Justin Timberlake is a white man. That grants him incredible freedom in his career. (2024)

Justin Timberlake is reclaiming his white masculinity. Sort of.

He has a new album out, Man of the Woods, and he’s been promoting it with the kind of Western iconography that codes as rugged and white and manly: mountains, flannel, bonfires. “This album is really inspired by my son, my wife, my family,” he says in the teaser for the album, as the camera pans over snow-drifted meadows, “but more so than any other album, where I’m from.”

“The overarching message is incredibly simple,” wrote Anne Helen Petersen at BuzzFeed: “The West is a place of authenticity, or regeneration, of fatherhood, of returning to the basics, of freedom, of control — all of which is to say, of unfetteredmanhood” — and, as she would add later in her article, specifically of unfettered white manhood. In the teaser, Timberlake is embracing the fantasy of the cowboy and the pioneer frontiersman, ruggedly shaping the country to his will as he makes his way through the Wild West.

The new aesthetic Timberlake debuted in the trailer for the album was met with some surprise, because Timberlake has never particularly insisted on his white masculinity before. Instead, he’s often borrowed from the conventions of black culture and kept his masculinity neutralized and unthreatening.

But Timberlake can make a major aesthetic shift like this if he’d like to, because his white masculinity isn’t actually new: It’s been at work in his career all along, invisibly. It’s what allows him to be both Justin Timberlake, R&B crooner of club bangers, and Justin Timberlake, man of the great outdoors and the Wild West, without penalty. And that kind of freedom and flexibility to transverse aesthetic boundaries and cultural codes is one that’s not afforded to his nonwhite, non-male peers.

Timberlake built his early career on a sound and image heavily influenced by Michael Jackson and other black artists, so this turn to the iconography of whiteness reads as a major shift away from the style of his previous output. He’s not alone in making this kind of turn to the iconography of whiteness: Miley Cyrus, who like Timberlake used her performance of hip-hop to leverage her way out of post-Disney-child-star purgatory, spent much of 2017 repudiating her old persona and reimagining herself as a decidedly white country-pop star. “I can’t listen to that anymore,” she told Billboard of hip-hop.

Miley’s vigorous rejection of hip-hop was not well received by culture critics — and coming on its heels, Timberlake’s new vibe looked like more of the same, as though Timberlake were planning to trash and reject the culture from which he took his cool as he built his solo career.

But as Lauren Michele Jackson pointed out at Vulture, the first music released from Man of the Woods was not wildly different from Timberlake’s normal sound: There was a little techno, a lot of funk, a lot of club music. Timberlake isn’t releasing a country album here — and if he were, as Jackson points out, he would still have been making music influenced by black America, because nearly all American music is deeply rooted in a black American tradition.

The mythic fantasy of the white male Wild West that the Man of the Woods trailer seemed to invoke is just that: a fantasy, one that’s whitewashed away the Native Americans and the black people who were just as present in the West as white men were.

Instead, Timberlake is working with two extremes: the fantasy of the rugged white male West, and the fantasy of the unthreatening Michael-Jackson-light sex symbol he’s perfected over his 20 years of fame:

By putting those two ideas together, he has not so much reclaimed his white masculinity as made it inescapably visible. Justin Timberlake is the man who is entitled to sing R&B over a club song and who is entitled to lose himself in the woods, who can bring sexy back and who can spread out his arms to the sky in a snow-covered field. He’s a white man, with all the flexibility and freedom that implies.

Timberlake’s white maleness is obviously not new — it is only newly visible. His career has always been shaped and molded by his white maleness and the privilege it affords him, in ways that become clearest when you compare it to the careers of the women and people of color he became famous around.

Two of those people are especially illustrative right now. Because when Justin Timberlake performs at the Super Bowl this weekend, he’ll be haunted by the ghosts of two women.

In 2004, superstar Janet Jackson magnanimously invited young up-and-comer Justin Timberlake to make a surprise appearance at her Super Bowl halftime show. It wasn’t the first time she’d offered her support to Timberlake’s fledgling career: NSYNC had performed on her Velvet Rope tour in 1998, and Jackson sang on Timberlake’s first solo album, Justified. For Timberlake, who was leaning hard on the idea that he was the second coming of a younger, whiter Michael Jackson, the association with MJ’s less volatile sister — a superstar in her own right — was invaluable. (It didn’t hurt Jackson’s well-established reputation as an icon to be associated with a hot new rising star, either.)

Jackson sang and danced her way through her medley, and led the crowd in a vigorous chant against bigotry, hatred, and illiteracy. Then Timberlake made his way out of the crowd, singing his hit “Rock Your Body.”

“Bet I’ll have you naked by the end of this song,” Timberlake sang as the number wrapped up, and he reached out to Jackson’s chest. Reportedly, he was supposed to tear away a rubber bustier, leaving Jackson’s breast covered by a red bra. Instead, he appeared to tear away both bustier and bra, and Jackson’s breast was exposed, partially covered by a piece of nipple jewelry. (The official line here from Jackson’s camp is that “the garment collapsed,” but it’s unclear whether they’re referring to bustier or bra and how it could possibly be said to have collapsed.)

The cameras hastily cut away to fireworks, and the number ended. The entire thing lasted for 9/16ths of a second —but it would cripple Jackson’s career.

First, CBS forced Jackson to apologize to the nation, both on camera and in a written statement. “I am really sorry if I offended anyone. That was truly not my intention,” she said.

“I had said before I sat down to record the apology ... ‘Why am I apologizing?’” Jackson would later tell Oprah. “They wanted me to say that, so I did.”

Timberlake, meanwhile, offered up a few laughing apologies here and there. He was not only invited to that year’s Grammys but in fact won two awards that night. “I know it’s been a rough week on everybody,” he said during his acceptance speech. “What occurred was unintentional, completely regrettable, and I apologize if you guys were offended.”

Today, Jackson is still a successful artist, albeit not at the pop-crossover-sensation level she was at circa 2004. She continues to record and release new music — the latest of which, 2015’s Unbreakable, she released on her own independent label — and last year, she wrapped a well-received world tour. But she had to climb her way back up to those heights after plummeting in 2004, and it took years for her to come anywhere near that level of cultural capital again. “It is so nice to see people excited aboutJanet Jacksonagain,” remarked VH1 News in 2015.

Timberlake, meanwhile — the person who actually took off Jackson’s clothes, however unintentionally he may have done so — coasted through on a few halfhearted apologies. And he knows exactly why. “If you consider it 50-50, then I probably got 10 percent of the blame,” he told MTV in 2006. “I think America is harsher on women. I think America is unfairly harsh on ethnic people.”

America is unfairly harsh on women and “ethnic people” in a way that it is typically not harsh on straight white men. America loves to police the bodies and the sexualities of women of color —so when Timberlake reminded us all that Janet Jackson, a black woman, not only had a body but also had secondary sex characteristics, the media pounced on her. But Timberlake’s uncontroversial white male hand, the hand that actively disrobed Jackson, went unremarked-on and unpunished.

Timberlake was about to play a similar role as another famous female pop star went through the media wringer. Britney Spears was about to flame out spectacularly in public — and Timberlake would quietly, passively make his way through the fallout unscathed.

Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears built their careers on parallel tracks: They were on Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club together; they became young stars together. When they started dating in 1999, they quickly became one of the most well-known celebrity couples in Hollywood. In 2001, they rocked the Super Bowl halftime show together. “If the Disney Channel is the world’s largest high school, then consider these two to be high school sweethearts,” says E Online.

And immediately after their 2002 breakup, both were riding high. In 2003, Spears released In the Zone, one of the most celebrated albums of her career. Timberlake, meanwhile, parlayed their breakup into “Cry Me a River” — whose video features a Spears look-alike as the woman who cheats on him — and rode it all the way to the Grammys.

But in the years afterward, as both teen icons began to attempt the tricky transition to respectable adult artist, they found themselves on radically different paths.

“By 2004, Britney’s grip on her world was starting to slip — or maybe more accurately, Britney started to slip from the world,” writes Vox’s Caroline Framke. “Forces within both her own circle and the salivating music industry were pulling the sweetly dorky Louisiana girl in a thousand directions, and it was only a matter of time before she broke.”

Britney was treated as a passive agent in her own life, to be presented in whatever manner her management thought would be most profitable: as an avowed virgin in a tiny Catholic schoolgirl uniform, begging her listeners to hit her one more time; as a sexpot writhing around a snake. She was packaged as a sex object, emphasis on the object, and she reacted by spiraling out of control and becoming a figure of public mockery.

Timberlake, meanwhile, built his breakup with Spears into a salable image: She was the whor* who claimed to be a virgin, he implied, while he was the steadfast and betrayed lover.

“Sure,” he said, laughing, when Barbara Walters asked him if Britney Spears was actually a virgin. (In 2002, it was apparently okay to publicly speculate about the virginity of pop stars.) Then he played his song “Horrible Woman” — which, for what it’s worth, he denied was about Spears — singing, “I thought our love was so strong / I guess I was dead wrong / But to look at it positively, hey, girl / At least you gave me another song about a horrible woman.”

As Spears’s public image imploded, Timberlake’s only became more sympathetic. He was positioned as a victim of Spears’s volatile persona, a legitimate artist who had to overcome the association with her manufactured pop.

He experimented with acting. He collaborated with major artists and released well-received albums. There were few think pieces about what his love life/wardrobe/sexy new sound meant to America’s youth, and whether he was sending a bad message to our vulnerable teens.

In 2007, Britney Spears shaved her head, beat a car with an umbrella, and made a widely panned, vacant-eyed appearance at the VMAs.

In 2007, Justin Timberlake was riding the wave of goodwill from his iconic SNL “Dick in a Box” sketch. He’d just begun touring his album FutureSex/LoveSounds, which would eventually be added to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He collaborated with Madonna.

The next year, Timberlake would induct Madonna into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with a jab at Spears. “The world has always been full of Madonna wannabes,” he said. “I might have even dated a couple.”

Today, Spears has found stability in her Las Vegas residency. But many people tend to think of her as a legacy act, a pop icon whose primary cultural value is nostalgic, rather than as a vital contemporary figure who is still turning out new hits.

The music industry chewed Spears up and spat her out when it was done extracting all the profit it could from her —but it allowed Timberlake to thrive, flourish, and ultimately live on to mock his ex.

It’s not Timberlake’s fault that the music industry is sexist and he was allowed to thrive while Spears, whose early career tracked his own with eerie precision, was dismissed as a sad case of a fallen star who couldn’t hack the spotlight. It’s not his fault that the industry is racist and that Janet Jackson, an established superstar, was punished for something he did. It is his fault that he cooperated in hanging Jackson out to dry in the aftermath of the Super Bowl, and that he capitalized heavily on disdain for Spears as he developed his own solo career. But there’s no way of knowing whether Timberlake’s intervention would have made any difference to either Jackson or Spears in the long run.

What we know for sure is that Justin Timberlake is a major and well-respected superstar right now, and that Janet Jackson and Britney Spears —women who used to be considered his peers and superiors —are not at the level he is. He’s gone from a supporting player in their Super Bowl performances to headlining the show solo, and Jackson and Spears won’t be there. And that’s because Timberlake’s inoffensive male whiteness has allowed him to walk away from situations that punish women and people of color.

Justin Timberlake is a walking monument to what you can achieve in the music industry if you are not held back by a culture of systemic misogyny and racism — and Britney and Janet are monuments to what happens if you are. Their careers are indelibly marked by their gender and race, and so is Timberlake’s.

So Justin Timberlake hasn’t suddenly reclaimed his white masculinity for the first time with Man of the Woods. It’s been with him all along. It’s just that now it’s become impossible to ignore.