It's Nude-ney, Bitch

Over the course of the last 24 hours, Britney Spears published three carousels (as Instagram calls them) or photo dumps (as regular people call them) of herself nude, holding her boobs with a heart over her vagina. Nude photos are not new to Spears’s Instagram feed, appearing with some frequency since her conservatorship was lifted last November. As of this morning, the trio of carousels has, by my count, though I’m no mathematician, twelve nude photos, the densest volume (so far?) on her page.

For the longest time, the greatest thing any of us hoped we would see was a celebrity nude, but now the tides have turned. Though Spears’s Instagram comments are often populated with sentiments like “nudeney!” or “slayney!” or even “oop!... she did it again!” the comments section on this recent slew took a scolding tone. “Get help,” one person writes, while another says, “This must be embarrassing for her sons.” Dozens of comments read, “Stop,” or “That’s enough.”

One long comment, in particular, gets at the crux of the matter, which is how complicated it seems to be for some of the #FREEBRITNEY folks to accept every aspect of her liberation: “I absolutely love Britney and total team Britney but I don’t want to see this kind of stuff on my feed. Yet alone my kids… luckily they don’t follow her. This isn’t what we need on here. And I’m all for women empowerment so please don’t come at me. There must be a line and this is over the line…”

For those expanding on their “stop” or “enough” or “why” comments on Spears’s Instagram, it is easy and quick to bring up either her children or their children or her future child (Spears’s captions specify these photos were taken before her current pregnancy). One of the major talking points around Spears’s conservatorship last fall was that she wanted her to get her IUD removed in order to have another child. It perhaps became easier to empathize with her as a would-be mother than a woman living under strict regulation — not that that’s come up anywhere else recently or anything. But escaping the frying pan of conservatorship into the fire of modest domesticity hardly sounds like freedom. If she wants to post nudes, let her post nudes. If she wants to post twelve of them, well, whatever. Imagine liking your body enough to post a nude photo of it a dozen times –– bet it feels good!

If Spears’s nude photo dumping is baffling to anyone, it is baffling because her whole Instagram presence is baffling. Overlong captions, confusing dance videos, provocative photos –– this is the fabric of Spears’s social media, and truly no one else’s. Or, to quote the comment that sums it all up best: “Beautiful beautiful, but why..???… and so often ..??”