On the cover of the highly-anticipated Happier Than Ever, Billie Eilish’s sophomore album, her hair is bottle-blonde, and a single tear rolls down her porcelain cheek as she gazes into the distance in a Julie London-kind of way. It’s quite different from the nightmarish cover of her debut album. But the cover was not the most shocking change during this new era: her major shift in image and aesthetic has raised eyebrows and deep concern. In the time of what seems to be the tail-end of Britney Spears’ conservatorship, is Billie’s venture into the world of corsets, blonde hair, and sexy photoshoots the beginning of a new kind of pop star exploitation?
Diving beneath the surface of Eilish’s new image reveals a much more complicated identity — one of sexual politics, choice feminism, and a career trajectory that is reminiscent of early Britney Spears. The true mark of the beginning of her Happier Than Ever era was the British Vogue photoshoot released in early May in which Eilish exchanged her usual baggy chic-look for a classic pinup look. I, along with the rest of the world, was stunned when I first saw Billie Eilish’s British Vogue photoshoot because, duh, she is stunning, but also because it was so unexpected that it surpassed shocking and landed in Internet-breaking territory. I truly believe the inspiration behind the corset-and-latex look was much more complicated than a mere act of empowerment, especially considering how the hyper-sexualization of underage girls gets rebranded as empowerment on behalf of the artist.
After scrolling through the photos, I immediately thought of the piece Tavi Gevinson wrote for The Cut on how the documentary Framing Britney Spears claimed Spears to be in complete control of her image as a young girl, particularly on set of the Rolling Stone photoshoot by Dave LaChapelle, which shows a then-sixteen year old Spears in an unbuttoned cardigan and booty shorts. Gevinson argues that in no way was Spears in control, especially seeing as she was underage at the time of the shoot, and that this claim was used to maintain a carefully constructed narrative surrounding Spears throughout the documentary — one of the rise of the power and control she worked for and her loss of both power and control over her assets, career, and personal life. While Spears and Eilish are two very different artists coming from different backgrounds and each emerging at very different sociocultural moments, they have both been the focus of media scrutiny and their bodies the focus of public obsession. Gevinson’s take on the documentary can thus be loosely applied to Eilish as well.
Gevinson points out that “young women are disadvantaged by age and gender [and] youth does carry currency, which can be mistaken for power. If you are a woman, however, this currency is not on your terms.” Later, she reiterates a piece of advice from writer Anna Wiener who told Gevinson, “Confidence is not a vector of power.” (Confidence is not a vector of power. Seventeen year old me is shaking in her Doc Martens). Throughout the Vogue article, Eilish assures the reader that she was the one making the calls and visualizing the result. But something about the shoot doesn’t feel as empowering as Eilish declares it to be. For months following the release, I couldn’t help but wonder: is it possible to find true empowerment solely in the way we present ourselves to the world in a culture where this approach to women’s empowerment simultaneously satisfies the male gaze? In other words, can an alternative end be achieved by using the same means? And, in broadening this curiosity to concerns of sex, race, and class, I was reminded of Audre Lorde’s declaration that forever rings true: the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Eilish’s claim of empowerment suddenly feels empty.
In 2001, Spears released “I’m a Slave 4 U,” officially leaving behind her cheeky pigtail days and adopting a sexier, more mature look. Of the album, Billboard raved, “If 1999’s…Baby One More Time showcased her girl next door likability with a schoolgirl uniform and pigtails, and Oops!… I Did It Again (2000) found her slowly chipping away at her perceived purity with videos featuring chair-straddling dance solos, then Britney (2001) was the culmination of those bubblegum-wrapped eras bursting once and for all, as she proved she really was ‘not that innocent.’”
Even the production on the single was distinctly different from her previous hits, both “…Baby One More Time” and “Oops!…I Did it Again.” It was breathier, darker, older. She was 19 and ready to shed her Disney image for a more mature, adult image. It worked. In the midst of Spears’s recent court hearings, I’ve been thinking about how “Slave 4 U” was interpreted by the world as a young woman claiming autonomy over her body while in reality every aspect of her life and career were being controlled by her team and her family, perhaps implicitly, but regardless, strings were being pulled. I believe Eilish is in her Slave-4-U era. (See “Oxytocin” — it’s her “Slave 4 U”).
The timing is what makes the change in her image raise concern: right as she becomes legal, she does a complete 180 with her look. We all know that being a teenager involves a whole lot of identity changes and trying on different ideas, attitudes, and styles. But what makes me question the drive behind this change is the timing that parallels her eighteenth birthday, her insistence that she is in control, and the trend of grooming young girls in the entertainment industry. Her enthusiasm from the interview did not translate onto the photos. (An episode of the podcast Nymphet Alumni discusses how her signature dead-eyed look in the Vogue photoshoot stirred up feelings of unsettlement). If we don’t take Spears’ case seriously and begin to reexamine the way our legal system, entertainment industry, and social norms are all funnels into the pockets of the wealthy, as well as pillars of certain avenues of social order, we will fail young artists like Eilish.
Both what Eilish represents and the narrative she is sharing with the world can be interpreted as a modern example of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, a story about belief versus knowledge. Eilish, like most all celebrities, is a figure who represents an entire array of political, cultural, and sexual implications. She tells us what she believes is empowering, which is an echo of what Western culture is currently fixated on as feminist, empowering, and groundbreaking, and we generally believe it. But it’s not entirely her fault. Gevinson says, “[Young women’s] capacity to perpetuate these standards doesn’t mean they are not also victims of these standards. If anything, it shows how girls’ bodies and sexuality are so deeply regulated by a society that despises women and fetishizes youth” (Gevinson).
Even in my best moments where I feel powerful — be it at the club, walking down the street, or in the company of a date — there remains a power imbalance that cannot be overridden by confidence. Capitalism and patriarchy grant women the illusion of power while still wielding power over the ways in which women choose to show their bodies and what women choose to do with their bodies. Again: the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house.
Eilish proves that she knows her way around the body positivity conversation. In the Vogue interview, Laura Snape writes, “Eilish predicts one side of the response to the shoot: ‘If you’re about body positivity, why would you wear a corset? Why wouldn’t you show your actual body?’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘My thing is that I can do whatever I want.’” and there’s the catch. Women — more often than not middle to upper class, white, thin, cisgender women — can make their own choices based on nothing but their own intention and with only their own health, safety, and desire concerned. “I can do whatever I want” may as well be the anthem for neoliberal choice feminism. It’s like reveling in the light when we haven’t quite made it out of the cave — we’ve only hit a ray of sunlight coming from the entrance.
Snapes goes on to say, “Confidence is her only gospel,’ she says, yet that intent has been spun into ‘a lot of weird miscommunications’. She clears it up: ‘It’s all about what makes you feel good. If you want to get surgery, go get surgery. If you want to wear a dress that somebody thinks that you look too big wearing, f**k it — if you feel like you look good, you look good.’” In another article about the photoshoot, British Vogue’s style director Dena Giannini said of Eilish, “This generation-defining artist is a woman who knows what she wants. And what she wanted was ‘something she’d never done before… something that embraced her gorgeous and strong femininity.’” It is unclear if those are Eilish’s words or the designer’s; regardless, the images of Billie are meant to be examples of “gorgeous and strong femininity” which subsequently equates the cisgender female body with femininity, eliminating other forms of femininity from the conversation and adding to the mainstream, transphobic, Euro-American discourse around bodies. Additionally, ideas of what is considered empowerment for women that is perpetuated by the media is, and has always been, constructed by cis white men, and consequently will not threaten the structure of patriarchy that maintains male control.
That’s not to say that modesty will save us either. Using women’s bodies as vehicles towards liberation cannot be successful because it still commodifies bodies and sells them, and the messages they represent, back to the world. It’s a never-ending exchange of cultural meaning imposed onto the body that leaves us running in circles around an extremely narrow and white supremacist vision of what it means to be an empowered woman. So how do the historically powerless suddenly wield collective power by way of posing in latex, corsets, or Skims Shapewear?
Referring to young Britney Spears as she is portrayed in the documentary, Gevinson writes, “But it is absurd to discuss her image…as though there was not an apparatus behind it, as though she existed in a vacuum where she was figuring out her sexuality on her own terms, rather than in an economy where young women’s sexuality is rapidly commodified until they are old enough to be discarded.” Similarly, Eilish’s sexuality is being commodified and branded as empowerment. But look at Britney today: she is a pop icon with a net worth of nearly $70 billion yet has no control whatsoever of her professional nor personal life. How has her body empowered her?
If we are ever to exit the cave, we must get past the idea that being hot is the key to our liberation (no matter how badly some of us wish this were the case) and instead begin to critique the messages we receive from any kind of public figure, including our beloved pop stars. Especially because messages many people support, like individual empowerment, are rooted in ideologies that really aren’t that innocent.
