“[Britney] Spears, who is thirty-nine has spent the past thirteen years living under a conservatorship, a legal structure in which a person’s personal, economic, and legal decision-making power is ceded to others. Called a guardianship in most states, the arrangement is intended for people who cannot take care of themselves. Since the establishment of Spears’s conservatorship, she has released four albums, headlined a global tour that grossed a hundred and thirty-one million dollars, and performed for four years in a hit Las Vegas residency.” — The New Yorker, July 3, 2021
By order of the Court, you are hereby notified that as a result of a petition you were not made aware of and a brief secretive hearing at which you were not present, you are henceforth under the control of a conservatorship.
The Court has deemed your conservatorship necessary and unavoidable because you have failed to meet the newly established “Britney standard.” That is, you are not doing better in life than Britney freaking Spears, the beloved music icon and world-famous performer who has accomplished far more than any jackass with a law degree, but whom the Court has repeatedly determined is not fit to control her own affairs independent of a conservatorship.
As a conservatee, your financial and personal affairs are hereby placed in the care of a court-appointed conservator who you are now paying to control your life. This Court finds that you have never kissed Madonna or reinvigorated pop music with a string of all-time bops, and it is therefore highly unlikely that your faculties exceed those of six-time platinum album recording artist and early 2000s cultural phenomenon Britney freaking Spears.
Britney launched a world-class music career as a teenager that influenced a generation of pop stars. She endured a painful and personal legal crisis for over a decade while continuing to perform at the top of her field, raise two children, and look good in low-cut jeans. This has not impressed the Court enough for us to end her conservatorship. Therefore you — a person with college debt and only ninety-two followers on Instagram — have virtually no chance of challenging our under-regulated and overreaching control.
You may, of course, petition to end this conservatorship at any time, if we let you, which we won’t. We won’t let Britney go, and she is a goddamn goddess and once-in-a-lifetime entertainer with a dedicated global fanbase who advocates for her freedoms to be returned. If you can’t drum up an even greater magnitude of public support and media attention than Britney freaking Spears can, you do not meet the standard set by this Court.
That is, of course, unless you are a non-disabled white man.
If you are a non-disabled white man, you can disregard this notice. Go ahead and wipe your ass with it — it doesn’t apply to you. The Britney standard applies to women, people of color, and disabled people only. Non-disabled white men can still be as dysfunctional as they want and enjoy all of their constitutionally protected freedoms, just as they always have.
If you are a non-disabled white man, then have a nice day, sir, and remember, if you ever want to place your partner or daughter under a conservatorship in order to crush her life and leech off of her financially for an indefinite period, we made sure that is something very easy for you to do. After all, we even did it to Britney freaking Spears.