The year was 2002, and a young Justin Timberlake was ready to dive deep into solo stardom after years of sharing it with the wider vocal range of JC Chasez in *NSYNC and Britney Spears’ incomparable fame in the tabloids. Producer Pharrell Williams entrusted him with beats Michael Jackson had rejected. Manager Johnny Wright packaged him as a white boy from the South who could sing and dance like Usher and managed to make that time a teenage NSYNC fan sued him for assault disappear from public consciousness completely. Everything was going to go smoothly.
Except it didn’t. Timberlake’s debut single, Like I Love You, failed to crack the top ten on the Billboard Hot 100. Its parent album, Justified, sold less in its first week of sales than NSYNC’s last release. Mind you, Timberlake’s numbers were perfectly respectable. But they were not the numbers that would make him a solo superstar, nor were they the numbers he, and most importantly, Jive Records, wanted. So, Timberlake and his team took the radio-friendly, R&B-lite pop Spears diss track Cry Me a River, which leads us to the unfortunate (generous wording) nature of the plot of its music video.
The video is rather simple: it follows Timberlake’s scorned loved character as he commits a variety of felonies associated with post-separation abuse. He stalks his former partner (styled to be an obvious stand-in for Spears), waiting for her to leave her home until he can break in. There, he films himself having sex with another woman in her bed, leaving the video for the Spears stand-in to see on a loop on her TV. There are a few words for that, like sexual harassment and non-consensual exposure to sexual material. Then, there’s more stalking and sexual harassment, as Timberlake’s character spies on his former lover in the shower in a scene that is as sexually charged as it is creepy.
Advertisement
Throughout the video, Timberlake’s character’s behavior is sexualized, glamorized, and normalized by being framed as rightful revenge for having his heart broken, a coming of age where the “nice” boy who got cheated on becomes a man who takes no shit and has sex with a new hot chick while at it. After all, can we blame him? He’s only getting back at the woman who hurt him; he’s only showing her what he’s made of. It’s her turn to cry; he sings. If you disagree, you must’ve him confused for another guy! Not that people never picked up on the creepiness (see: Carson Daly comparing the vibes to American Psycho). Still, it was celebrated. Per multiple publications, it was the moment Timberlake became “cool,” a “sex symbol” with a “mature” image.
He owed it all to post-separation abuse. Yet, no one has ever mentioned it. No one has ever brought up that the actions of the hero of the music video are depressingly widespread in real life, and they don’t earn those men “cool” brownie points nor applause for getting their revenge. They get the police called on them. They get restraining orders filed against them. Women like the one in the video change their door locks and get a guard dog, mace, and even guns. If it gets really bad, they move out. In the worst-case scenarios, which are the depressingly prevalent ones, men like Timberlake’s character don’t stop at a one-time revenge play. In those depressingly prevalent scenarios, it ends with femicide.
Post-separation abuse isn’t talked about as much as it should, despite how common it is. Partially, it’s because our culture still does not take it as seriously as it should. Abusive behavior is often minimized as intensity, possessiveness, passion, and inability to let go. Sometimes, those behaviors are even justified, such as when a couple’s breakup is volatile or messy in big and small ways. It’s the reason the femicide rates are so high. It’s the reason stalking affects so many. The police often fail to take claims of post-separation abuse behavior like the one exhibited in the video seriously. A petition for a restraining order might be filed, but it doesn’t mean it’ll be granted. The police might speak to the perpetrator and choose not to do anything because they may have good standing in society (class is always a factor), or maybe because they seem stable (the victim was obviously exaggerating!), or perhaps they’re “going through it, cut them some slack, we’ve all been there, haven’t we?”… Sexual harassment? They were involved; if you’ve been involved once, sexual attention/overtures/content, even if unwanted, is part of the deal, people will say.
So, when pop culture pieces like the “Cry Me a River” music video come out, it isn’t all that surprising the elephant in the room isn’t addressed. It’s not even recognized, and it’s a vicious cycle because something like that video’s plot being framed the way further contributes to the problem. It’s just another drop in the minimization of a very real issue. The danger that strikes fear and kills in everyday life becomes a cool, bad-boy fantasy many have after a bad breakup with their ex because, look at that, it’s number one on TRL. The fact that a very real woman was at the center of a post-separation abuse fantasy music video makes that particular situation even more insidious. She was dehumanized because it was edgy and entertaining. Per the consensus, that is. In reality, it is terrifying. It is terrifying that you have a live woman being used as a prop in a fictitious abuse narrative; it’s terrifying that she’s real and high-profile, someone people feel like they “know,” and yet no one ever spoke up: “wouldn’t it be horrible if someone really stalked her, broke into her home, sexually harassed her? Someone she once loved and who once loved her?.”
Advertisement
But why would they? “It’s just a fantasy, isn’t it? Does it really matter that it’s an abuse fantasy, if that’s all there is?” some will ask. The cognitive dissonance will hit them once the headlines from real-life cases start to make waves. The vicious cycle comes and goes and comes again, in a continuous loop, never to be recognized, and if recognized, never to be addressed. Never to be challenged, never to be broken.
When heartbreak is stylized as seduction, pop music exposes how desire can slide into control — a tension explored across eras in our Sex, Desire, and Power in Pop Music coverage.
