When I was much younger, I prided myself on not being a follower, despite adopting prevalent beliefs simply because that was the opinion of the people I looked up to. I would mock fans of Justin Bieber and One Direction and profess my hatred for them. I had no reason to dislike them or their music, but I wanted to feel special amongst the teenaged girls around me.

It felt good to be the only 13-year-old girl in my grade who could confidently say that she had no attraction whatsoever to Harry Styles, not that I had put any thought into that. I knew it would upset my peers, so I said it. It was only recently that I came to the realization that I hated for the purpose of hating things.

Pop culture is easy to mock and pick apart. Why? Because I wanted to feel unique. I wanted to feel important: intelligent. That was the curse of the early to mid 2000s. An undying loathing of people born of a need to stand out, and, funnily enough, fit in. And one such victim of that wave was, and is, Britney Spears.

Undoubtedly, you know who the princess of pop is. She ran the music scene of the early 2000s until the early 2010s. Airwaves ran rampant with “…Baby One More Time”, “Toxic”, and “Circus”. Even if you don’t recognize the titles, you’ve heard pieces of the songs. Spears was the cultural zeitgeist: fashion, music, and trends incarnate.

Every minute of every day, she had a lens on her. They followed her clothes, her headspace, her relationships: everything was pawned off to prying eyes. But they had no innocent intentions in the early 2000s.

Rather, the media of the time wanted to eviscerate her, live on television. Article after article followed on how Spears was losing her grip on reality. Her mistakes were made into country-wide controversies, for no other reason than people fed on her lapses. The media was famously obsessed with her body. Many interviews have resurfaced of reporters asking about her breasts and weight. But America’s favorite pastime was questioning her virtue.

Spears highly publicized relationship with Justin Timberlake saw her called all forms of promiscuous after it fell apart. Timberlake’s accusations of her infidelity only mounted the growing wave of animosity. Spears was enemy number one, simply because she was massively famous.

And it never stopped, despite the insistence of modern media. Every piece of Spears life is dissected for our viewing pleasure. For the past couple of years, Spears has been taking pictures of herself scantily clad. She cites her recently ended conservatorship as the reason, as she had little control over what she could do with her body during that time.

What are standard Instagram posts are reduced to disturbed images by critics. And even the proponents are not free from criticism. Why does every image warrant a new article? Why can’t we spare Spears, who has frequently lambasted the suffocating social scrutiny, more prying eyes? Why must her every action warrant an investigation? And what is everyone looking for?

Britney Spears’ new book, The Woman in Me, was released on October 24 of this year. It is the memoir organizing the height of her career, and life, into neat chapters. She discusses the traumas she endured, and she names the hands that dealt them.

The media cannot help themselves but latch onto their favorite target. The public debates her actions and image. But is that the purpose of Spears writing such a book? She wants to be heard: not from the perspective of a new article, but from her own words. We’ve denied Spears the woman in her for a long time now. Maybe we should give her the basic decency to let her live.