You Need Her Unhinged

On Britney, lucidity, and the business model of female instability

My best friend and I had been playing phone tag for weeks. She got tired of it first.

Just book your flights and come. I’ll see you at the airport pickup.

A few weeks earlier she’d sent a screenshot of a festival.

Fly to me and I’ll get us tickets.

I was all in.

What she didn’t know:

in the three weeks since we’d made plans, I’d lost three-quarters of my childcare, in the way that sometimes a season just takes the floor out from under you. I had lost track of the trip entirely.

Her text landed. I read it twice.

Goddammit. I wish.

Britney Spears performing "Piece of Me," The Circus Tour, 2009.

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I’m unhinged

unhinged

from performing peace

unhinged from micro-aggressive

motherfucking speeches

unhinged from the power play

in the sandbox

coercive assholes can leave my planet

unhinged in the best way

Oh, she’s totally lucid

and you know what?

I find most of them, utterly useless

that’s it, that’s all

my body is all done

undone

that’s a wrap

COME GET YOUR SONS.

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This is a scene from Surgeon General Warning, a play I'm writing about marriage. It opens with the scenes that should exist and don't.

There is an entire economy built around the moment a woman finally says what she means.

The diagnosis. The documentary. The podcast episode. The concerned tweet from someone who was definitely not one of the people who put her there. The think piece about her think piece.

Britney Spears handed them Piece of Me in 2007, a video that was essentially a receipt, and the industry went ahead and used it as a prop anyway. Charming.

Here’s what they grasped immediately, and what we’re still catching up to: unhinged is not a malfunction. It is a threat assessment. When a woman stops performing sanity for the comfort of the room, someone loses something.

Usually, it’s leverage.

So, my Dear Reader, good day to you.

And to everyone else, go get your fucking sons.

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