Strictly through observation, I’m sure many strangers have at least a superficial understanding of something my close friends know: I’m obsessed with pop music.

   With headphones on in public places, my facial expressions are perhaps too emotive — and my shimmy too visible — to be considered normal behavior. Occasionally, someone asks: what are you listening to?

   The last person to beg the question was a man ahead of me in line for the restroom, and the answer was the woman who, in my eyes, had always been the original pop star: Britney Spears. That day, it wasn’t the assertive raunch of “Gimme More” or the vindictive thrill of “Womanizer” that gripped me. It was the bittersweet last song of her 2007 Blackout album, “Why Should I Be Sad?”

   Prior to the album’s release, the darkness of Spears’ life had been laid bare to the world, custody battles and rehab check-ins included. Following her breakdown, she was mocked relentlessly and stripped of all privacy in a way that women who struggle in the spotlight often are. In response, she released one of the most demented — and liberated — visions of pop ever.

   On its closing tack, over a sparkly drumline, she announces: “It’s time for me to move along; it’s time for me to get it on.” It becomes clear in this moment that “moving along” has no monogamous connotation. Instead, she tasks herself with moving forward in life, after being knocked down and agonized in the public eye.

    It wasn’t until I began college that I took my affinity for pop seriously: as a lens through which to assess celebrity under patriarchy.

   Because of its design as something that is, at its best, both personal in statement and international in reach, pop music provides a unique opportunity to assess socio-political climate via gender. Through pop, some of music’s most famous women have created, re-created and negotiated their public perception, while involuntarily being made into cultural touch-points.

   Take Lana del Rey, a new-age pop star who introduced herself to the world as, in the words of New York Times’ Sarah Nicole Prickett, “a man-loving woman.” With her debut, second-wave feminists criticized her as “gender deserter” while male reviewers suggested that her “[resistance] to be polished” disadvantaged her. Others questioned why the embrace of femininity is a punishable offense: actress Hari Nef  highlighted that a lack of room in feminist aesthetics for high femininity means no room for trans women’s survival, either.

   With debuts like del Rey’s, the pop star clearly transforms a broader rift into a precise conversation of gendered expectations. With works like Blackout, and Amy Winehouse’s non-fictional “Rehab,” it’s pop music that allows us to assess how much respect audiences once deemed appropriate to give a woman undergoing public crisis, compared to a famous man.

   Many great pop albums won’t raise major questions regarding gender. But, inadvertently or intentionally, some will. By valuing the way they’re answered, we’ll preserve more colors and textures in pop culture’s fabric.