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| There is a moment in Britney Spears’s new memoir when she is summoned to an MTV studio and made to review footage of strangers complaining that she was “too sexy.” Spears, then 18, had just performed at the 2000 Video Music Awards, where she had torn off a sparkly black tuxedo to reveal spangled nude pants and a spangled nude bra, and various pedestrians roving Times Square had decided that she had crossed a line. | 布兰妮·斯皮尔斯在新出版的回忆录中描述了这样一个场面：她被叫到一个MTV演播室，并被要求观看陌生人如何抱怨她“过于性感”的视频。当时，18岁的斯皮尔斯刚在2000年MTV颁奖礼的演出中脱掉黑色亮片燕尾服，露出闪亮的裸色裤子和抹胸，时报广场上往来的许多路人看到了这一幕，都认为她已经越界。 |
| MTV had produced the awards show and profited from Spears’s performance, but it wanted a piece of the backlash, too. Now we could watch Britney Spears watch us critique her. She was expected to mount a defense — “What did I think of the commenters telling me I was corrupting America’s youth?” — but she did not know what she had done wrong. “All I wanted to do was sing and dance,” she writes in “The Woman in Me.” “Why did everyone treat me, even when I was a teenager, like I was dangerous?” | MTV制作了颁奖礼节目，并从斯皮尔斯的表演中获利；但它仍想从斯皮尔斯遭受的批评中分一杯羹。这样观众就能欣赏布兰妮·斯皮尔斯看到她被批判的样子了。人们期待她为自己辩解——“我对那些说我正在腐蚀美国年轻人的评论人有何看法？”——但她不知道自己到底做错了什么。“我所想的只有唱歌跳舞，”她在《我心之女》(The Woman in Me)一书中写道。“为什么在我只有十几岁的时候，所有人都把我当成危险人物？” |
| The title of Spears’s memoir is a lyric from her 2001 power ballad “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.” The song doubles as an articulation of Spears’s pop-star brand and the suspended adolescent state over which she once ruled. But now, more than 20 years later, it also feels like a premonition. First Spears was robbed of her childhood, and then she was denied her adulthood. I grew up alongside Britney Spears, and my arms still flail instantly into a dorky approximation of her choreography whenever I hear her music. All of the culture’s scrambled messages live in my body somewhere, too. | 斯皮尔斯这本回忆录的书名来自她2001年推出抒情摇滚单曲《少女已过，熟女未满》(I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman)中的一句歌词。这首歌在诠释斯皮尔斯流行歌星形象的同时，也展现了她曾如何在停顿的青春期风靡一时。但在20多年后的今天，这首歌似乎一语成谶。斯皮尔斯先是被剥夺了童年，然后又被禁止拥有成年。作为布兰妮·斯皮尔斯的同代人，每当我听到她的音乐，手臂仍会立刻摆动起来，笨拙地模仿着她的舞姿。所有那些文化的混乱烙印依然存留于我身体的某处。 |
| When Spears’s debut single, “ … Baby One More Time,” exploded like a glitter bomb on my middle school campus in 1998, something about her did seem dangerous. I was 13 and skulking awkwardly through the 8th grade. She was 16 and gutsily scaling the pop charts, only pretending to go to school in the song’s music video. When she danced down the hallway in her schoolgirl outfit, she assumed command of our halls, too. | 1998年，当斯皮尔斯的出道单曲《爱的初告白》(…Baby One More Time)像一颗闪光弹一样在我的中学爆红，她身上的某些东西看起来确实很危险。那年我13岁，正在笨拙又不合群地度过八年级。16岁的她在流行音乐排行榜上勇猛攀升，在这首歌的音乐录影带里只是假装上学而已。她穿着校服在走廊里跳了一路，自此将我们的校园纳入她的统治。 |
| Spears arrived as the queen of girlhood, but she was not just for girls. The boys — who were themselves expected to project a compulsory heterosexuality — quickly reached a consensus that her music kind of sucked but that she was very hot. I could sense them dismantling her, distributing her parts. The girls could have her voice, but the boys would take her body. | 斯皮尔斯以少女时代女王的身份出现，但她不只属于女孩。男孩们——他们自己也被要求表现出一种强制的异性恋特质——很快就达成了共识，认为她的音乐有点烂，但她很性感。我能感觉到他们在拆解她，分配她的部分。女孩们可以拥有她的声音，但男孩们会夺走她的身体。 |
| I was not a huge Britney Spears fan, but I didn’t have to be. Her rise felt inevitable, her power hegemonic. Her music was designed for everyone to like it, and I did. I was fascinated by the rusty edge of her voice. In friends’ bedrooms, we reenacted her videos. We pretended we were sad in a gymnasium or writhing on Mars. As we impersonated her pigtail braids and her creaky rasp, we also projected ourselves into her zone of male approval, familiarizing ourselves with its unsettling power. Britney Spears was the soundtrack to the death of my childhood. It was the time when I started to see myself from outside myself — to view my body through the monitor of judgment. | 我不是布兰妮·斯皮尔斯的超级歌迷，但我也没必要做她的歌迷。她的崛起势在必得，她的力量称霸天下。她的音乐是为了让每个人都喜欢而设计的，而我也喜欢。我被她那沙哑的嗓音迷住了。在朋友的卧室里，我们重演她的视频。我们假装在体育馆里悲伤，或者在火星上扭动。当我们模仿她的辫子和她沙哑的嗓音时，我们也把自己投射到她的男性认可区，熟悉它令人不安的力量。布兰妮·斯皮尔斯是我童年走向死亡的背景音乐。从那时起，我开始跳出自己看自己——透过评判的监视器看自己的身体。 |
| I did not register this at the time, but it was not just teenage boys who laid claim to the body of Britney Spears. When she was 17, Rolling Stone dispatched a grown man to report from her bedroom, and he returned with notes on her “honeyed thigh” and “ample chest.” On the cover, another man posed her on a bed wearing only a bra and boy shorts, with a Teletubby tucked under her arm. In newspapers and magazines, adult writers called her “jailbait” — essentially an accusation that a child has tempted an adult to sexually assault her. A People magazine cover in 2000 asked if Spears, then 18, was “Too Sexy Too Soon.” In the memoir, Spears describes her disturbed reaction as her audiences filled with “more and more older men” who leered at her “like I was some kind of Lolita fantasy.” | 我当时没有意识到这一点，但不仅仅是十几岁的男孩对布兰妮·斯皮尔斯的身体提出要求。她17岁那年，《滚石》杂志派了一个成年男子去她的卧室报道，他回来时带着关于她“甜美的大腿”和“丰满的胸部”的笔记。在那期封面上，另一个男人把她放在床上，她只穿着胸罩和平脚短裤，腋下夹着天线宝宝玩具。在报纸和杂志上，已经是成年人的撰稿人们称她为“诱人犯罪”——本质上是指一个孩子引诱一个成年人对她进行性侵犯。2000年《人物》杂志的封面文章中，作者问18岁的布兰妮是否“太快就变得太性感了”。在回忆录中，斯皮尔斯描述了自己的不安反应，因为她的观众中充满了“越来越多的老男人”，他们窥视她，“就像我是某种洛丽塔式幻想一样。” |
| Looking back now, of course Britney Spears does not seem dangerous. Like me, she was a child. It was the intensity of the attention trained on her that was perverse. Through her, I learned that the bodies of women and girls had a speculative value. Men determined their worth. They invested early, but they were always ready to withdraw their attention and place it in someone new. I looked nothing like Britney Spears, moved nothing like her, but I still felt like the culture was telling me: You are as valuable now as you will ever be. | 现在回想起来，布兰妮·斯皮尔斯的样子当然并不危险。和我一样，她也是个孩子。对她的过分关注才是反常的。通过她，我了解到女人和女孩的身体具有投机价值。男人决定了她们的价值。他们很早就开始投资，但他们随时会收回自己的注意力，把它放在新人身上。我的样子一点也不像布兰妮·斯皮尔斯，动作也一点都不像她，但我仍然觉得这种文化在告诉我：现在就是你最有价值的时候，你的将来不会更有价值。 |
| The early coverage of Spears took pains to emphasize her grip over her own career, and in many ways, it was true. Much of the appeal of her image was that it was shaped by the tastes of an actual teenage girl. In the book, she writes that the concept and styling of the “ … Baby One More Time” video were hers. And yet there was also something suspicious about how tirelessly record executives and managers emphasized her power. It is uncontroversial to think of boy bands like ’N Sync and the Backstreet Boys as engineered. With Spears, it seemed important to insist that she was responsible. | 关于布兰妮的早期报道煞费苦心地强调她对自己事业的掌控，在很多方面，这是事实。她的形象之所以吸引人，很大程度上是因为它是由一个真正的少女的品味塑造的。在书中，她写道，《爱的初告白》视频的概念和风格都是她的。然而，唱片公司的高管和经理们孜孜不倦地强调她的权力，这一点也令人起疑。说“超级男孩”(N Sync)和“后街男孩”(Backstreet Boys)等男团是人工打造出来的，这没有争议，但说到斯皮尔斯，似乎就一定要强调她要为她的所作所为负责。 |
| Every time her handlers spoke of her authority, they reminded us that it was conditional on their approval. They got to decide that Britney Spears was in control. And they got to decide when she was out of it. | 每次她的经纪人谈到她的权威时，他们都会提醒我们，这取决于他们的同意。他们有权决定布兰妮·斯皮尔斯什么时候掌握大权。他们有权决定她什么时候没有权。 |
| In 2007, Spears again performed at the Video Music Awards, this time somewhat against her will. She was newly postpartum and fighting her ex-husband, Kevin Federline, for custody of her infant sons. Her team, she writes, had pressured her to promote her new album and “show the world that I was fine.” She appeared in a glittery bikini and danced uneasily to her song “Gimme More.” | 2007年，斯皮尔斯再次在音乐录影带大奖上表演，这一次有点违背她的意愿。她刚产后不久，正在和前夫凯文·费德林争夺两个儿子的抚养权。她写道，她的团队向她施压，要求她宣传新专辑，“告诉全世界我没事”。她穿着闪亮的比基尼，伴着自己的歌曲《给我更多》(Gimme More)不安地跳舞。 |
| She was, she writes, “not fine.” She was exhausted, dizzy and unrehearsed. “It was less than a year since I’d had my second baby in two years but everyone was acting like my not having six-pack abs was offensive,” she writes. “I could see myself on video throughout the auditorium while I performed; it was like looking at myself in a fun-house mirror.” | 她写道，她“并非没事”。她筋疲力尽，头昏眼花，而且没有排练过。“当时距离我两年内生下第二个孩子还不到一年，但每个人都认为我没有六块腹肌是一种冒犯，”她写道。“当我表演的时候，音乐厅里到处都能看到我自己；就像在哈哈镜中看自己一样。” |
| This time her performance was pitched not as a danger to America’s youth, but to her own children. After the show, Ryan Seacrest grilled her about whether she was fit to be a mother. A teen columnist for a Florida newspaper gave her “The Worst Mother Award.” | 这一次，她的表演并不是对美国年轻人的威胁，而是对她自己孩子的威胁。演出结束后，瑞安·西克雷斯特质问她是否适合做母亲。佛罗里达州一家报纸的一名青少年专栏作家给她颁发了“最差母亲奖”。 |
| In 2007, I was a recent college graduate. I spent many nights extending my adolescence by getting drunk and singing “Overprotected” at a karaoke bar. I regularly embarrassed myself by dancing poorly to Britney Spears. And yet, when I watched her VMAs performance, I thought it was disastrous and amusing. | 2007年，我刚从大学毕业。很多个晚上，我在卡拉OK酒吧喝得酩酊大醉，唱着《过度保护》(Overprotected)来延长我的青春期。我经常跟着布兰妮·斯皮尔斯跳舞，跳得很难看，自己也觉得难堪。然而，当我看她在音乐录影带大奖上的表演时，我认为那是灾难性的，但也很有趣。 |
| Now, as I read about the event through Spears’s book, I got hot with shame, and then I got mad. I am now, like Spears, the mother to two boys, and they are about the age that her children were when she was led onto that stage. I could once again imagine living in a body like hers — her postpartum fun-house body, the one that was proffered as sad proof that she had lost her waistline, her control and her worth. | 现在，当我通过斯皮尔斯的书读到这件事的时候，我感到羞愧，然后我生气了。现在，我和斯皮尔斯一样，是两个男孩的母亲，他俩的年龄和她那次登台时她孩子们的年龄差不多。我可以再一次想象生活在她那样的身体里——她那哈哈镜般的产后身体，那是她失去了腰围、控制力和价值的可悲证明。 |
| The postpartum period is much like adolescence, with its startling physical changes and its extreme public scrutiny. Of course Britney Spears was exhausted — she had two babies. Of course she was unrehearsed — she had two babies. When I watched the performance again recently, it played like found footage in a horror movie. I saw a new mother being forced to do a sexy dance for America, and for the quality of her performance to inform whether she got to keep her children. | 产后时期很像青春期，有着惊人的身体变化，会遭受极端的公众监督。布兰妮·斯皮尔斯当然会筋疲力尽——她生了两个孩子。她当然没法排练——她有两个孩子。最近，当我再次观看那场演出时，它就像恐怖电影中的片段一样。我看到一位新妈妈被迫为美国人跳起性感的舞蹈，并且要由她的表演质量来决定她是否能够保住她的孩子。 |
| In “The Woman in Me,” Spears compares herself to Benjamin Button, the literary and movie character who is born as an old man and ages in reverse. When she was a girl, she was treated as if she was dangerously mature. When she became a woman, she was infantilized. Spears had long felt like her body was public property, but when she was placed under a conservatorship administered by her father and a lawyer, not long after that performance at the VMAs, that feeling was made literal. She was converted, she says, into a “child robot.” She became all body, no voice. | 在《我心之女》中，斯皮尔斯把自己比作本杰明·巴顿。这是文学和电影中的一个角色，他出生时是一个老人，但年龄却越来越年轻。当斯皮尔斯还是个女孩的时候，她被当作一个危险的成熟女性。当她成为一个女人的时候，她又被幼稚化了。长期以来，斯皮尔斯一直觉得自己的身体是公共财产，但当她在音乐录影带大奖上的表演后不久，她被置于父亲和律师的监护之下时，这种感觉就变成了现实。她说，她被改造成了一个“儿童机器人”。她变得只有身体，没有声音。 |
| The memoir is pitched as Spears’s reclaiming of her voice. But every celebrity memoir is an act of ventriloquism: The book was ghostwritten, and its audiobook was read by the actress Michelle Williams. | 这本回忆录的定位是斯皮尔斯重拾自己的声音。但每一本名人回忆录都是一种腹语表演：这本书有人代笔，有声书由演员米歇尔·威廉姆斯朗读。 |
| The most direct portal to Spears’s mind of late has been Instagram, where she posts wordless videos and pictures of herself in thongs or crop tops or in nothing at all, smiling and spinning and gyrating. In the book, she explains that after a life of being “prodded and posed for other people’s approval,” she no longer cares what they think. She reminds me of myself as a girl, dancing to a Britney Spears song in her bedroom. Her posts appear glitchy and unpolished. She looks like she’s playing around, investigating her new powers. | 最近，通往斯皮尔斯心灵最直接的入口是她的Instagram，她在上面发布自己穿着丁字裤、露脐上衣或什么都不穿的视频和照片，一言不发地微笑、旋转、扭动。在书中，她解释说，经历了“为了别人的认可而受摆布和摆姿势”的生活之后，她不再在乎别人怎么想。她让我想起了小时候的自己，在卧室里伴着斯皮尔斯的歌跳舞。她的帖子显得杂乱无章，未经润色。她看起来像是在玩耍，在研究自己的新能力。 |
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