Christina Aguilera seems to have subtly responded to Britney Spears’s comments about her backup dancers’ bodies by unfollowing her fellow pop star on Instagram.
On Monday, September 12, Spears posted a line attributed to comic Rodney Dangerfield (Instagram is notoriously, uh, generous when it comes to quote attribution, but that’s neither here nor there) that says, “I found there was only one way to look thin: hang out with fat people.” This is, at best, a dated observation (I mean…yeah, if you stand next to a pale person you might look tan? What’s the punch line?), and not a particularly cool message for Brit to spread, but it’s her caption that people feel stepped over the line.
“I wish I could have chosen the nannies for my children … my dancers … I mean if I had Christina Aguilera’s dancers I would have looked extremely small 💃💃💃… I mean why not talk about it ?? Don’t you think my confidence would have been a bit better if I could choose where I lived, ate, whom I called on the phone, dated and who was on stage with me !!! It’s hard sometimes now I see how much of my womanhood was stripped away at that time and every person sat back and didn’t say a thing !!! Anyways … I will be here talking bout things people NEVER talked about 🙄🙄🙄 !!!,” she wrote, alluding to her decade-plus under a conservator-ship that saw her headlining shows she had basically no control over.
It’s worth noting that Spears’s weight—her whole body in fact—was constantly remarked upon during her heyday. As she sang in “Piece Of Me,” “I’m Mrs. She’s Too Big Now She’s Too Thin.” So it’s understandable that she thinks telling her own side of the story about how she wanted to present herself and how she might have staged her shows in a way that she felt was most flattering (and maybe even inclusive? Hard to tell) is par for the course. But the line comes off as tone-deaf and pretty shaming toward Aguilera’s dancers, like they are props whose size is their most important trait rather than artists performing a really demanding job. As one of the top comments says, “Body-shaming others is not the move.”
In response, the “Genie in a Bottle” singer unfollowed Spears’s account, according to Page Six.
Hopefully, Spears can find a way to vent her frustrations without adding any negativity to this already difficult subject!
–Glamour–
