Britney Spears
Like Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears was a Disney-bred star. Unlike Cyrus, however, Spears was marketed to adults as well as teens.
Need evidence? Check her breakthrough video for 1999s
Baby One More Time, which exploits Catholic schoolgirl fetishes while declaring that shes not that innocent.
Need more evidence? Jeff Fenster, the A&R executive who signed one Britney Spears to Jive (R. Kellys label, coincidentally), once told a roomful of people at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas, that the soon-to-be pop star scored a record deal not because of her singing ability, but because of a photo.
The shot, said Fenster in 2006, showed a young Spears on a picnic bench with a puppy, and inspired Fenster to declare that “she looked like the sweet, all-American girl that you just wanted to defile and do bad things to.”
Spears was pegged to be 15 or 16 at the time she was signed. (Al Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
The photos of Jock Sturges and Sally Mann (1990s)
These two fine art photographers began to receive a world of criticism in the late 80s and early 90s for their artwork, often of young children, many of them nude of seminude.
Manns At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women turned some heads, but her 1992 work Immediate Family captured nude images of her own children, and was met with cries of exploitation and child pornography.
Similarly, Sturges photographs were attacked as porn masquerading as high art, and FBI agents raided his studio in 1990.
One of Mann’s photos is pictured at left. (AFP/Getty Images)
