Perspective: Britney Spears and Madonna, 20 years after that kiss

It’s been 20 years since Britney Spears and Madonna shocked the world by sharing a lingering kiss at the MTV Music Video Awards on Aug. 28, 2003.

It was a scene that was replicated at Spears’ wedding last year.

That marriage, Spears’ third, is now over; multiple news outlets reported last week that her husband filed for divorce.

That, and news that the Spears-themed musical “Once Upon a One More Time” is closing on Broadway (The New York Times called it a “costly misfire”) comes at the same time that Madonna is about to launch her international “Celebration” tour that had to be postponed because of what her manager called “a serious bacterial infection.”

It’s not been a good year for either the princess of pop or the queen. And the past 20 years, for that matter, has at times seemed like a race to the bottom in terms of the women’s increasingly cringey behavior. And it’s not just critics saying this, but fans.

Spears has taken to posting low-production-value videos on social media in which she dances and spins in bikinis and lingerie.

As USA Today reported, “Britney Spears said she is ‘shocked’ after her split with actor Sam Asghari but that it’s ‘nobody’s business’ in a video post on Instagram Saturday where the singer dances in a neon green bikini bottoms, a black crop top and tall black boots to the song ‘If’ by Janet Jackson.”

That follows a series of similar videos she’s posted on X, causing more than one follower to say they hope she’s doing OK. “Hope you are in a good mental place,” one said.

Spears was released in 2021 from a 13-year conservatorship that she fought to end. Since then, her strange social media posts, some nude or topless, have repeatedly made headlines, including an Instagram post on Sunday that showed her cavorting with several men and at one point asking “Is this recording?”

It’s been a sad, strange show for fans of the one-time Disney child star, and at one point, after Spears took down her Instagram account, some fans asked police to do a welfare check at her home, Harper’s Bazaar reported. She later said that her privacy had been invaded.

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Meanwhile, after her hospitalization in June, Madonna has been posting fairly sedate content compared to what she was writing on social media earlier this year, after she was savaged on social media for how she looked at the Grammy Awards.

Like Spears, she has made social media posts that have made even ardent fans wish that she would do more self-editing — among them, a video of her sitting naked in a bathtub while philosophizing about COVID-19.

“Artists are here to disturb the peace,” Madonna wrote on Twitter last October, and she’s been doing that since her first album was released in 1983. But social media allows avant-garde entertainers an instant audience with none of the traditional gatekeepers of propriety, and it doesn’t always enhance their image.

Last year, she had some posts taken down by Instagram for violating the platform’s nudity policy, and other posts have been described in headlines as creepy, eerie and weird. In December, she’d posted on Instagram a photo of her face covered in a black-lace balaclava and biting a riding crop, prompting one commenter to plead, “How about bake some Christmas cookies? Throw on a nice sweater and jeans and watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” with your children.”

For people who have grown up listening to Madonna and Spears — the operative words here being “grown up” — their seeming lack of maturity and growth is troubling. “You’re 50, right?” one commenter wrote in response to a twirling Spears video. Actually, she’s 41, and Madonna is 64 and about to begin what looks like a grueling European tour. Kudos to her for that, and here’s hoping that Spears can find peace and contentment after the shock of her divorce and all the difficulties that came before it.

But we can wish them well and enjoy their music and still wish they’d stay off social media until things settle down. Sages say “never meet your heroes,” and there’s truth to that, not only in person, but also in the fake intimacy proffered by Instagram.