Evening Standard - ES Magazine
Laura Craik is UPFRONT about Britney, boozy boredom and foodie failures
Laura Craik on Britney’s endless lockdown, Cardi B’s botched berries and the nonsense of Kendall Jenner’s tequila haters
“THAT a 39-year-OLD WOMAN has had her life CONTROLLED seems a DYSTOPIAN FICTION straight from KAFKA’S pen”
Even before watching the documentary Framing Britney Spears, I’d been thinking a lot about freedom: what it feels like, what it tastes like (beer). Our lockdown will end. Britney’s is interminable. I can’t get this out of my head. A 39-year-old woman has had her life controlled for the past 12 years by a father she allegedly fears (Jamie Spears legally controls her finances, children’s custody arrangements and medical care). It seems medieval, a dystopian fiction straight from Kafka’s pen.
Sometimes, I want to run out of my house and scream. Knowing that I can makes me not need to. Imagine all your needs and desires being thwarted in perpetuity. Britney’s conservators argue she’s not a prisoner because she gets to travel, as though that makes it okay. But she has to seek permission first. That is not okay. It’s likely to reduce every sun-drenched beach visit to a haunted shadow.
Meanwhile, Princess Latifa al-Maktoum, daughter of Dubai’s autocratic ruler, last week claimed to be incarcerated under armed guard, after having tried to flee her restrictive life three years earlier. Not seen in public since 2018, friends had smuggled her a mobile phone, on which she’d filmed herself saying she’d been drugged and returned to Dubai at gun point. Nobody knows where Princess Latifa currently is, or even whether she’s alive. Domestic abuse isn’t always physical: coercive control is one of its less visible forms. According to the Office for National Statistics, an estimated 7.3 per cent of women — 1.6 million — experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2020, with three quarters of victims of crimes involving domestic abuse being female. God knows how much this figure will have risen over lockdown. Those are only the official figures. ‘I feel like if you are an adult, you should be able to live your life and not be controlled,’ said Britney’s long-time friend, Paris Hilton. Britney is a global superstar with 28 million Instagram fans and a $60 million fortune, yet all the fame and money in the world can’t set her free.