In August of 2003, everyone was talking about a single instant that would become one of the defining moments of pop culture history: Madonna kissing Britney Spears during the opening performance of the VMAs. The thing was, she also kissed Britney’s fellow “pop tart,” Christina Aguilera, right after Britney, it just didn’t seem so based on one cameraperson’s very strategic pan and close-up to get Justin Timberlake’s reaction to the Britney beso, which was especially important considering their sordid breakup was still fresh in the headlines from 2002 (a breakup that helped Timberlake garner two awards that same night for “Cry Me A River” featuring an overt Britney Spears lookalike, in addition to punctuating the majority of his career successes thanks to the endless fodder her jilting provided).
With Christina’s moment stolen for the sake of ensuring the vexed expression of J.T. would be forever immortalized, the metaphor for people preferring trash to quality was forever sealed. And again, it isn’t because Britney isn’t a pop goddess in her own right, but at the same time, Christina has always had the superior vocal talent. Yet this did not matter when it came to who was more visually appealing at a time as literal as the George W. Bush era. Thus, when Aguilera sat down for an interview with Andy Cohen that touched on her already iconic history (yet seemingly unknown to most) history with Radio City Music Hall (she took the stage there for her Liberation Tour on October 3rd and 4th), she recalled feeling slighted over MTV’s need to get the reaction shot, stating, “Yeah, because I definitely saw the newspaper the next day and it was like, ‘Oh, well, I guess I got left out of that.'”
That most of Aguilera’s career at that phase was designed by the culture of tabloid journalism to be pitted against and compared to Spears’ further added to the overt misogyny of the media wanting to play into the beloved notion of two women competing against one another–which was heightened and made especially surreal when adding into the mix that now the two were quite literally competing for Madonna’s affections. At the outset of the performance, all is ostensibly equal in terms of how Madonna treats each of her unwitting protégées, twirling Xtina here, slapping her top hat on Britney’s head there. And at one point, the camera pans to Justin after a shot of Madonna tangoing with Christina, his eyebrows going up and down in concert with the music. Right before the moment of kissing truth, it would appear as though Madonna is lending favor to Christina in seductively removing her garter and whipping it around like a prize, causing this brief and slight moment for Christina to reach out for her leg in some sort of reflexive sign of sexual gratitude. But the tide soon turns before one can intuit what’s happening, and the kiss with Britney is given a full three seconds to Christina’s half a second before Madonna screams, “Yo yo yo, who dat be?” in announcement of Missy Elliott’s arrival.
Reaction shots across the board to 50 Cent, Eminem, Mya, the cast of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Paris and Nicky Hilton show signs of elation at the sight of such an unexpected performance (it would be a far cry from Madonna’s appearance at the 2018 VMAs). But what MTV and its engineers of the evening (all primarily with penises) wanted was the specific tale of Justin being scandalized, further proof that he was somehow wronged in it all, if Britney’s “slutty” behavior that night was any small indication.
And Christina paid the price for this hokey soap opera. So before the stock image photo of a man eyeing another woman as his girlfriend looks on in horror/disgust, there was this, the most memeable of all representations of wanting to pursue that which is easier for consumption, more palatable to one’s appetite for “cheap shots,” as Aguilera called it, demarcating women as objets de manipulation in a male-designed narrative that gives Timberlake the right to not join everyone else in giving a standing ovation for the performance because “whores don’t deserve praise.” Instead only to be written about and dissected endlessly through the lens of a man’s skewed eye.
