Twenty feet away from me, Britney Spears is pantless. Her sculpted hair makes her look like Marilyn Monroe on a date with DiMaggio, assuming they’re going to Manhattan’s finest pantless restaurant. She’s wearing a sweater that probably costs more than my parents’ house, and her white heels add five inches to her five-foot-four pantless frame. Oh, and did I mention she’s pantless? She’s not wearing any pants.

This is a hard detail to ignore.

This is a hard detail to ignore because the men who have seen a pantless Britney belong to a highly select fraternity: It’s Justin Timberlake, her gynecologist, the photographer who’s doing this particular photo shoot, and (maybe) the frontman for a third-rate rap-metal band from Jacksonville, Florida. That’s more or less everybody. And — perhaps stupidly — I actually thought I was about to rush this semipathetic frat; I honestly believed the reason I was invited to this photo shoot was to glimpse Britney’s secret garden and write about its cultural significance. Somehow, that seemed like the only logical explanation as to why her naked ass was being unleashed on the cover of this magazine; this whole affair must be an aggressive, self-conscious reinvention. I mean, why else would they have invited the writer to the shoot? Why else would Spears have just released the “news” that she lost her virginity at the age of eighteen (a story that surfaced only twenty-four hours before this very photo session)? Isn’t this how the modern media operates? Isn’t everything wholly overt?

Actually, no.

Britney’s womanhood will not be seen this afternoon, or at least not seen by me. All her pictures are ultimately shot behind a fifteen-foot-high opaque partition, and nary a heterosexual man is allowed behind it. Apparently, the reason I am here is to be reminded that the essence of Britney Spears’s rawest sexuality is something I will never see, even though I know it’s there. Culturally, there is nothing more trenchant than the fact that Britney Spears will never give it up, even though she already has.