Released as a single in February of 2002, after Britney Spears had recently turned twenty, “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” was intended to serve as a synergistic means to promote her only film to date, Crossroads. Considering the movie would only be of value to the demographic that enjoys watching it for camp value as a double feature with Glitter, it was important to help stack the odds in Spears’ favor musically–hence also using “Overprotected” and “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll” from her third album, Britney, which came out shortly before in November of 2001. Not to mention “Bye Bye Bye” from *NSYNC during a scene of Spears in the role of Lucy Wagner, driving across the country with her friends, Kit (Zoe Saldana) and Mimi (Taryn Manning). Of course, this was before her much publicized breakup with Justin Timberlake that would never find her vindicated in the matter as her ex continued to profit financially from his “heartache.” Alas, it only works when Adele does it (at least in terms of coming across as sincere).
Keeping her then current relationship with Justin in mind, Britney was still promoting her Jessica Simpson steez in terms of insisting upon her desire to wait until after marriage to have sex. Of course, Justin was quick to debunk that myth once he was in full-fledge Petty Betty mode, followed by Britney’s own mother in a tell-all book called Through The Storm: A Real Story of Fame and Family In a Tabloid World, which offers up the tidbit that Britney lost her V-card long ago in high school to a football player.
But because the public did not yet want to believe the obvious, Britney could play quite well into her innocence shtick on a song such as this. For the added voice required to lend it a bona fide woman’s perspective (as opposed to the male one that came as a result of the track being written by go-to collaborators in her early days, Max Martin and Rami), Dido offered her own songwriting to temper the “girlishness” of Britney as a construct. Part of that construct still being too “chaste” to be deemed a full-fledged woman. So it is that she grapples with the knowledge of her power to use her body as a weapon to get what she wants (for most women, that means something of a materialistic bent, n’est-ce pas? But then, what could Britney need a man’s bank account for to get her such things when she was and is already capable of doing so?–even if the bane of having a conservator puts a petite dent into the income). Should she recoil from that phase called “womanhood” for as long as she can, clinging steadfastly to the sort of false innocence that makes men like Humbert Humbert erect? Or should she embrace the inevitable assault of words that will brand her a “whore,” a “slut” and a “hypocrite” (something to the effect of what takes place in Ariana Grande’s “God Is A Woman” video)? Neither, in truth, is the short answer, and one that apparently couldn’t even be discovered by Britney in a meandering three minute, forty-nine minute existential dilemma.
Why bother being classified as either, when this in-between phase is the ultimate get out of jail free card (often in actuality) for any wrongdoing (Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan knew better how to wield said gray area in their heyday as Hollywood party girls)? In struggling with the identity that is bound to happen naturally anyway as time performs its cruel task of rendering women older (Godard was right when he wrote the line of dialogue for Anna Karina to say, “I think women should never be more than twenty-five”–mainly because that’s when they possess the most power over men, yet are too naive and unself-assured to properly use it), Spears is wasting her precious and all too brief golden era of not being a girl or a woman, just some best of both worlds nymph.
In the “inspirational” (in that the nature-based backdrops are what you would see on archetypal posters put on display on the ceiling at the dentist) video, Britney seductively sings, “Feels like I’m caught in the middle,” as she bears her midriff and cleavage in between the cleavage of a rock (god bless early 00s literalism). Obviously, she’s not so girlish in her artfulness when it comes to knowing that the body talks louder than the mouth as she declares, “I’m not a girl/There is no need to protect me/It’s time I learn to face up to this on my own.” “This,” presumably, being the fact that she’s going to have to spend the bulk of her income on anti-aging products and procedures now. It’s an unpleasant reality to come to terms with, but then, not more unpleasant than not actually having the income to afford to do so. So while Britney prattles on about trying to find the woman in her, she’s effectively just pissed away her valuable moments as an immune to classification female. “I’m A 20-Year-Old Female,” of course, would not have been as tailor-made to the schmaltz of a song that was designed to be a theme for Crossroads. And a theme to Britney’s life at that time, one in which she was, behind the facade of confusion, all too aware of how to perfectly combine the image of the vixen/virgin that can only be achieved during said in-between period of girlhood and womanhood that she seems to be so upset about while collecting the check as her listeners genuinely tried to examine her nonsensical complaint and the white girl/woman problem of: “Life doesn’t always go my way.” Yet in all fairness, Kevin Federline was a very fuzzy end of the lollipop to kick off being a woman–one that not even Shirley Temple would want to lick.
