As a girl with the most extensive number of perfumes in the celebrity game (illustriously beating out Paris Hilton) and a song called, naturally, “Perfume,” if anyone was going to find a new way to revolutionize perfume, it was Britney Spears. And so she did, with her latest–her twenty-fourth, to be exact–fragrance, appropriately dubbed Prerogative, serving as the first truly genderless one to hit the shelves. While some of us have been ignoring rules about “pour homme” versus “pour femme” for years, Britney makes it officially sanctioned with an elixir specifically formulated to be for everyone. How, exactly, that works, who knows? Only perfume genius (not to be confused with Perfume Genius) Britney.
And in the midst of embarking on a world tour that takes her Piece of Me show from beyond the creepy confines of Las Vegas, she’s still found time to make teasers for her latest contribution to the robust catalogue of celebrity scents. Writhing in front of a series of screens with a muscular man on it (Britney is a sexual Sag, after all, and TV can be pretty boring if you’re not dancing at the same time), the conclusion of the teaser shows us Britney’s signature round-shaped bottle with the loud yet demure PREROGATIVE etched across it. Because, yes, it is your fucking prerogative to not only wear Britney Spears perfume past a certain age, but to also not be hemmed in by the definement of labels like “for men” or “for women.” Nothing is for anyone anymore. We are all amorphous, sexless members of a society that is increasingly a figment of the internet’s imagination.
Who better to celebrate that than Britney as she somewhat ironically lusts after a man in these teasers that tout genderlessness, when alas, Miss Spears is still the poster child for herteronormativeness? Yet she still speaks to the gays, as evidenced by her Vanguard Award at the GLAAD Media Awards earlier this year. “The new fragrance for all” is its tag line, and maybe it is. For aren’t we all lusting after a man on the screen at this point? Now that they’re such a rarity in pure, undiluted form (perfume analogies, you know). And with so many men now craving men so openly–maybe because women are such harpies, right?–what could be more relatable than this promo for the fragrance? Britney might claim to be communing with all genders in this, but let’s be honest, it’s the gay men she’s speaking to.
Regardless, this is certainly a far stride from the period in which Britney was so conservative she claimed she was waiting until marriage to lose her virginity (those Bush II years were oppressive, lest you forget). Sure, America has come under fire of late for not being the most open or tolerant milieu (well then, surely Russia isn’t for you), but as usual, Britney is setting the stage for a rallying call for us to change our ways (just as she did with “Work Bitch” in terms of getting us to see that we’re all lazy pieces of shit and that’s why we don’t have the things we want). With liberty and justice for all, and now with a fragrance “for all.”
