Christina Aguilera remembers what it was like to grow up in a music industry that made her feel hypersexualized as a teen.
The pop titan made her debut in 1999 with her single “Genie in a Bottle” when she was 18 years old. Despite its controversial and innuendo-filled lyrics, the track went on to become a commercial success and put her on the map as the next teen pop idols alongside her former Mickey Mouse Club castmate, Britney Spears, who had just debuted with “Baby One More Time” the year prior.
But it didn’t take long for the singer to feel the weight from her critics at the time. During a 1999 Rolling Stone interview, she noted the double standards between her and her male contemporaries—which included NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys.
“Britney and I show a little tummy and it’s like, ‘Oh, my God,’” Aguilera said at the time. “We’ve both been called bad influences by some critics, but NSYNC or Backstreet will get onstage – and I love those guys to death – but they’ll do repeated pelvic thrusts to an audience of prepubescent girls, and no one says anything.”
Fast forward to 2024, Paper Magazine’s Justin Moran asked the 5-time Grammy winner about the cultural obsession over youth and innocence in the early aughts.
“It’s inappropriate and you’d get canceled for it,” Aguilera told Moran. “People are being held accountable now in a way that they were never before.”
Expanding on her point, the singer says that writing her 2002 magnum opus album, Stripped, which featured the Redman-assisted “Dirrty,” was important to reclaim her artistic identity.
“It definitely was a time to hypersexualize the little girl playing innocent thing. That's why ‘Dirrty’ was so important to me,” she said. “I hated feeling like I had to play both sides of the coin in a way that I wasn't comfortable with and in a way that I felt was inauthentic.”
She continued, “I'm not trying to be cutesy for nobody, I need to rough this up, whether you like it or not. As I said, I was surrounded by a lot of older males, it was a different time. But it's definitely an environment to this day I don't like being around: the macho male gaze. I just can't do it, it's a really uncomfortable place for me to be. A lot of people can stomach that, but I'm just not that girl.”
Aguilera doesn’t resent her self-titled debut album, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s 200 album chart and went on to sell 14 million copies worldwide as of 2020, per ABC News. She credits the LP for giving her “a platform and a fanbase” and teaching her some valuable lessons along the way.
“I was taught many lessons with [my first album], not only about myself and where I wanted to find joy in music, but when you have that level of success so early on there's so much disappointment that comes because people change around you,” Aguilera said.
She continued, “I was surrounded by a lot of male figures, where I constantly heard things you don't need to hear. I was caught in all of that and learned a lot early on to create ‘Fighter.’ Even ‘Dirrty,’ like stop with your ideals of me being in this little bubble of being sexy, but not too sexy. Be sweet, but not too sweet. Get all these ideals off me.”
“I'm 21, I’m going out to clubs and having fun with my dancers. You work so hard when you're in that world of having multiple charting hits and you're on this wave,” she added. “You're in such a blur of a schedule that you can't even think straight. It was a lot and it all went into the artist that I was going to become.”