An Apology to Ms. Spears

Dear Ms. Spears,

You don’t know me and have never heard of me. I am as certain as I can be that we will never meet. And, to be honest, I don’t even know your music.

All that said, you might wonder why I am writing you a letter. The shameful truth is, I owe you an apology. You would never know it, but I have played my own small part in wronging you and doing you everlasting damage.

Before you get the wrong idea, I guess I should explain myself. I think I am older than you are. When I first heard of you, I believe you were 15 or so, and I was already out of high school. Some people I knew owned your music. I knew that your songs were being played all over the radio, although I wasn’t listening to those stations. And though I wasn’t a concert go-er or an MTV watcher, I learned by osmosis that you were causing a great stir with your dancing and parading on video and on stage. While it was of no particular interest to me personally, the public eye celebrated you as something of a mini-goddess. They adored you and doted on you, followed you around and made you into a star.

But it wasn’t out of respect or true admiration that the world took notice. Unfortunately, it was out of exploitation. You were not noticed; you were ogled. The media objectified you and took advantage of you, all the while pretending you were older, more mature, and in control.

In time, the fascination petered out, leaving you out in the cold. The adulation to which you had grown so accustomed no longer came naturally, and you had nothing to show for it. At some point, I became conscious of headlines in mainstream media outlets, outlining a wide variety of your personal and legal troubles. I distinctly remembered that you had been blond, and then all of sudden you were a brunette. It’s very nice to be a brunette, of course; but you didn’t seem a very happy one.

I must not and cannot judge you; I can’t presume to understand the whole picture. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that you underwent a crisis. Here was the adoring world, following you with great interest, and then it was gone. And the only tool you had at your disposal to reclaim that attention was your physicality, your body. You learned that your mind was not valued and that your personality was not interesting; in short, you learned that the media thought that you were worthless.

And nobody came to help you.

Why am I apologizing for all this? I don’t run any media outlets, I never did an internet search for you or your name, and I can’t recall ever even clicking on a headline about you. But I cannot and will not deny that I too have played my own small role in the media’s mechanism for destroying women and destroying you. I held a hotmail email account, when they were running distasteful and empty banner ads aside my email. I read news and sports websites that regularly ran offensive articles and ads. And these images and ideas caught my attention. Wittingly or unwittingly, I learned your name and those of many other women like you, who are championed and supposedly exalted for all the wrong reasons. In these ways, I fed into a system which programmatically, if subtly, sends the message that a woman’s worth lies primarily in her sexuality. Clearly then, I helped to steal your youth and irreparably damage your life.

Obviously, these lifestyle choices have hurt countless others as well. Some have doubtlessly idolized you and wanted to follow in your footsteps, with idyllic notions of grandeur and without awareness of the consequences. As an aside, I think we could safely assume that the very same values influenced your own initial decision to plunge into this media world in the first place. And sometimes, we fail to acknowledge the toll that this objectification takes on men as well. The subjects of all this desire, men marginalize their own sensibilities and values in the most dehumanizing and depraved way. Men make themselves into animals.

But I have come to apologize to you. Your life should be more meaningful, is far more meaningful, than the world has publicly conceded. And I contributed to the distorted view that reduced you to a two-dimensional image. For this, I am truly remorseful, and I beg your forgiveness.

Wishing you better,


Yonatan Kohn