A mysterious red glow radiated from your Zenith TV in the year 2000. The video quality was poor and blurry, but you couldn’t stop watching. Literal flames surrounded the glow, both repelling and drawing you in more, followed by two loud, disorienting thumps. “Yeah,” snarled a breathy, anonymous voice six times in rapid succession. And then, you saw them: two eyes staring straight into your soul, consuming every inch of you. The hold this amorphous being had on you was both terrifying and intoxicating, thrilling and dangerous. Soon, you realized it wasn’t a monster you were looking at—or an angel or a demon or the second coming of Christ. It was something far more powerful: 18-year-old Britney Spears.
Who, by that point, was the most famous teenager on the planet. The red glow, of course, was the Mars-themed video for “Oops!…I Did It Again,” Spears’ follow-up to her blockbuster debut album, …Baby One More Time. It was fitting to put Spears on another planet for this video; her reach then was stratospheric. If …Baby established Spears as a cultural phenomenon, Oops—the song, the album, the catsuit—proved she wasn’t a flash in the pan. She was here to stay.
The Oops album, released 25 years ago this May, sold a staggering 1.3 million copies its first week, becoming the fastest-selling female album of all time (a title held until Adele dropped her 25 record over 15 years later). But Spears’ impact transcended pure sales. If you didn’t live through her imperial phase, it’s almost impossible to describe. This viral video from the Oops era does a pretty good job at showing it. “Ciao, Milano!” a teenage Spears says to the gargantuan crowd that formed outside an Italian TV studio just to catch a glimpse of her.
“Do [that] many people usually come out here every day?” Spears asks the host, to which he says, “No, not so many people…This is all for you.”
“Don’t say that,” Spears says. “That scares me!”
Remember, this was before X, Instagram, TikTok. We didn’t know celebrities’ every move then. Instead, we heard once or twice on the radio that Spears would be appearing on a talk show and mobilized with posters, markers, and cameras to maybe see her for three seconds. The fact Spears caused Princess Diana-level pandemonium for a routine press appearance is scary and speaks to how utterly obsessed with her we all were.
Like Diana—and a small circle of stars that includes Madonna, Taylor Swift, Meghan Markle, and…not many others—Britney Spears doesn’t have a target audience. She’s amassed so much fame and interest that the globe is her audience. This was especially true in 2000, and it’s difficult to explain why. After all, Spears was one of many wildly successful pop acts to emerge at the turn of the millennium. Christina Aguilera, *NSYNC, and the Backstreet Boys all sold out their fair share of arenas, but Spears was different. Her girl-next-door vibe paired with her inexplicable X-factor made everything she said and did endlessly fascinating.
In one breath, she was an idol for young girls; in the other, she was corrupting America’s youth one cropped tee at a time. As Spears grappled with her identity, artistry, and sexuality on the world’s stage, we grappled with her. Who was she? What did she want? Seemingly everyone was asking these questions in the year 2000. If you weren’t a fan of Britney Spears, you’d at least heard of her—and you definitely had an opinion.
Growing up in South Carolina, Erin, 32, remembers thinking Spears was “the girl.” “She wasn’t relatable to me, but not in a bad way,” she says. “She was older and so cool and pretty and perfect. I consumed so much media about her—I was entranced.”
At a sleepover one night, Erin and her friends attempted to learn Spears’ iconic “Oops!…I Did It Again” dance, and she recalls having a specific, gnawing thought: I’m not doing this in front of my mom. “I knew by default Britney wasn’t a parent’s favorite influence,” Erin says. “That was so much of the narrative about her then.”
Michelle, Erin’s mom, was indeed aware of pop culture’s effects on her two daughters (her youngest’s name is Brooke), but she wasn’t “super judgey,” Erin says: “I wore a Christina Aguilera ‘Genie in a Bottle’ costume for Halloween one year, and she was fine with that.”
Of course, Michelle, a lifelong school teacher, had some guardrails for what she wanted her daughters to consume and wear. When she took them to see Mean Girls in 2004, she made them leave after the first 15 minutes. “She had this thing about girls being mean; she didn’t like us watching that,” Erin says. “She was aware of Christina and Britney and, ‘Are they fighting? Do they not like each other?’ I don’t think she liked that.”
Michelle also didn’t love Spears’ style at the time (nor Aguilera’s—that aforementioned “Genie” costume went through several rounds of approval). “I wanted my girls to be modest,” she says. “I didn’t want my girls to look at Britney as an idol to emulate because I didn’t want them showing their bellies or revealing their bodies.”
The images in Spears’ music videos were “a concern,” Michelle remembers. When she’d take Brooke and Erin shopping at teen stores in the mall, “crop tops and belly shirts” were everywhere.” Michelle thinks Britney’s image heavily contributed to how revealing some teen fashion got in the early 2000s.
“[These styles] were under the guise of being cute little girl clothes,” Michelle says. “But these were not grown-up stores. I don’t know if [Erin and Brooke] would’ve seen these clothes as inappropriate at the time, but they just weren’t an option for them.”
When I ask Michelle if she worried about Spears’ influence on her daughters then, she doesn’t hesitate. “Absolutely,” she says, with an important caveat: She never blamed Britney Spears herself for the images Erin and Brooke became enamored with. After all, Spears was only a teenager herself when “…Baby One More Time” debuted in 1998. “A 16-year-old doesn’t make those decisions,” Michelle says. “Girls like Britney [in Hollywood] needed to be protected, and they often weren’t. That makes me sad. They aren’t allowed to be children. I was sad for her and angry at whoever allowed that to happen to a child.”
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As Michelle sat in her living room 25 years ago attempting to wrap her head around Spears, Erin was upstairs having simpler, more innocent thoughts. When I ask what she remembers about the “Oops” video, Erin says, “Britney’s long, long straight hair. That was the red catsuit, right? The dance moves were so good. The outfits were so cool. So many music videos at the time were so basic; the artists were just in neon boxes, spinning around. Britney’s videos were whole performances.”
As a 7-year-old, Erin obviously didn’t interface with Spears the same way her mother did. “She was just this ‘it girl’ who was not a normal human,” she says. “My mom understood more how other people had influences on Britney. I was just like, ‘She’s so talented. She’s so pretty. I don’t ever want to stop watching her.’”
Joe, 35, got mesmerized by Spears around the same time but for totally different reasons. In 2000, he lived across the world from Erin in Beijing, where his father was a principal for a foreign exchange program. Joe heard rumblings about Spears after …Baby One More Time, but Oops was his “onboarding era.” “I was in Vietnam with my dad’s students, and they had all these pirated CD stores around the city,” he says. “They had Oops!…I Did It Again there, and I thought, OK, I have some money. I didn’t want anyone to look, and I bought the CD. I remember listening to it on the bus, not wanting anyone to know. Britney just had this indescribable star quality that drew you in.”
Joe’s affinity for Spears at the time was deeper than he realized. He remembers at 10 years old picturing an “avatar of himself” performing Oops tracks, namely “Stronger.” (“You could fucking rip a door off its hinges when that song comes on,” he says.) Madonna, Janet, and Michael Jackson created our modern pop star archetype, but Spears was the first in their lineage Joe engaged with. Her arrival planted a pivotal seed in his mind: Maybe I could be a pop star, too.
Now, performing as Zee Machine, Joe’s amassed over 10 million streams and a sizable social media following. He released a collaboration with acclaimed DJ Dave Audé in 2022. His musical inspirations lean more toward glam rock, but he credits Spears for “showing me what a superstar really is.” “To me, she’s the blueprint,” he says. “She was the first person who showed me, ‘This is a pop star. This is the standard.’”
In many ways, Joe used Spears to live out his wildest dreams in adolescence. It makes sense, then, how “protective” he became of her. “She was somewhere between an older sister and a goddess for me,” he says. “I remember how my dad or uncle or some adult in my life would bring her up and be nasty about her. I wanted to defend her any time I heard someone talking shit about her.”
That desire remains now, even as Joe’s Spears fandom has waned. He remembers following her tumultuous mid-aughts struggles and thinking, “I hope she’s OK. I hope Perez Hilton writes something nice about her.” Ultimately, Spears igniting Joe’s passion for performance has left them inextricably linked. He’ll always care about her, he says: “For a while, when someone was bullying her, it felt like they were bullying me.”
Watching Britney Spears as a young gay boy made Joe feel invincible, but it made Tim panic. By the time Oops! came out, Spears was enemy number one in his conservative Oregon home. Tim’s mother—”the biggest misogynist I’ve ever met in my life,” he says—detested Spears for all the reductive reasons famous women were maligned in the 2000s. “She’s wearing nothing. Doesn’t she have any self-respect?” Tim remembers his family, who he describes as “anti-sex,” saying about Spears—and only Spears. “Britney was a bit of a lightning rod for misogyny,” he says. “My mom did not talk about many famous women, but Britney Spears was one that broke through.”
Tim’s home life made coming to terms with his sexuality all the more confusing. When straight male classmates asked him who he “thought was hotter: Britney or Christina,” he froze. Not only did he “genuinely not know” how to answer the question, his mom taught him to essentially hate women like Spears. He had two options: say Spears was “hot” to allay suspicion of his sexuality, or parrot his mother’s slut-shaming rhetoric. That’s all he knew.
Tim, now 35, tells me Spears symbolized the sexuality he was trying to both embrace and understand at that time. “My early perspective on Britney Spears was that she was a woman who reinforced the fact that I was gay and made me feel othered and afraid,” he says.
A few years later, Tim’s pastor suggested he start conversion therapy, which he did for three years before leaving his church and coming out. “The world’s objectification of Britney outed me in some ways,” Tim says. “When I realized I didn’t find her hot, that terrified me.”
Tim used his experience in conversion therapy to write a musical titled You Are Not Gay. As an adult, he, of course, doesn’t harbor any resentment toward Spears. “I realize now how much negativity clouded my earliest memories of her,” Tim says, joking that he’s now firmly “Team Britney” even though he’s not a super-fan of her music. Still, he tells me he doggedly followed her “conservatorship stuff, which was very fucked up.”
Tim having enough interest in Spears to follow her conservatorship case says something essential about her. We’re still enraptured by her. Perhaps we always will be. “If you asked me to name a famous person, I’d say Britney Spears,” Joe told me during our conversation. But what happens when you eclipse the idea of fame entirely? When your reach, your impact—hell, your face—becomes so widespread, culture seems incomplete without you? Only a few entities are in this rarefied group; things like Barbie, McDonald’s, and, yes, Britney.
But there’s a key difference between Barbie and Britney. One is a doll made of plastic for us to project our dreams, fears, and emotions onto. The other is a person, made of flesh and bone, yet to many she was just as synthetic as Barbie. So that’s how we treated her. In our attempts to “figure” Spears out, we stripped her of all humanity. After Oops launched Spears into megawatt superstardom, it became impossible for us to let her come of age in the messy, contradictory way we all get to. She needed to be something to us: an unstoppable diva, the perfect best friend, Satan reincarnated. And she couldn’t deviate from the role we had in our minds. If she did, we got enraged. Something as silly as her dyeing her hair brown felt like a moral offense.
Our attitudes toward Spears laid the groundwork for her tragic fate: a conservatorship where people made every single decision for her. Of course, we know in 2021 Spears was freed from this oppressive, corrupt arrangement, but that doesn’t absolve the world from its part in her story. Our obsession, hatred, and worship of Spears made us feel entitled to every part of her. Even to this day that sentiment rings true. (Just look at all the chatter about her “behavior” on Instagram.)
But Britney is not our Barbie. She never was. This footage from the “Oops” video shoot makes that point very clear. In one moment, we see a pop icon stare down the camera with a ferocity so intense, it’s awe-inspiring. But when the shot is done a mere five seconds later, we see a goofy, dorky Louisiana girl mimicking her song’s cheesy bridge. That dichotomy says it all. As it turns out, the red glow that captivated you in 2000 was never anything to fear. It was just 18-year-old Britney Spears.
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