As a celebrity pop icon spirals downward, how are we the viewers implicated in the inevitable crash? Brittney Spears, unlike her predecessor and self-proclaimed icon Madonna, has become a stage for contemporary societal projections about femininity, morality and motherhood. Whereas Madonna deliberately controlled her public image, Brittney seems molded by the media, forced to carry the judgments and perceptions of an increasingly neo-conservative media landscape. While Brittney might have once straddled the virgin-whore dichotomy, she now consistently falls victim to our desires to punish and condemn the slut, the bad mother and the reckless female. In fact, the judicial system seems to be caught up in these public persecutions of the bad-girl. As seen in her much ridiculed MTV Video Music Awards performance, Brittany has become the screen upon which we can attach our own fantasies of destroying the misbehaving woman. How might her narrative of failure enact our own social perceptions about the possibilities of independent womanhood?