It's no longer 'cool' to mock Britney Spears, but back when her film 'Crossroads' premiered the sexism was downright abusive

• People are reexamining the treatment of Britney Spears after a new documentary.
• But women who grew up with Spears aren't satisfied by this latest societal reckoning.
• Now millennials are in positions of power and we're seeing a new era of feminist storytelling.

My Twitter feed was suddenly flooded last week, each short message highlighting the mistreatment of Britney Spears.

I felt a tightening in myself; a hesitance to reopen a wound that I had long ago buried somewhere between my heart and my gut. I couldn't immediately bring myself to watch "Framing Britney Spears," the New York Times documentary about the pop singer and a culture that's steeped in sexism, knowing that I had lived through a version of it already as a young woman.

Now Justin Timberlake has apologized to Spears and Janet Jackson; Pitbull is yelling "Free Britney!" at a press event; and "I Am Sorry Britney" trended on Twitter the weekend of the doc's premiere.

But those of us, especially women, who grew up idolizing Spears and witnessed her public destruction throughout our teenage years, are far from satisfied.

It's no longer "cool" to mock Spears or her legion of one-time tween fans. We have years of societal awareness, feminist activism such as the #MeToo movement, and documentaries like the recent "Framing Britney Spears" to thank for that. But when it comes to moving forward, there's simply too many hollow admissions of culpability and not enough unpacking of exactly how we got to this point.

If we zoom in on Spears' Hollywood career, it's not hard to draw a line between misogynistic teen movie franchises like "American Pie," which captured how society treated young girls at the time, and the scornful treatment of Spears along with her 2002 movie "Crossroads," the first screenplay written by Shonda Rhimes.

In the early 2000s, casual misogyny was baked into our culture. Nowhere is that more apparent than 'American Pie.'

"American Pie," the 1999 raunchy R-rated teen movie, felt like an inescapable rite of passage for kids like me who entered high school in the early 2000s. You'd have thought that movie reinvented comedy and sex at the same time, the way it was praised to high hell.

The movie follows four high school boys, who make a pact to lose their virginity by the end of their senior year with the rule that it has to be "valid, consensual sex - no prostitutes."

But the only takeaway to be found in "American Pie" (other than the apparent timelessness of potty humor) is that teenage boys are not only desperate for sex, but that they're owed that sex from hesitant young women, who need to be coerced or tricked into it.

The only two girls in the movie who are overly enthusiastic about sex (Alyson Hannigan and Natasha Lyonne's characters) are portrayed as annoying or undesirable - and certainly not the first choice for any of the boys' pursuits.

"American Pie" is credited with reviving the sex-comedy genre, which you can see reflected in subsequent popular movies like "EuroTrip," "Van Wilder," and to a less-harmful degree in 2007's "Superbad."

The same year "American Pie" premiered, spawning its own mega-franchise of movies, Spears' first album "...Baby One More Time" debuted. She was only 18 years old, but one male critic at the time was happy to label the former "Mickey Mouse Club" star's aesthetic as "kindergarten cutesiepie cack" while telling her to "grow up, girl. Quick!"

Another male critic called the music studio where "...Baby One More Time" was recorded a "Lolita-pop doll house," and said the hit single was good at "effectively transforming this ex-Mouseketeer born in a tiny Louisiana town into a growling jailbait dynamo."

And that's just a peek into the treatment of Spears' music. When she dared to dip a toe into Hollywood, the scorn only deepened.

'Crossroads' was a coming-of-age movie about female friendship, at a time when Spears was also growing into her own. Critics hated it.

"Crossroads" premiered in 2002, just a few years after "American Pie." The movie followed Spears' character, Lucy, as she rekindled childhood friendships, fell in love, and had sex for the first time along with writing and performing music.

"Crossroads" was almost immediately banished to the discount-DVD bin, dismissed by critics and audiences alike as cheesy and hollow.

One male movie critic, Mick LaSalle, happened to review both "American Pie" in 1999 and then "Crossroads" in 2002.

LaSalle revered the former for its "warm spirit and respect for the characters." He found one scene, where Jason Biggs' character secretly films a foreign exchange student undressing in his room, and intentionally broadcasting the live feed to his friends (who in turn accidentally send the link to their entire student body) as "a long, delightful and embarrassing scene."

There's no mention in the review of the young woman being violated, nor of the fact that she is somehow the sole person punished for the "event" when she's sent back to Europe offscreen.

But LaSalle found "Crossroads" fascinating, not for its exploration of teenage girlhood and sex, but because "there has always been a disconnect between Spears' offstage and onstage personae. When not singing, she cultivates the image of a scantily clad but chaste young lady. But onstage she acts like every sailor's pal when the fleet's in."

The Razzies, a parody awards show that honors the "worst" in cinema, introduced a new category called the "Most Flatulent Teen-Targeted Movie" and promptly nominated "Crossroads" for the trophy. Spears went on to win the "Worst Actress" award that year. Managing to become even more tone-deaf in retrospect, the Razzies also nominated Rhimes for worst screenplay, failing to see the "Bridgerton" executive producer and "Grey's Anatomy" creator's trademark shine in her first-ever movie script.

Although the Rotten Tomatoes score for "Crossroads" sits depressingly low, after rewatching it a couple of years ago when it was available online (now you can't find the movie available to rent or stream on any major platform) I found it holds up against my glowing memories.

The movie still shimmers with that Rhimes quality that's also apparent in her later works, such as "Grey's," "How To Get Away with Murder" and "Scandal." Like all of Rhimes' writing, "Crossroads" presents women's friendships and ambitions as meaningful and worthy of the Hollywood treatment.

"Crossroads" was paired with Spears' 2001 hit, "Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman," a ballad in which Spears quite literally asks for people to leave her alone while she tries to sort out what growing up in the spotlight means. Part of the lyrics reads, "All I need is time/A moment that is mine/While I'm in between."

In the movie, Spear's character reads the lyrics aloud to the man she's falling in love with. By the end of the film, she's singing it on stage during an audition for a record company, announcing herself as an adult ready to take on the world in her own way and in her own time.

Not enough people were listening to Spears then, but now millennials are coming into their own power and the tides are shifting.

For many millennials, Spears was a beacon of unattainable cool. Listening to her albums made us feel powerful, with anthems like "Stronger" and "Overprotected" telling us we could forge our own paths.

Imagine the confusion and hurt so many young people felt when we saw the world tearing Spears down, saying that she wasn't enough and she was too much all at once.

Now Spears is no longer the butt of the joke, nor is she in the center of a media circus 24-7. The world has largely settled into the realization that what was happening to Spears at such a young age was anything but normal. We saw that through paparazzi photos of her, showing her mental health issues, and later the conservatory legal situation with her father, which grants him and a lawyer control over the singer's financial and personal assets.

What's different now is that Gen-Xers and millennials, who grew up with Spears, "Crossroads," and "American Pie" are now in positions of power to speak out against misogynistic culture and how it bleeds into what we consume.

In the days after "Framing Britney Spears" premiered, when Twitter was suddenly alight with compassion for the pop star, I saw a lot of statements akin to "we were all complicit" coming from people who were much older than me in the early 2000s.

That kind of passive admission of wrongdoing is frankly insulting to those of us who were literal children at the time and knew better than to participate in Spears' tear down. It's even more insulting to hear the "we were all complicit" line from people who absolutely had the capacity to know the damage they were inflicting and indulged in it anyway.

I'm not a girl anymore and neither are the then-young Spears' fans who knew the public's treatment of her was wrong. Now we're fighting for our voices to be heard, whether its with bylines of our own at the same publications that once gleefully bashed Spears, or in the same Hollywood systems that once glorified "American Pie."

I'm particularly grateful for creators like Issa Rae, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Michaela Coel, and Emerald Fennell, millennial storytellers who are writing incredibly rich, funny, creative and thoughtful TV shows and movies that reflect the complicated internal lives of women, particularly in the face of continual sexism and racism.

In an interview with Vulture's Angelica Jade Bastién, Fennell (the writer-director of 2020's "Promising Young Woman," which centers on woman who pretends to be drunk only to lure men home with her) spoke about her obsession with turning the idea of being feminine on its head.

"This idea that just because you love Britney Spears doesn't mean you couldn't cut someone's face off," she said. "Just because you wear pink doesn't mean you're not filled with murderous rage."

Our rage is ready for its time in the spotlight. The reckoning is only just getting started.