison aren’t selling girlhood.
They’re selling release.

iv. the authenticity problem

The Life of a Showgirl came and went like it was nothing.

Probably because the album sounded nothing like the life of a showgirl.

What she should have called it was I Love Travis Kelce and I’m trying to beat Sabrina Carpenter to the concept.

For the first time in a long time, I saw more critics than supporters. Even the Apple Music description is… odd:

“What’s a girl gonna do after the record-smashing Eras Tour?”

Girl? Taylor Swift is 35.

This “era” isn’t about artistry or reinvention.
It’s about the fact that Taylor Swift has finally become the senior prom queen.

She has the football player boyfriend, the fame, the recognition — everything the once-overlooked horse-girl-with-a-guitar never had. And she’s relishing it.

But here’s the issue:
It reads as wish-fulfillment — teenage fantasy delivered twenty years late.

At a time when audiences crave mess, complexity, contradiction, and reality…

Taylor is still selling the soft-focus fairytale she mastered in 2008.

And for the first time in her career, everyone just shrugged.

v. folklore and evermore

What kills me is that she almost had it.

Folklore and Evermore are her most adult bodies of work — and she completely regressed with Midnights. I mean, come on, “This Is Me Trying” is my go-to crying song.

And what I don’t understand is why.
Midnights was cute, sure, but Taylor needs to stop competing with artists a decade younger than her. Midnights read as a response to Olivia Rodrigo’s rising star power. Olivia was gradually stealing Taylor’s audience in a much more entertaining grunge-2000s way.

This return to pop is her attempt at knocking Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan off the Billboard Hot 100.

And it’s so sad to witness.
This terrible fear of disappearing, of being forgotten…
and she’s going to do it all by herself.

vi. evolution

Taylor needs to evolve or she’ll become Katy Perry.

There was a time when you would switch between radio stations and hear the entirety of Teenage Dream. Now Katy Perry is a laughingstock online. Witness was the final nail in her popstar coffin.

The Life of a Showgirl is the first nail for Taylor.

This level of capitalistic greed worked really well under the Obama administration, but as our economy crumbles, this braggadocious attitude is played. She’ll become an act audiences shrug at.

The truth is this: popstars don’t disappear because they get older.
They disappear because the world around them changes and they refuse to change with it.

And right now, Taylor Swift is clinging to an identity that no longer fits the culture or her age or, frankly, her talent.

She has the money, the acclaim, the legacy.
What she doesn’t have is the courage to evolve.

And that’s the tragedy here — not the downfall, not the criticism, not the memes.
The tragedy is that Taylor Swift could become one of the greats. She could write the kind of music we teach in college classes. She could age like Joni Mitchell or reinvent like Madonna or vanish and reemerge like Beyoncé.

But she won’t.
Because the girlhood fantasy is too profitable to let go of.

And so we’re watching the slow, glittery unraveling of a woman desperately trying to remain the girl she used to be. A popstar living in a world that has already moved on. This is why her personality, her sense of style, her language always seems five years in the past.

And if Taylor Swift doesn’t evolve soon, she won’t be the main character of pop music anymore.

She’ll be a nostalgia act.

✴

Do you remember where you were the evening of March 24, 2006?

I do.

I’d finished my homework. I’d eaten dinner. I was bathed and in fresh jammies. I hit 4 and then 2 on my remote control.

A new show called Hannah Montana was about to premiere on Disney Channel.

After that night? Oh, honey. My life was forever changed.

Some might be confused — Miley Cyrus, a “pop icon”? To that I say: you must be very young.

There was a time when you couldn’t flip to Disney Channel without seeing Miley Cyrus in some form. Whether she was dancing in the background of High School Musical 2, grinning between commercials, or staring back at you from a Walmart aisle — she was everywhere.

But to understand Miley’s rise, you have to rewind the script a bit. Britney and Miley both graduated from the same school: Disney Channel High. And Disney’s biggest regret after canceling The Mickey Mouse Club was realizing they’d let future megastars — Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, even Jessica Simpson — walk straight into someone else’s hands.

Think exclusive branding deals, record contracts with Disney-owned labels (hello, Hollywood Records), and every possible form of synergy.

As far as Disney was concerned, they weren’t going to make that mistake twice.

In the early days, Disney Channel itself suffered from an identity crisis. Outside of animation and theme parks, nobody really cared about Disney’s television arm.

But by the late 1990s, everything changed. The network rebranded itself into a family-entertainment juggernaut built on carefully engineered relatability. They did market research. They consulted child psychologists. They studied how to make content that would keep an entire family glued to the same screen.

It’s said that Disney ran a tight ship. The goal was relatability and respectability — do not rock the boat of the average Christian American family in Middle America.

Meanwhile, Nickelodeon was taking risks — weird, loud, sometimes gross risks. The Amanda Show, All That, Drake & Josh, even Zoey 101 had an edge. Nick wanted kids to feel rebellious. Disney wanted them to feel safe.

Disney sold aspiration: shiny hair, squeaky voices, cross necklaces, and chastity rings. Their stars didn’t just act — they modeled virtue.

And yet, beneath all that moral packaging, the network was quietly perfecting its most lucrative export: the teenage-pop-star pipeline.

By the mid-2000s, the “Disney Girl” was the ultimate hybrid: talented, wholesome, and marketable across film, TV, and music. She could make you laugh, sell you a lunchbox, and drop a single — all under one corporate umbrella.

But what happens when the character grows up and the girl beneath wants out?

When a star acted up — or when a producer on set got too handsy — they were swiftly removed. Demi Lovato was kicked to the curb in the late 2000s. Vanessa Hudgens was nearly manhandled into a PR apology.

As Vanity Fair and author Ashley Spencer put it, no one could be bigger than the brand.

Until we meet Hannah Montana.

“You get the best of both worlds”

“Best of Both Worlds” is the infamous title track of Hannah Montana. The irony is palpable: a young girl caught between the allure of fame and the desire to live a normal life. I remember watching Hannah Montana as a kid and wondering how no one noticed Miley Stewart had an uncanny resemblance to Hannah.

Despite this, Miley Cyrus looks back on Hannah Montana fondly. She traveled around the world on musical tours as Hannah Montana. The smile and blonde wig were plastered on every single item imaginable — folders, pencils, blankets, lunchboxes. If you could carry it in your hand, it had her face dead center.

Disney also supported Miley as a solo act — she released two albums under Hollywood Records, one being a double-disc CD featuring Hannah as the first and Miley the second act. Disney’s messaging was clear: without Hannah, there was no Miley Cyrus.

With Disney branding heavily pushing this Best of Both Worlds ideal, how does a young girl separate herself — her identity — from this larger-than-life brand?

I Can’t Be Tamed

America was pissed when this music video dropped. Parents screamed that it was too inappropriate for a young woman. And yet, music critics seemed to disagree.

Despite an obvious attempt at rebellion, many described it as generic and lackluster. A writer for Billboard even described a lack of emotion in Cyrus’s vocals. Sadly, they were right. Tonally, sonically, Miley was playing it safe. Sure, she wore a leotard and gyrated against the bars of her caged enclosure. Yes, she had cleavage and wiggled her hips as she proudly exclaimed, “I can’t be tamed!”

But you could tell her heart wasn’t in it.

Deep down, Miley Cyrus knew this. Three years later, America said hello to the worst public-relations nightmare of a modern female celebrity.

Welcome to Bangerz.

VMAs and Cultural Appropriation

If you were active online from 2013–2021, my heart goes out to you.

It was the golden age of discourse — BuzzFeed think pieces, Tumblr callouts, and Twitter threads that lasted for days.

In the middle of it all stood Miley Cyrus: tongue out, latex bikini on, twerking against a Black woman twice her size.

The internet lost its mind. Some called it liberation; others called it theft. And both were kind of right.

But Miley Cyrus isn’t the first white woman trying to leave the good-girl myth behind and having zero idea how to do it constructively. Maybe music executives think the branding has to scream, “Yeah, that’s right. I fuck now.” Maybe it should say, “I’m an artist learning the complexity of human relationships, my sexuality, and my desire to be seen.” But what do I, the average consumer, know?

Every millennial teen remembers where they were the first time they heard Dirrty by Christina Aguilera. In her own words, “The label [RCA Records] wanted to push the cookie-cutter, [...] almost virginal kind of imagery that wasn’t me. I really wanted to squirm away from that, because I thought it was fake and superficial and untrue to what I was about.”

Aguilera was a part of the 1990s teen-pop trend — music made specifically for teens about liking boys and wondering if you were pretty enough.

Britney was also a part of this brand and the Disney machine. You could be cute, cookie-cutter, just sexy enough, or you could be sexy, filthy, and sweaty with a beat produced by Danja bumping in the background.

Gwen Stefani loved the Harajuku girls and Chicana culture. She wanted to be Japanese and then pivoted back to the Latino culture of South Central L.A.

And why is Blackness synonymous with hypersexuality?

That was rhetorical. We know why.

The answerable question is: why do we still allow this in 2025?

White women can peacock and show their breasts, and everyone exclaims, Wow, she’s so daring.

In 2014, Nicki Minaj was heavily critiqued over Anaconda. Critics of The National Review, an American conservative magazine, called it degrading and claimed that it promoted prostitution, drug abuse, and immorality to young girls.

Sexyy Redd is a slut, a hoe, a thot. Black conspiracy theorists claim she’s a government plant to destroy the Black community.

Miley’s imitation of Black womanhood was disrespectful. It was openly mocking a culture she clearly had limited knowledge of. It just further promoted the idea that Black women are promiscuous and hypersexual by design.

Used to Be Young

Miley knows she used to be crazy; she used to be fun.

We say she used to be wild. She says she used to be young.

Like everyone else, I love this song. However, as a cultural critic, what space was this song written from? A white woman musing on her “antics” and ignoring the social weight of her actions?

Her 2013 VMAs performance was seemingly scrubbed from the internet. It takes a few minutes longer than it should to find it on YouTube. The one video that’s watchable is degraded in quality with a copyright warning in the description.

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Once Robin Thicke appears, whatever resembled a performance went downhill fast. You can’t help but wonder if she chose him due to his own controversy that year.

Was “Blurred Lines” catchy? Well, yes — thank you, Pharrell.

Was it rape-y? Absolutely.

And this ignited feminist debate about sexism, misogyny, rape culture, and the like. Sentences were being formed that had never been spoken before. Twitter was experiencing conversations it was not equipped to handle.

So imagine the shock of the general public when Robin Thicke saunters onstage to perform this song with a twenty-year-old Miley Cyrus. As she shouts the lyrics into the microphone, she’s humping a foam finger and rubbing her ass on Robin Thicke.

It’s these Easter eggs that really make you wonder.

What has Miley Cyrus been trying to say all of these years?

Culturally, what does coming of age look like for women? There’s never been a passing of the torch from mother to daughter. Your sexuality is your own. You should own it, respect it, and find a healthy, comfortable way to express your desire.

Part of it is America’s attitude toward sex. We’re still rather conservative. Parents don’t even want to discuss sexuality with their own children in school settings because it is “inappropriate.” If we took the European approach to love and life, perhaps more women would learn what it means to experience desire as being in her body — and not just being grateful for the experience of being lusted after.

Midnight Sky

Miley’s career has morphed into this pop-rock icon of sorts. She’s positioned herself among the likes of Stevie Nicks and Brandi Carlile. This lane seems to be where she’ll thrive the most.

However, it’s what makes the rest of her career look insincere. As a pop star, she lacks a cohesive brand identity. It’s likely why no one knew she released a visual album this year.

Nowadays, her transgressions have been forgiven. People generally love Bangerz for what it was. And I choose to believe her heart was in the right place at the time.

Culturally, we must invent new ways for white women to age out of girlhood.

This is what I call the Britney Spears Effect. In a way, America itself exists within the Madonna-Whore Complex. How can women sell sex, have it, and prove they’re worthy of protection? As I previously stated, Britney was worthy of protection when she made teen-pop music and wore a schoolgirl costume as a wink-wink nudge, but when she openly stated her sex drive was outrageous, she became a target for the media.

It’s okay to want to feel sexy. It’s okay to want to have sex. You just shouldn’t need to sacrifice dignity — or a sliver of autonomy — to sell a record and express that.

I’m curious to see where Miley’s career goes. Many female artists struggle to exist as women in their mid-30s (cough,Taylor Swift). The consumer finds it difficult to find the middle-aged woman interesting. You’re well past the age to discuss how “life-changing” firsts are; you’ve been famous for a long time, so you’re used to that. What’s left to add? Marriage? Kids? Sure, but everyone does that — so what makes you unique? By design, America cares a little bit less as the years go by.

I suspect Miley will likely pivot back into acting or end up as this generation’s Jessica Simpson: forgettable singer, impeccable businesswoman.

Maybe that’s just the cycle. We build them up, tear them down, and then grow up alongside them, pretending we didn’t. I still remember that girl in her pajamas on March 24, 2006 — the one who thought fame looked fun. Now I know it was just another script someone else wrote.

Miley read hers out loud. The rest of us lived ours quietly.

And if she’s lucky, she’ll keep doing what she’s always done: shapeshift, survive, and sing about it later.

That’s the real best of both worlds — knowing when to play the part, and when to walk offstage.

part i. the altar of the popstar

When you hear the name Britney Spears, who do you see?

The scantily clad performer, or the teeny-bopper in pigtails?

True pop superstardom is being worshipped on an altar. If you were active on Twitter in the last few years, you’ve seen these fans in action. You’ve watched them fight in Ticketmaster queues and defend their artists to the death in digital gladiator arenas. Fans — or stans — are the beating heart of any artist worth paying attention to.

And Britney had millions.

After twenty years of Madonna and Janet Jackson, it was time to get back to basics. No more grown women making music about sex, power, and pleasure. The industry wanted a virgin reborn — someone who could sell sin without sinning.

Britney was designed for mass consumption, precision-engineered for the teen market. Her debut album cover is practically perfect: the lighting, the posture, the promise.

She peers up at the listener with an innocent smile, her short skirt barely concealing the rest of her. It says, “Oops, you caught me!”

And for the father buying his daughter that CD in ’99 — it stopped him in his tracks.

Britney was sacrificed so America could maintain its cultural ideal — purity, control, consumption, and finally, freedom.

part ii. the construction of the virgin

Every major pop celebrity of the late ’90s and early ’00s started out on The Mickey Mouse Club. And what a perfect introduction for the teenager selling sex without actually having it.

It’s a faint memory, but in the early-aughts, America was obsessed with sex. While the European market is more open and sexually free, America hides its eroticism on premium cable networks in the middle of the night.

We were teaching abstinence in schools while broadcasting Girls Gone Wild commercials at midnight. Internet pornography was beginning its first boom — the dial-up era of voyeurism — and every pop-culture product, from Abercrombie ads to MTV Spring Break, was selling a fantasy of consequence-free desire. The contradiction was the point: we wanted to look, but not touch; to moralize, but still consume.

Britney was selling the possibility. In an interview promoting Oops!… I Did It Again, Britney said she wanted to wait until marriage — a line that calmed parents and thrilled tabloids alike. This presents quite the conundrum. Her entire brand is built on sexuality and desire — yet a public justification was demanded for her behavior. It was okay for her to wear a skimpy, Catholic school-girl costume because she was allegedly a virgin. It was plausible deniability. She was selling sex, but not promoting it and this made it okay for your tween daughter to consume her.

It wasn’t innocence they wanted — it was the illusion of it.

Jessica Simpson was selling the purity. Women helped enforce the same purity codes that oppressed them. Simpson was positioned as the eternal virgin — a Bible Belt beauty with a subpar singing voice. She blamed her lack of popularity on her refusal to show skin, an awkward attempt at a jab at Britney.

In 2003, Britney had an exclusive televised interview with Diane Sawyer. To say it is one of the more prominent pop culture moments of the last 25 years would be an understatement. Diane probes her on her choice to appear nude on magazine covers. Britney bites back with Christina, J-Lo, and Kate Hudson do it, so why is it only a problem when she does it? Diane claims Britney had a “different relationship with young girls.”

When she first came out in the 90s, the most scandalous thing Britney had done in the public eye was wear a crop top. By 21, she was carrying an entire system on her back - continuously crossing lines she didn’t even realize were drawn.

part iii. the ritual of corruption

Many forget that Britney’s virginity was a hot topic at the beginning of her career. When she started dating Justin Timberlake, the conversation got even hotter.

Timberlake was also in transition — moving from boy-band frontman to smooth, sexy solo act. And an R&B singer can’t convincingly croon about sex and beautiful women if he allegedly had experience with neither.

Britney’s body, once the site of innocence, became the proof of someone else’s masculinity. Her purity was currency — something to be speculated on, joked about, and ultimately spent.

However, in her 2023 memoir The Woman in Me, Britney publicly admitted that her image was partially manufactured:

“Given that I had so many teenage fans, my managers and press people had long tried to portray me as an eternal virgin — never mind that Justin Timberlake and I had been living together, and I’d been having sex since I was fourteen.”

The irony was almost biblical. Britney had become the product of a culture obsessed with promoting abstinence. Sex went hand in hand with alcohol and drug use — a hedonistic moral failing to the idea of middle-class America.

Fast-forward to her release of the smash hit “I’m a Slave 4 U.” The public reaction was so severe, you would have thought Britney was being accused of witchcraft. She was essentially being stoned to death in the court of public opinion.

Her belly-dancing, cat-like whisper was so provocative that many listeners took her single literally. In reality, it was her own personal statement — she’s a slave to the audience and to fame. This picture sharpens when we consider “Overprotected,” a song about being confused as she transitions to adulthood, as her follow-up to “I’m a Slave 4 U.”

The song wasn’t obscene, or even explicit. But it looked like sex — and that was enough. Parents’ groups condemned her. Radio programmers pulled back from airplay. Editorials scolded her for “betraying” her younger fans. It was the same story every time a woman dared to own her desire: moral panic disguised as concern.

Britney had only turned nineteen, but her body was already public property — adored, dissected, and now, disciplined. She had crossed an invisible line. The virgin had become the temptress, and the world wanted a confession.

Cry Me a River cast Justin as the wounded hero and Britney as the faithless woman. He denied the connection for years, but the writing was on the wall. He sacrificed her image to promote his own — and the world applauded.

Her downfall was swift. It was one thing to be a sexual woman. It was another to be branded a cheater.

The industry smelled blood in the water.

The purity myth had cracked, and the press moved in for the kill. The interview that was supposed to be an honest act of journalism turns into an interrogation. Sawyer demands Britney answer for her misgivings on behalf of the American public. In terms of her high-profile relationship, Britney always acted with class. Timberlake leapt at the opportunity to publicly humiliate her and gave permission for the world to join in.

Britney Spears had officially became a joke.

part iv. the public crucifixion

By 2006, the pop princess had become the fallen woman. Her marriage was tabloid fodder, her motherhood scrutinized, her face plastered across every checkout aisle in America. Each headline another lash; each photo another proof of her decline.

Paparazzi hounded her. There are dozens of examples of bright lights flashing in her face as she attempts to walk down the street or drive her car. There’s video of her tripping and almost dropping her baby — but no one mentions the dozens of paparazzi swarming her to get a photo.

That same year, Britney does a Dateline interview with Matt Lauer that many would now agree aged poorly. Almost a decade later, Lauer’s career is ruined — he was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women. There’s a grim irony in a man later exposed for sexual misconduct being allowed to publicly question a woman’s sanity.

The most documented moment of her downfall came with the shaved head — a gesture the world refused to understand. In The Woman in Me, she writes that it was the result of severe inner turmoil, a desperate attempt to reclaim something of herself. But the cameras turned it into spectacle. What she experienced as crisis, the culture received as comedy. Even now, it circulates as a meme — her pain repackaged as punchline.

part v. the resurrection and the price of survival

And then she dropped Blackout — the greatest comeback album of all time. During one of the darkest months of her life — filing for divorce and losing custody of her babies — she made a public statement of resilience.

She opens her album with “Gimme More.” Her first words? It’s Britney, bitch. The declaration of a woman returning from the dead.

She closes with “Why Should I Be Sad.” Ending with: They couldn’t believe I did it, but I was so committed.

She was losing everything, but she still had her passion for music and performance.

Blackout wasn’t a cry for help — it was a coronation.

Every track vibrated with defiance. It wasn’t glossy; it was industrial, metallic, almost alien. Britney had turned the machine that consumed her into her instrument.

But the irony is brutal. While she sang about control, she was under the tightest control of her life. The conservatorship began a year later, locking her inside the system she’d already survived once.

It was a legal cage disguised as care. The same public that had crucified her now claimed to be saving her.

It’s reminiscent of the Final Girl in every ’90s slasher: the one who lives because she abstains from sex and sin. The “slut” dies first. Always.

Britney was the slut, and in the eyes of the public, she was already dead.

Freedom became choreography. Redemption became PR. The audience got its miracle — the popstar reborn — but she was still a woman performing inside a cage.

The #FreeBritney movement completed the ritual. The same public that once demanded her punishment now begged for her release. But even that plea was entertainment. Every hearing, every post, every grainy clip of her dancing alone in her living room — content. Another opportunity to laugh and giggle at the “crazy” lady.

Because that’s the thing about sacrifice: it doesn’t end at the altar. It just changes platforms.

Britney’s career is dead, but her love of performing lives on. Every video she posts of her twirling around in her living room is that teenage girl who loved dancing at malls. The same twenty-one-year-old who gave us “Toxic.” Her sacrifice revolutionized pop music as we know it today. Blackout walked so The Fame and BRAT could run.

Britney was never the tragedy. She was the blueprint.

The popstar dies so the audience can feel alive.

Britney’s death — cultural, not literal — made way for a new kind of woman to rise. If Britney was the sacrifice, then the next generation was the rebellion. Out of her ashes came a wave of girls who refused to be quiet or pure — women who smoked weed onstage, twerked on live TV, and weaponized their sexuality instead of apologizing for it.

The lesson was clear: if innocence could be destroyed, then the only way to survive was to sin loudly.

“The Popstar as Sacrifice” is part one of The Tragedy of the Pop Icon.

Follow along on arifountain.com or subscribe on Substack to catch each new installment as it drops. This is a story about the women who built the soundtrack of our lives — and what it cost them to do it.