Protestors at the #FreeBritney Termination Rally in in Los Angeles on Nov. 12, 2021. Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images.

Britney’s free, bitch.

Now what do we do? The question is, “what does Britney do?” Whatever she wants, I guess.

What if I don’t care?

Rendering: Adam Pardee/STAFF.

I mean, I have a 13-year-old daughter, whose self-esteem I worry about because, you know … 13, eighth grade … grabby boys, mean girls, etc. I also have a 19-year-old daughter, who by definition–her age and last name–makes me constantly worry she’ll leave for work one day and end up in a rented convertible speeding through the desert on her way to Las Vegas.

My eldest daughter lives halfway around the world and may be forgetting how to speak English and getting ready to marry a bullfighter for all I know.

Like Paulie Walnuts, I got my own problems. I don’t know Britney Spears. Why should I care? Why should anyone care?

It’s a question I ask every time I see protestors outside the courthouse, screaming to free Britney. Or writing think pieces about how her father and some lawyers have taken advantage of this poor kid–who, by the way, isn’t a kid anymore, but because of her upbringing, might as well be.

Britney Spears has more money and fame than I’ll ever imagine. She’s certainly better looking than me. She’s (maybe) a better dancer. So as I pondered this topic du jour, since a judge on Friday ended her conservatorship after 13 years, another thought occurred to me:

I just watched an interview with the mother of Kyle Rittenhouse–the now 18-year-old who last summer traveled across state lines to Kenosha, Wisconsin during anti-police violence unrest to … I don’t really know what he was trying to do; I guess protect the good people of Kenosha from a fictional terrorist organization. Rittenhouse shot and killed two people, and wounded another guy, and is now on trial for homicide.

I saw a clip of Fox News treat Rittenhouse’s mother like she was the grieving Virgin Mary the day after Easter, and immediately and automatically ran that scene through the brain filter I’ve been using the past few years: “What if that was a Black kid?”

As I pondered the answer, which is pretty obvious, I saw Britney Spears through a similar filter.

What if Britney Spears was a man?

Would she have spent 13 adult years having no control of her life because more fame than any of us can image finally resulted in some bizarre public behavior?

What if we didn’t freeze our ideas of her in 2000, when she was little more than a cute, blond white girl, who sang and danced on cue to entertain the masses, while seemingly not having any dangerous thoughts of her own?

Maybe she doesn’t have any thoughts of her own; we don’t know. We never had the chance to find out. But if her name was Bobby Spears and was in a boy band in 2000, we would’ve started calling her Robert by now and allowed her to evolve as a person, instead of deciding she was forever a girl who needed taking care of.

She was forever “not a girl, not yet a woman,” as her hit song announced 20 years ago, when the people managing her every move offered her up as a commodity in a weird, Lolita-style way, to all demographics willing to buy it. She was still a girl to the kids buying her records, but by then definitely something else to adults.

Is it a coincidence that, only now that she’s two weeks from turning 40, the endless stream of entertainment industry buzzards controlling her since she was a Mouseketeer are now willing to let go? She was legally frozen in her 20s, before her product shelf life expired.

The obvious comparison is, of course, her ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake, who has been allowed to grow up into an actor/musician/man whose work can be admired. Meanwhile, the girl formerly on his celebrity level has been in a holding pattern.

Were the things Spears did any “crazier” than what other men struggling with celebrity did at her age? Or was she just worth more to her handlers in a world where men are allowed–expected–to age gracefully after a few developmental bumps in the road, while women are still expected to be seen more than they’re heard?

We should all care, especially those of us with daughters. Because if they were sons–even in 2021–it’s pretty obvious they’d still have a better chance to become the people they should be.

Follow music critic Tony Hicks at Twitter.com/TonyBaloney1967.