Originally Posted by baldy1138

I thought the media was mostly to blame for turning the most harmless thing Britney did into evidence of a nervous breakdown. There aren't a lot of pictures of it, but she was smiling as she did it. To me, it looked like a liberating experience for her. It might well have been symbolic of her desire for a fresh start. That is not unheard of.

But then we got a lot of tabloid articles full of hearsay and speculation from various "sources," not to mention random fans giving their two cents' worth about how bad she looked. Then we got pictures of crazy bald Britney freaking out in public, which then became the default image in any story about her. I don't know that we ever got a genuine explanation from her of just what the shaved head was about. There was just this immediate sh*t storm in the media, after which I think she was advised to make a half-assed apology and put the whole thing behind her.

I am by no means defending anything else Britney did that was genuinely stupid, nor am I in any way a fan of anything she's done, but I think I'm a fair person, and I thought she got pretty badly smeared on the head shaving thing.

I've said it before, if it was someone with a reputation as a spiritual person, or with some credibility as an artist, people would not have been branding her insane. To me, it was far more significant that someone so tied to the most superficial feminine ideals would shave her head than it would have been if she was an artsy type more prone to experimenting with her image.