Not long ago it was considered normal to ask Britney Spears if she was a virgin

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If a male journalist – scratch that, any journalist – asked a barely legal pop star today whether she was still a virgin, the journalist would be out of a job faster than it would take for the gasps in the room to subside. If a talk show host tried to not-so-subtly ask her when she was 17 years old if she had gotten breast implants, he would be labelled a pervert and sent to join his purity-curious colleague in the unemployment line. And if a photographer snapped and shared photos of her a few years later – newly divorced, obviously in some sort of mental distress and exiting a car in a miniskirt without underwear, exposing her naked crotch – he would be judged as a pariah, a degenerate and a parasite.

Yet not even two decades ago, all of that was perfectly normal. Britney Spears was one of the biggest pop stars in the world, and it was generally accepted that her bra size, virginity and mental health status were matters of legitimate public interest. The Washington Post reviewed her 2003 album In The Zone and labelled it “her first post-virginity album.” A column for the Los Angeles Times that same year described how she had perfected the “slut strut” in music videos. These types of descriptions would be totally verboten now, not so much because journalists want to talk about 17-year-olds’ breasts and are suffocated by a puritanical cancel culture, but because we’ve come to understand that the grotesque leering of barely adult bodies is unbecoming of established media (and of respectable people) and that it sends a terrible message to young girls.

A new documentary from The New York Times on the Britney circus of the early-2000s has caused something of a reckoning with the caricatures that were made of young, prominent women as recently as a few decades ago. Though the film, Framing Britney Spears, is primarily about the years-long conservatorship battle the pop star has had with her father, it also illustrates how media coverage at the time dehumanized Ms. Spears and propagated a narrative of her as a good-girl-gone-bad, then gone wild, then gone crazy.

Ms. Spears was not an anomaly. This was around the time that the affair between U.S. president Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky came to light, when the Democratic machine successfully manipulated the story to be one of Ms. Lewinsky as a seductress and a homewrecker. The blue dress she wore during one encounter with the president became late-night TV fodder, as did her weight and her mental anguish. It wouldn’t be until years later – particularly after the #MeToo movement – that the power imbalance between a 22-year-old intern and her 49-year-old boss, who also happened to be the president of the United States, would be properly understood and conceptualized.

Before Ms. Lewinsky there was Anita Hill, who was asked whether she was a “scorned woman” when testifying about sexual harassment allegations about then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. And there was Princess Diana, whose virginity was a matter of ferocious public curiosity before she married Prince Charles, and whom the British press would eventually come to describe as manipulative, promiscuous and crazy. (“Diana, driven to five suicide bids by ‘uncaring’ Charles,” read a sensational headline in The Sunday Times in 1992.)

By the 2000s, when the Britney Spears narrative arc was in full swing, the objectification of other young celebrity women was common. Actors Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen were the subject of online clocks counting down the days until they turned 18. Paris Hilton became the butt of jokes and tabloid headlines when a sex tape between her at 18 and her 30-something boyfriend was leaked online. It was all normal, uncomplicated and reflexive.

Certainly the cultural climate has changed since then – enough so that we may look back with disgust at how grown adults merrily discussed the state of a teen celebrity’s hymen and blamed a 22-year-old intern for the political trouble that befell a horny president. But old habits – or rather, narratives about vixenish women – die hard, and perhaps they’ve only become more understated in recent years, though not entirely disappeared.

The British press, for example, has happily propagated a portrait of Meghan Markle as a cruel temptress who has torn apart the Royal Family, and commentators on Fox News a couple of years ago eagerly disparaged Christine Blasey Ford, who accused then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, as mentally unstable and vindictive. But one consequential change now is that there is considerable mainstream pushback to these lazy portraits, and no one would dare ask a teen pop star if her breasts are real. It’s 20 years too late for the Britney Spears generation, but not a moment too soon for the next one.

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