Britney Spears shaving her head encapsulates the final mood of celebrity, paparazzi and tabloid culture within the early 00s. The photographs of Spears taking clippers to her hair were splashed all around the press in 2007, and he or she was subsequently painted as erratic, crazy, and getting ready to breakdown. On the time, the singer didn’t have a voice and couldn’t share her reasons and motivations behind the act. But now, 15 years later, she has been in a position to tell her own version of the events.

In her latest memoir, The Woman in Me, out today, Spears shares more about that moment of shaving her head, and the way it was a response to being always looked out, touched and judged. 

In 2007, she was struggling – going through a divorce, within the midst of a custody battle, being relentlessly harassed by paparazzi. “I’d been eyeballed a lot growing up,” she writes within the book. “I’d been looked up and down, had people telling me what they considered my body, since I used to be a teen.” Shaving her head was a technique to ward off against all of that, she says.

In February of 2007, she walked right into a hair salon and asked a stylist to chop off her hair. When the stylist refused, she did it herself. “I went right into a hair salon, and I took the clippers, and I shaved off all my hair. Everyone thought it was hilarious. Look how crazy she is! Even my parents acted embarrassed by me. But no one appeared to understand that I used to be simply out of my mind with grief. MY children had been taken away from me.”

After shaving her hair off, Spears writes that everybody was “scared” of her, even her mum, and that nobody would seek advice from her anymore because she was “too ugly”. “My long hair was a giant a part of what people liked – I knew that. I knew a number of guys thought long hair was hot… shaving my head was a way of claiming to the world: Fuck you. You would like me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You would like me to be good for you? Fuck you. You would like me to be your dream girl? Fuck you.”

While the initial release of eliminating her hair was almost a euphoric moment – she writes within the book when she first shaved her head “it felt almost religious. I used to be living on a level of pure being” – it didn’t last long. Soon after the incident, she was seen in wigs each time she stepped out in public and in 2008, when she was put in a court-ordered conservatorship, she was forbidden to maintain the look. “Under the conservatorship I used to be made to grasp that those days were now over,” she writes. “I needed to grow my hair out and get back into shape. I needed to go to bed early and take whatever medication they told me to take.”

The feelings Spears shares about her hair and the oppression that comes with being beautiful to the male gaze is something that quite a few female celebrities have expressed over time. Sinead O’Connor, perhaps one of the famous female stars to have a shaved head, said in a 2017 interview that in her childhood, her abusive mother would compare her two daughters to one another, calling Sinead her pretty daughter.

“After I had long hair, she would introduce us as her pretty daughter and her ugly daughter,” O’Connor said. “And that’s why I cut my hair off. I didn’t need to be pretty. It’s dangerous to be pretty, too, because I kept getting raped and molested in every single place I went… I didn’t need to be raped, I didn’t need to be molested. I didn’t want to decorate like a lady. I didn’t need to be pretty.”

In her memoir, O’Connor says that when she was working on her first album a male music executive told her she should grow her hair long and begin dressing more feminine. In response, the following day she went to the barbershop and had it shaved even shorter.

Doja Cat has also shared similar stories and feelings in regards to the response she got when she was experimenting along with her hair and shaved all of it off. Talking to Dazed last yr, she said she couldn’t understand why people were so against it. “They’re like, ‘Oh, this will’t possibly be her simply having fun. She needs to be out of her mind. She needs to be cuckoo.’”

Although Doja has rejected comparisons between herself and Spears, saying it minimised the struggles and trauma that Spears was going through on the time, like Spears she also hit back at the concept the one thing a girl can or ought to be is “hot” for the male gaze. “You all want me to look fuckable for you so which you could go home and jerk your cocks all day long whilst you live in your mother’s basement. Go fuck yourselves,” Doja wrote in a now-deleted tweet in response to people online criticising her buzzcut.

Beauty is usually used as a tool of control and oppression for ladies. While there have been many aspects that contributed to every of Spears, O’Connor and Doja’s decisions to shave their heads, what all of them have in common is that it was a technique to remove themselves from the mainstream narrative of beauty standards and traditional attractiveness and in doing so take control of their very own appearance and lives.

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