18 February 2007
who today amongst us has the courage to shave their hair off?
This is more Tim's territory than anyone else's, but hard not to think that Britney's recent act of auto-defurring is less an act of incipient madness than a feminist gesture of moderately significant proportions. After all, from virginal pig-tailed school-girl to Madonna-snogging sex-kitty, Britney's always been about the all-American hair-cut: two parts cheerleader to one part cheesecake. Chaste when tied up, just dirty enough when unleashed. What then is it to exempt oneself from the casual tyranny of hetero-hair-expectation?
To be a bald woman implies one of three things: 1. sickness 2. some sort of militant lesbianism 3. witchiness (as in Roald Dahl's The Witches, who turn out to be be hairless and clawed once their 'disguises' are removed). Britney is swimming in unchartered waters as pop-princess divested of glitz - revealing the sorts of things that can't ever be mentioned, oh, you know, the alien core of all prettiness, the hyper-artificiality of unstable heterosexuality in an age of psychopathic scopophilia, etc.
Britney's comment whilst in the midst of her 'mad' act that 'people keep wanting to plug things into me' is classic Dworkin territory. She's right - they literally do - from the businessman who offered $11 million for her virginity, to Madonna's tongue desperate to resurrect a flagging career, to the spurned recent ex-husband who threatens to poke at her career with stories of lesbian orgies that'll ruin her career unless she gives him more than the $6 million she originally offered him. Between the corporate cock, the pop-tongue and the sex-lawsuit, Spears has more unwanted entry-points than a decommissioned East German switchboard. Let's just hope she gets saved by a jolly lesbian commune before it's too late. Or perhaps it's all a big PR push for her role as GI Jane II, as an attempt to capture the all-important dyke vote ahead of the forthcoming Iran invasion.
