A sea of voices and online polls on Tuesday said Spears got exactly what she deserved - with some even surmising it's exactly what she wanted - while a small number went against the tide and suggested the pop star was railroaded by a sexist society that judges mothers more harshly than fathers.
"What do we know about Kevin Federline other than he's getting $20,000 a month from Britney Spears?" CNN's outspoken Nancy Grace said sneeringly of the assertion that Federline was a better parent than Spears.
Nancy Luke, a sociologist at Brown University, told ABC News that the 25-year-old Spears could be the victim of a society that has higher expectations of women than men when it comes to parenting.
"It is still the norm in the U.S. that women are expected to take care of the children as opposed to the male, who has far less responsibility in this area," she said. "There is a definite double standard."
Others scoff at that suggestion, saying Spears's conduct over the past few weeks made it almost impossible for the judge not to order her boys - Sean Preston, 2, and one-year-old Jayden James - into her ex-husband's full-time care. She had reportedly ignored judge Scott M. Gordon's recent orders to attend therapy sessions, submit to drug tests and go to parenting classes.
"If a man ignored a judge's direction as Ms. Spears has ... and acted in public, with and without the children, the way Ms. Spears has, he would have lost any contact with the children, and no one would doubt that he was an unfit parent," wrote a poster to the ABC News website on Tuesday.
Los Angeles divorce lawyer Connolly Oyler said he's surprised Spears didn't lose her children much sooner. Judges usually remove kids from households where parents are ordered to undergo drug testing, he told The Associated Press.
The pop star has been exhibiting bizarre behaviour for months, including defiantly shaving her head in an apparent rebuke of her mother and frequently partying at L.A. hotspots without wearing underwear.
Her astonishingly lacklustre live performance at the MTV Video Music Awards last month led some to speculate anew about drug use, and both her management firm and her lawyer dropped her as a client soon after.
In recent days, she's been photographed driving her two boys around town without a California driver's licence and without strapping them into their car seats.
Equally disturbingly, Spears has repeatedly taken the boys out into public knowing full well she's being hounded by hordes of paparazzi - and the children's terrified and tear-stained faces have been seen in countless photographs, including one in which a distressed Sean Preston was seen leaning out of his car seat to hold the hand of his wailing little brother.
Just hours after losing custody of the boys, Spears's mystifying behaviour continued.
She high-tailed it to her favourite tanning salon after giving the kids to Federline's bodyguard two days earlier than legally required, dined at the highly visible Nobu restaurant in L.A. and then rented a room at a five-star Beverly Hills hotel while wearing a barely-there miniskirt and a mile-wide smile.
"I see a girl relieved to be rid of her children," Elaine Lui, a correspondent on CTV's ETalk Daily, said on her gossip blog "Lainey's Entertainment Update."
"I see a girl who knows no shame .. if it were me, if the entire world had learned that my boys were deemed legally better off with my low-life gold-digging ex, I'd be hiding in humiliation and busting my balls to get them back. Britney, however, seems to be revelling in her freedom."
