Britney Spears Slams TV Hosts for 'Making Strange Comments About My Breasts' at Start of Career

The pop star writes that she noticed early on in her career that her male counterparts were being asked different sorts of questions

Britney Spears is reflecting on the ways in which her rise to fame was handled differently in the media than that of her male counterparts.

In her new memoir The Woman in Me, Spears writes she “couldn’t help but notice” that, while she was dating Justin Timberlake in the early 2000s, he was often asked less invasive questions than she was during interviews with talk show hosts.

“Everyone kept making strange comments about my breasts, wanting to know whether or not I’d had plastic surgery,” writes Spears, who eventually started taking the antidepressant Prozac as public criticism mounted.

In recent years, video clips of interviews Spears conducted in her teenage years and early 20s have resurfaced under a critical lens due to journalists’ sometimes crude and invasive line of questioning.

In one clip, a 17-year-old Spears is interviewed by Dutch TV journalist Ivo Niehe, who tells her there’s one subject they have yet to discuss, and it’s one “everyone’s talking about.”

“Your breasts,” he says, as Spears repeats the question with a laugh. “You seem to get furious when a talk show host comes up with this subject. In general, what do you think about breast implants, just in general?”

Related: Britney Spears Says She Feels 'Sick' Thinking of Conservatorship: 'I Didn't Deserve What My Family Did to Me' (Exclusive)

A YouTube compilation of Spears’ reactions to difficult interview questions has been viewed nearly 700,000 times, and features other, similar instances, like the time a journalist asked why she’d “let everybody know that you’re still a virgin,” and the time another interviewer asked if Spears would “dare” give her a kiss on the cheek.

“Madonna got a tongue one… Maybe a small one?” the woman asks.

Spears’ 2003 Primetime interview with Diane Sawyer has also been revisited in recent years, as the pop star was grilled by the veteran TV journalist over Timberlake’s hints that she’d cheated on him during their relationship.

Related: Britney Spears Says 2003 Diane Sawyer Interview 'Was a Breaking Point': 'I Had Been Exploited'

In the Primetime special, Sawyer starts by declaring Spears’ abs the “most valuable square inch of real estate in the entertainment universe,” and later criticizes the star for posing nearly nude on the covers of Esquire and Rolling Stone: “What happened to your clothes?” she asks. “What’s this about? Is it about shocking people?... I think everybody always thought had a different relationship to young girls.”

In an interview with PEOPLE done over email, Spears dives deeper into the most difficult moments of her life, admitting that she still finds them “hard to speak about.”

The Grammy winner writes in her book that since the end of her conservatorship in 2021, she’s “had to construct a whole different identity,” and has emerged as someone “strong and confident. A woman.”

For more of the exclusive excerpt and interview with Britney Spears, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands everywhere Friday.

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