The hairdressers at Esther’s Haircutting Studio in Tarzana, California, were locking their doors for the night last Friday when a cavalcade of cars drew up outside. Britney Spears jumped out of one of the vehicles and, accompanied by her bodyguards, marched into the salon. When owner Esther Tognozzi refused to shave off the pop star’s hair, Spears took hold of the clippers and removed her locks herself. As Spears cut, inevitably, she was snapped by the paparazzi who have faithfully recorded her journey from teenage stardom into an increasingly troubled adulthood.
While bids mount for her shorn locks on eBay, theories about Spears shaving her hair have been foisted upon her more quickly than the garish blonde wig she has since donned to conceal her baldness. Does losing her hair equal losing her mind? Or is she finally regaining control of her chaotic life?
Throughout history, a shorn head has been heavy with meaning. The bare-headed Christian or Buddhist monks told of their devotion or a renunciation of worldly pleasures. More commonly, shaven heads have been associated with trauma, brutality and the loss of individuality or strength. In biblical legend, Samson was deprived of his incredible power and killed when his hair was cut off while he was asleep. In ancient Greece shaved heads were a mark of the slave. Shorn hair is inflicted on the sick, and has been deployed by armies to both dehumanise their own soldiers and punish their enemies. Among skinheads, a shorn head was a symbol of aggression. Among lesbians, a shaved head, or short hair at least, came to be a symbol of their abandoning of traditional man-pleasing femininity.
With time, a shaven head became fashionable, among men at least, and skinheads eventually lost their shock value. The image of a woman with no hair, however, can still pack a visceral punch. “There are lots of positive connotations in men,” says Alastair Ross, a social psychologist at the University of Strathclyde. “It’s the hair equivalent of joining the Foreign Legion or becoming a monk. It’s having a spring-clean or the sign of a new physical regime. But in women it’s seen as being out of control because it’s outside the normal distribution of hair behaviour.” In other words, baldness is still relatively rare in women, and is generally treated as a sign of crisis or stress — or if it is known to be self-inflicted, a sign of madness.
Bald women tend to emerge in art as either frightening or frightened. Sigourney Weaver’s striking baldness as Ripley in Alien3 was intended to show her torment, but also her (stereotypically masculine) virtues of strength and bravery. From Samantha Morton as a clairvoyant “precog” in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report to the skinhead women of David Lynch’s Dune, shaven-headed women have played particularly visible roles in sci-fi, depicting dystopian futures or as a sign of people who are in some way untouchable.
Becoming untouchable is the most widely postulated theory behind Spears’s trip to the barber. One eyewitness to the shearing scene, Emily Wynne-Hughes, told the press that Spears had said “she didn’t want anybody to touch her”. It is a significant statement from someone who has lived almost all her life in the public eye, according to psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos. “Her relationship with the public is one of the most significant relationships she has had in her life. From her point of view, the public validates or doesn’t validate her. She probably feels interfered with. This idea that ‘You don’t touch me,’ is her saying, ‘I need some control of my own.’ I think this is about control, about her trying to get into the driver’s seat.”
For a tiny number of women — Demi Moore, Skunk Anansie, Sinead O’Connor — a shaven head is indeed accepted as a symbol of them being in control. This may not be one of those occasions. “I’m not sure if it’s strategic for Britney in the same way as it was for Sinead O’Connor,” says Ross. “Sinead was very much making a statement and she was opting out of a male fantasy and a society that expects certain things of women.”
Clinical psychologist Linda Blair believes shaven heads are still seen as a crisis for women because flowing hair is so tied up in notions of female beauty and, in the days before dyes and extensions, a visible symbol of their reproductive power. Blair also believes that Britney has lived so long in the public eye that she may not be able to separate her public and private life. “With the state she is in now, there probably isn’t much clarity between doing this in public and doing it in private because she’s had no privacy for so long,” she says.
Every day more hairdressers listen to tales of personal crisis than the massed ranks of publicists and psychologists. Esther Tognozzi had little time for elaborate interpretations of what went on last Friday. “I did say, ‘Is this getting rid of the old and starting afresh?’ and she said, ‘Yes,'” Tognozzi told the media. “Maybe she just got sick and tired of all the extensions and chemicals in her hair, and maybe she just wants a new beginning. It’s only hair. It grows back.” — Â