Jessica Simpson can’t watch it. Jennifer Love Hewitt said it “hurt my heart”, and Paris Hilton suggested it clarified her own mistreatment. Drew Barrymore said it was familiar – when the world thought her crazy, she was stripped of autonomy, too. Framing Britney Spears , a documentary by The New York Times that examines the pop star’s court battle to regain control of her life, was released in February and many female celebrities are still publicly talking about it. The documentary not only exposed the media’s mistreatment of Spears, but also the toxic culture for many high-profile women in the late ’90s and 2000s in the US, Europe and Asia. The documentary is part of the trend of content revisiting big stories from the past with women at their centre ( I, Tonya , Truth and Lies , The Price of Gold , The Clinton Affair ). Many women are now speaking out about the misogyny they faced. US actress Hewitt said she was “hopeful” things were changing, but many doubt the change is radical enough. “In some ways, absolutely it’s better. In other ways, it’s perhaps worse,” says journalist Allison Yarrow, author of 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality . There’s recognition now that certain questions are inappropriate to ask, including whether someone is a virgin – a question Spears, Simpson and other teen stars repeatedly faced. It’s no longer acceptable to remark on the size of a woman’s breasts in an interview, at least not without the internet erupting in outrage. Yet female celebrities worldwide remain on the front lines of the world’s culture wars, balancing their own aspirations with their audience’s desires and society’s expectations, trying to navigate success in a culture that demands access to their bodies and – in many cases – their private lives. Indian actress Sonam Kapoor Ahuja recently told Cosmopolitan India that Bollywood expects women to “be a certain way, dress a certain way, and talk in a certain way to fit in”. Women should reject sexist films and projects , she argued. “Look at the way song lyrics or scripts are written about women … that needs to change. The way women are portrayed and talked about in the industry is not OK, and as women, we should not agree to work in those films because we are just harming ourselves.” For her part, Grammy Award-winning US singer Billie Eilish is known to avoid sexualisation and scrutiny by wearing loose-fitting clothes, and the preoccupation with her style shows what an anomaly she is. Hong Kong-Canadian actress-singer Joyce Cheng Yan-yee has been scathing about Hong Kong media’s obsession with female celebrities. “[Women in the industry] are always scrutinised for the way we look, for our shape, for our size, for the height of my nose, the shape of my face,” she said last year . “And I feel like it’s not as bad for males.” In South Korea, plastic surgery and dieting are widespread in the entertainment world, and female K-pop stars are known to have to watch their weight, with weigh-ins a part of life during the trainee process before debuting as a star. Women in the industry are regularly taken to task for their looks, by fans and the media industry alike, and the weight and change in appearance of female stars often leads to online hate. In 2019, solo singer Ailee appeared on the South Korean television show Video Star where she revealed her struggle. “When I gained weight, people say I gained so much, and now people say I’m too thin,” she said, as per Soompi’ s translation. “They tell me to do it in moderation, but I don’t know what their standard is. It’s so difficult. At that time, I got depressed. It was so hard for me. Being the best at singing is my goal, but as I focused on my weight, I developed problems with my voice. I was diagnosed with vocal nodules, and treating it was difficult. I’m not a model, but I had to maintain my figure like a model.” Experts say there is also far more demand for content now than decades ago, making celebrities more vulnerable. While the growth of social media means public figures no longer need to be mediated through traditional mainstream news outlets, newer platforms come with their own perils: audiences feel an even greater entitlement to access and women become easier targets for abuse. US model and television personality Chrissy Teigen recently left Twitter, saying: “This no longer serves me as positively as it serves me negatively”. While the world debates past culpability, experts point out the way the public continues to treat high-profile women cannot be ignored. “In each case, the shameless shaming that was aimed at these women when their stories were breaking is being retroactively revisited, rethought, and reframed with new insights that came from #MeToo, anti-bullying campaigns, and a general – I hope – increase in enlightenment about gender in America,” says Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University in the US. Much of what makes people gasp at the Spears documentary are the questions she was asked: US journalist Ed McMahon asking a 10-year old Spears after a performance, “do you have a boyfriend?”; US broadcaster Diane Sawyer asking Spears for her reaction to the wife of a Maryland politician wanting to “shoot her” for being a bad influence on her daughters. Hewitt said it took her years to understand that the questions she was expected to answer, especially about her body, were wrong. “For some reason, in my brain, I was able to just go, ‘OK, well, I guess they wouldn’t be asking if it was inappropriate,” she said in an interview with entertainment outlet Vulture . “Now that I’m older, I think, ‘Gosh, I wish that I had known … so I could have defended myself somehow or just not answered those questions.’ I laughed it off a lot of the time, and I wish maybe I hadn’t.” Experts say these questions were completely normal at the time. Now, most celebrities and public figures have millions of followers on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok, platforms that allow them to tell their own stories – or, at the very least, better control their messages. Jessica Simpson, who was frequently body shamed at the height of her fame, said in an interview with People magazine she “spent so many years beating myself up for an unrealistic body standard that made me feel like a failure all of the time … I don’t think people always realised that there was a human being, a beating heart and working eyes with actual feelings behind those headlines and that words can hurt and stay with you for a lifetime”. Experts say it’s a useful cultural exercise to think critically about the ways in which the public let many female celebrities down. But these reflections are just the start. Bitch author Yarrow says much of the conversation has focused on white women and needs to expand to include women of colour. After the Spears documentary, people remembered singer Justin Timberlake’s past behaviour towards Spears, but Janet Jackson fans also said he owed her an apology after their infamous Super Bowl halftime show performance in 2004 when he exposed her breast on live television. He eventually apologised to them both. “The Britney Spears documentary opens up a conversation for the way that women were treated in the ’90s, for conversations about fixating on body image and little else,” Yarrow adds. “And it is exciting to hear these other folks who experienced the same treatment speaking about it publicly. But it’s only really the beginning.” Yarrow cautions women who feel complicit in these stars’ mistreatment against blaming themselves. It’s much bigger, she said, than any one interviewer, comedian, fan or troll. “Let’s look at some of the structural misogyny and racism that allowed women to be covered in the news media in this way,” she says, “that allows them to still be covered in the news media in this way, and that has produced this next stage of public identity in social media that allows women to continue to be harassed and abused.”