Britney, Pamela and pumpkin spice: What the PSL hatred was always really about

Language, ever-shifting, has moved in such a way that we are now all in an "era," whether one realizes it or not. Couch potatoes are in their "lazy era," while the more bold are in their "main character era" (which is actually how fashion brand Worth Collective has characterized their collection of flouncy, pastel dresses that practically beg for a rom-com-worthy meet-cute). Acting a little curt at work? You're probably in your villain era. Taylor Swift fans? They're certainly in their "Eras" era. 

It's one of those linguistic developments that was both born and flourished on TikTok, where data shows that the majority of consumers and creators are young women. Overexposure has rendered it a little grating at this point, but the use of the term "era," as opposed to "phase" or even "routine," gives both heft and ownership to something pretty complex in a relatively short format: the ways in which we perform femininity. 

This is something that I've been thinking about a lot as the pumpkin spice latte turns 20 and, looking back over the last two decades, considering just how much of a symbol of a particular kind of femininity it became; something for which the drink then became equal parts adored and seemingly reviled. 

Fittingly, this anniversary comes at a time during which pop culture continues to remind us through projects like "Framing Britney Spears" and "Pam and Tommy" just how complicated our relationship with symbols of girlhood and womanhood (and the labyrinthine spaces in between) actually are.

Just as Britney Spears and Pamela Anderson became icons and faced unwarranted scrutiny, the PSL has also been dissected, debated and disdained in a way that reveals the complex intersection of gender, culture and identity in American society —  and emphasizes just how much our preconceived notions about those things may be worth revisiting. 

The pumpkin spice latte debuted in the fall of 2003, just a few months before Britney Spears released her fourth studio album "In the Zone" and Pamela Anderson began to star in Stan Lee's adult animated series "Stripperella" following a rocky relationship with Kid Rock and an even rockier marriage to Tommy Lee. 

Superficially at least, the two women very much represented a particular "type" of woman: a caricature of the blonde, bubbly girl next door, dressed in a cheeky red one-piece or perhaps a pleated uniform skirt accessorized with baby pink pom-pom hair ties. By virtue of their careers on-stage and on-screen, Anderson and Spears quickly ceased to be people in the mind of the public; they were commodities and regarded as sex objects. Every time someone bought "...Baby One More Time" or watched "Baywatch," customers were buying into the act.  

However, much like another very famous bombshell (Marilyn Monroe received her own gritty reconsideration in the 2022 film "Blonde") with the accolades came the now-predictable barbs. Through a tornado of breathless tabloid stories, TMZ features and Perez Hilton's bitchy blind items, they were reduced to dumb, messy and vapid creatures that the paparazzi hunted for sport. Misogyny has always existed, but as a tween in the mid-2000s, I remember how particularly vicious the landscape felt for women at the time. 

Those attitudes are, of course, not just applied to actual, living and breathing women — but also to the things girls and women like, from boy bands to how they take their coffee. In her essay "Women Aren't Ruining Food," Jaya Saxena writes: "When men enjoy something, they elevate it. But when women enjoy something, they ruin it."

"When those foods blow up, we judge women for falling for the marketing or trying to jump on the bandwagon, and we assume that because they like something other women like, they don't have minds of their own," Saxena wrote. "And on top of that, women are asked to reckon with, consciously or unconsciously, the perceived psycho-sexual symbolism attached to seemingly innocuous foods." 

Herein lies the reason that the PSL has managed to inspire such hatred both online and in the real world. More so than concerns about corporate cringe or seasonal creep, people came to hate the pumpkin spice latte simply because lots of women loved it, thereby rendering it obviously and irreparably "basic." 

"Basic girls love the things they do because nearly every part of American commercial media has told them that they should," culture writer Anne Helen-Peterson reported for Buzzfeed in 2014. These things include most of the things I can buy in the sprawling suburban stripmalls near my childhood home: Lululemon yoga pants, Ugg boots, infinity scarves and a pumpkin spice latte, likely retrieved from a Starbucks inside a Target. 

According to the internet, to be basic is to be predictable, to be vapid, to have no sense of subversion or irony in how you view the world — which is why the term was eventually leveled as an insult and why the PSL became its badge. 

I'm not quite sure when exactly the tides began to change for the PSL, but they have; the tendrils of the #MeToo movement has inspired a reconsideration of how women throughout pop culture history have been treated, which perhaps extends to how we've traditionally viewed the trappings of femininity. I also think that a lot of our collective angst surrounding superficial things like how people choose to spice up their morning cup of coffee began to dissipate during the pandemic when we all had bigger things on our minds. 

Regardless, even the impossibly cool cafe down the street from me has relented and listed their version of the PSL on their seasonal specials board, made with frothy oat milk and freshly toasted warm baking spices. 

Twenty years on, the PSL has undoubtedly cemented itself as an autumn staple. Now that it has, maybe we can finally unpack why we turned it into a stereotype in the first place.