A few days ago, Tuesday, October 24, 2023, American singer, Britney Spears, came out with what was promised last year when she was signing the book deal with publisher Simon and Schuster to be ‘’a tell-all’’ memoir. The much-anticipated book is entitled The Woman in Me. For millions of Spears’ adoring fans in Nigeria, Africa, and the planet Earth, what may catch their fancy about the singer’s memoir is completely different from what has caught mine. For them, it might be the conservatory deal with her father in which she came out of it in a rebellious, rancorous manner to disagree with important members of her nuclear family.
The likes of Britney Spears fancy themselves as role models. There are millions of young persons all over the world who try to model their lives upon their own. We, therefore, have a responsibility to hold them up to a certain standard of behaviour.
For me, it is something that has to do with her sexual morality. I am amazed that what she or her book’s publicists found so important to highlight among the interesting or significant parts of her book and her life is the aspect about an abortion she had some years ago for one of her numerous boyfriends and men friends by name Justin Timberlake.
In other parts of the sane world and among certain sane persons, what is highlighted in a person’s memoir or autobiography is the child or children a lady has for, or more appropriately, with, a particular man or men. It is not the abortion a lady has for a particular man.
I must confess in my prudishness that ever since I read this story, I have remained puzzled. There are many things in this modern world that are puzzling to a 6o-something-year-old man. This is certainly one of them. It is abortion and not the number of births a woman has in her relationship.
As I was checking up other possibly bizarre things about this lady, I came up to a portion in her life about her boyfriends, husbands, ex-husbands, and ‘’side-guys’’ and a long list of the names of these boys and men was written out as if her life is a celebration of sexual rascality. I lost count or rather I am scandalized to mention the number! Is this what is meant to be a star female singer? You have numerous sexual liaisons with men worthy to have a portion dedicated to their naming?
What, I keep asking myself over and over, is the significance of the story about her abortion? Is it to show the prudish world where some of us are members of that in America a lady can have sex, get pregnant and she can terminate it any time she wants without consequences to her or anybody else? Is Spears using the opportunity of her memoir to celebrate her licentiousness?
The Western world will not cease to amaze some of us. This is a society where they come up with some absurd laws about protecting the dignity of women. Only recently, a Spaniard, Luis Rubiales the president of the Spanish Football Federation, was sacked for publicly kissing without her consent a young girl he fancies and who also obviously fancies him. Yet, it is he, and not both of them, that was sanctioned by the hypocritical society.
It is also in this same society that a lady is hailed as a heroine for flaunting her sexual indiscretion, her getting pregnant in the process and her callously doing away with that pregnancy
One of the most amazing things God has done for mankind is that having a close relationship is a very deeply private or personal matter. If you don’t talk about it nobody including, your parents or legitimate partners, will have any way of knowing about it. I think this is to help all of us maintain our own dignity and save the world from unnecessary scandals so that peace can reign in this sinful world. Why then are women, especially in the entertainment industry, encouraged to flaunt their indiscretions in the faces of decent men and women?
