There is a very particular moment in Britney Spears’ revelatory The Woman In Me, during which she at last has the courage to rehash having an abortion in 2000. The baby, of course, would have been Justin Timberlake’s. Justin, at that time, however, was riding a bit too high on the crest of his success with NSYNC, and fatherhood would only signal a “death sentence” with regard to his ability to sleep around furthering his burgeoning prosperity. Britney, on the other hand, always knew she wanted to have a family. Repeatedly, this has come up in interviews with her from the very start of her career.
So, although it might have been “too soon” for Timberlake, from Spears’ perspective, “It was a surprise, but for me it wasn’t a tragedy. I loved Justin so much. I always expected us to have a family together one day. This would just be much earlier than I’d anticipated.” Timberlake did not see it that way, he being the one who insisted that Spears “get rid of it.” This, to be sure, is more than somewhat ironic considering how public he’s been about his pro-choice stance. And yes, having the choice doesn’t just refer to the choice to abort, but the choice to carry out a pregnancy. Timberlake did not allow that choice for Spears, bulldozing her into doing what he wanted because it would have damaged his reputation (“If he didn’t want to become a father, I didn’t feel like I had much of a choice. I wouldn’t want to push him into something he didn’t want. Our relationship was too important to me”). And yet, years later, at a rally for Barack Obama, Timberlake declared next to his new girlfriend, Jessica Biel, “Nobody should be able to say what you can do with your body… I give Jess the right to choose where we go to eat all the time. The funny thing is, what the woman chooses is usually right.” First of all, vom, and second, it’s cruelly apparent that he didn’t believe Spears deserved the same “approach.” And gee, how kind of Timberlake to “give the right to choose” to Biel. Which was more than could be said for Britney.
It was already bad enough that, as usual, she was pushed and pressured into doing something she didn’t want to do, but, to add insult to injury, Spears recalls that while she was in agonizing pain on the floor of the bathroom, Timberlake thought it would be a great idea to come in and start playing his guitar to soothe her. Or, as she puts it, “At some point he thought maybe music would help, so he got his guitar and he lay there with me strumming it.” Yes, that’s correct, while Spears was doubled over in agony, Timberlake thought, “Hey, let me play my guitar for her. That makes sense. My music is all-healing.” There’s a reason “strumming it” sounds like “stroking it,” because all Timberlake was doing by playing his guitar in that moment was stroking his own ego with a masturbatory flourish. Never mind that Spears was on the verge of total panic because of the pain, and her awareness that Timberlake would not take her to the hospital if anything went wrong in order to guard his “dirty secret” at all costs.
Spears was also sure to make it clear that she was unsure about “her” (read: his) decision, and that, even to this day, she questions if it was right, remarking, “I don’t know if that was the right decision. If it had been left up to me alone, I never would have done it.” She added, “We also decided on something that in retrospect wound up being, in my view, wrong, and that was that I should not go to a doctor or to a hospital to have the abortion. It was important that no one find out about the pregnancy or the abortion, which meant doing everything at home.” Thus, not only was Spears strongarmed into the entire ordeal, she didn’t even get the luxury of having access to more complete, professional medical care for the procedure—all because JT would be “shamed.” Even though, in the end, Spears would have been the one to bear the brunt of the inevitable media backlash had the news actually leaked. For, as she also points out, “There’s always been more leeway in Hollywood for men than for women.” Plus, as we saw in 2002, everyone automatically sided with the false narrative Timberlake painted via “Cry Me A River” and its video.
Spears’ description of the breakup that ensued not long after her abortion was one characterized by being “clinically in shock.” However, in Spears’ position on the bathroom floor, she might also have been clinically in shock as a result of seeing Timberlake sit down next to her and play guitar in response to her visible physical torment. A scene she illustrates by recalling, “…I took the little pills. Soon I started having excruciating cramps. I went into the bathroom and stayed there for hours, lying on the floor, sobbing and screaming. They should’ve numbed me with something, I thought. I wanted some kind of anesthesia. I wanted to go to the doctor. I was so scared. I lay there wondering if I was going to die.”
For Timberlake to engage in the peak Ken behavior of playing his guitar in response to that exemplifies the worst kind of toxic masculinity. The kind that assumes it is gentle and caring when, actually, it is entirely narcissistic and self-serving. And so, with just one sentence, clearly drenched with shade, Spears recalls her own Barbie-esque hell. One in which the Ken of the scenario, Justin, seriously thought the thing that would help her most of all was his guitar-playing.
Obviously, there’s a good reason for writer-director Greta Gerwig to have so heavily featured this male trope in Barbie. For there have been scores upon scores of women subjected to this same form of musical abuse posing as…what? Romantic prowess? Sensitive boy swagger? Who the fuck knows what’s actually going through a man’s head when he decides that “strumming some tunes” is somehow the fulfillment of the ultimate female fantasy.
All that can be known for sure is that the least consoling thing to happen while a girl is having an at-home abortion is being “Ken’d” with some guitar. Merely adding to how viable the tagline, “She’s everything. He’s just Ken” truly is. And yet, for whatever reason, it still takes the Barbies of the world too long to understand that they don’t need Ken, it’s the other way around. Or, as Justin would phrase it, “You were my sun/You were my earth.”
