Christina Aguilera is in pain. Today, it’s not the psychological or emotional kind—although she’s certainly entitled to those, after a traumatic childhood and years of battling her way through a notoriously cruel industry. This time, it’s physical. As she sits in her dimly lit studio on a sunny L.A. afternoon, the diva with the legendary voice has blood on her hands. Literally.
"Sorry, my ear is bleeding," she says, then adds, "lovely for your article." She dabs at a brand-new piercing on her upper right ear, taking the wound in stride. Christina, 37, is wedged into the corner of a black couch, black blanket around her legs, coffee mug in her clutches. She's barefaced, wearing a (you guessed it) black T-shirt and black pants, projecting a majorly chill vibe. Is this really the daring star who once made headlines with skunk-stripe hair highlights and a triple-tongue stage kiss with Britney and Madonna? Well, yes…and no.
"When I first started out, I would never have dreamed of doing an interview without makeup on," she says. She’d never have imagined going totally natural on an album cover either. But her latest record, Liberation, bears a photo of Christina with messy, damp hair—still platinum but sans extensions—and wait, are those freckles? "I still love getting glammed up, but I want to show imperfections on this go-round," she says.
Don’t be fooled though. This isn’t a comeback story or a reinvention. It’s a reveal, and it’s courageous. "It's scary, but I'm up for the challenge. You can't tell me something I haven’t already heard about myself anyway."
Some things everyone has heard about Christina: She entered the pop scene in the late '90s as a rail-thin teen with seriously plucked eyebrows and a midriff on permanent display. Like her Y2K Top 40 cohorts Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Mandy Moore, she was a perfectly packaged product whose every appearance was carefully orchestrated. Christina won the Best New Artist Grammy in 2000, but it wasn't until her sophomore album, Stripped, two years later, that she set herself apart with a pair of butt-cheek-baring chaps and highly sexual songs. The coy ingenue from "Genie in a Bottle" was now gyrating in a microskirt to "Dirrty."
"I was feeling a sense of rebellion," she remembers. "Freed from the formulaic experience, I just threw out anything I felt was a little plastic or a little stale or was eating me up with superficiality."
Not everyone was ready to give her room to remodel herself. Many critics didn’t take kindly to a young woman—especially a former Mouseketeer—singing about sex on her own terms. Music writers at major publications called her "skeezy," "a strumpet," and "a tart" and likened her new image to something out of a "hooker convention." Christina’s "Dirrty" video was spoofed on Saturday Night Live with the words whore and ho.
"It's hard to hear yourself being called names," she says. "I remember being hurt by these commercials on MTV, pitting Britney as the good girl and me as the bad girl. It's like, if I'm going to be demure and innocent, that’s okay. But if I'm going to just be myself, I'm trouble." She starts telling stories of music execs treating her badly. There were the male reps who never left the room when she did clothes fittings. The person who called her difficult because she was exhausted and yawned during a meeting. The guys who sat at dinner with her, talking crudely about other women's bodies, as if Christina weren't there.
"I love the female body, and I think it’s something to be proud of, not something that men should dictate ownership of," she says. "'Dirrty' was extremely controversial at the time, but it would be nothing now. I hope I paved the way and helped set the ground rules that women can be any version of themselves they wanna be…and proud of it." More than a decade later, former "nice girls" such as Miley Cyrus and Selena Gomez got some flack for embracing racier projects, but SNL wasn’t cracking jokes about them spreading STIs (yes, that happened to Christina).
She still regrets not standing up to harassment from the men in her life, including her own father. Throughout Christina’s childhood, he was physically and verbally abusive to her mother. "My dad was very dominant with my mom, and I always knew I was never going to let a man take advantage of me like that. But making it in the business was a completely different mindfuck. I didn’t even know to think about it like, Wow, this person’s really disgusting, the way he talks about women. I had no super-strong women around me, and I thought feeling inferior, small, or helpless just had to be accepted."
When it comes to her personal relationships, she says, "I made up my mind at a really young age that I had to do for myself. I never wanted a man to tell me what I could and couldn’t do, what I could and couldn't spend. I always knew I had to be the queen of my castle."
She admits that, at certain points, she might have taken that idea a little too much to heart. "I've always been that one-foot-in, one-foot-out kind of person who’s like, 'you’re not gonna break me before I break you!' But I find it more rewarding at this point to work through that friction and put a mirror in front of myself and be like, is this really his issue…or yours?"
It's a hard-won outlook based on a few relationship failures, including her now-dissolved first marriage to music exec Jordan Bratman, with whom she has a 10-year-old son, Max. One crucial lesson: Avoid pairing up with another star. "I've had opportunities, but it isn’t my style to date another person in the business," she says with a smirk. "There's gotta be something wrong with you if you want to be in this business. I mean, hi! I definitely have my issues. I think that I can only handle one [celebrity] in the relationship, and I need to be it."
For the past four and a half years, she's been engaged to producer Matthew Rutler, 33, whom she met when he was a production assistant on her 2010 film, Burlesque. The two have a 4-year-old daughter, Summer Rain. Their long engagement isn’t a sign of cold feet, she says. They just don’t have time for wedding planning. "I'm a planner and a perfectionist, so I want it all to be right."
In the meantime, Christina has the dynamics of a LTR down. "The routine can be monotonous," she admits. "You gotta be spontaneous. Being a sexual person who's comfortable in my own skin, a sense of adventure is important to me, going on road trips, staying in hotels."
Lately, Christina has been thinking about her own freedom—from her pop-starlet image, her distressing past, her bad relationships—and the sense that she may have finally found it. On Liberation, the track "Searching for Maria" borrows a few bars from The Sound of Music because Julie Andrews’ character is one of Christina’s icons. "Before my first record deal, before anything, it all started with being inspired by how free she looked in those hills," she says. And with that thought, she heads out into the light to play with her kids…the pain from earlier on seemingly forgotten.