Having built a career out of pandering to male fantasy, Britney Spears has finally fulfilled a female one, with her zero tolerance reaction to a bad hair life. This, then, is the ultimate post-relationship haircut, that relationship being not her abortive marriage to sometime rapper Kevin Federline, but her more long-term and damaging relationship with the public and media. “Why have shaved your head?” asked a fan as she stared in horror at Britney’s newly-shaven bonce. “Because of you?” retorted the songstress, later elaborating that she had acted because: “I don’t want anyone touching me. I’m tired of everyone touching me.”

Alas, persuading people to want to touch her is where Britney has always excelled. A child gymnast, at 12 she became a close personal friend of Mickey Mouse, as a member of his club, that notorious despoiler of pubescent talent. With her parents as managers, Brit strutted her stuff in the girl group Innosense, posed as the schoolgirl she might still have been in “(Hit Me) Baby One More Time”, and was denying breast implants by 17. Rolling Stone helpfully depicted her as Lolita for anyone who had missed the message of her iconography. The more Spears writhed around in the throes of virgin / strumpet ecstasy, the more the peanut crunching ground stamped its feet and salivated over popping popstrel cherry.

Britney’s attempts to seize her body back from public ownership and put it to private, procreative use have proved fraught with difficulty. Motherhood, and the physical changes it brings with it, have not proved fan friendly, despite Spears’s efforts to exploit Demi Moore’s “pregnancy as porn” strategy of nudity plus bump.

This weekend’s shearing incident is merely the latest in a long line of actions in which Spears has reappropriated her body from being an instrument to sell Pepsi to something she can actually live with / in. From laying down the lard and sprouting chins and florid acne, to flaunting her vagina (message: “You wanted it, you can have it, Caesarean scars to boot”), Spears is deliberately sabotaging her body as brand.

Hers is a textbook case of hysteria - that is, self-expression via the body - baring her scalp its ultimate expression, short of self-harm or suicide. For where going brunette might formerly have been seen as an act of rebellion from this most bottled of blondes, so shaving her head allows Britney to transcend to a whole new level of symbology suggestive of disease, transgression, punishment and penitence. Its implication: everybody’s favourite living doll just ain’t playing anymore.

Those who find radicalism and empowerment in the gesture should not be distracted from the look of abject misery in Spears’s eyes. Hysteria may be communicative, but it also marks the collision between empowerment and suffering. Britney knows that we’re always going to want to hit her one more time, so to pre-empt that she would rather get in there herself first. Thus, Britney Jean replaces Norma Jeane as our latest blasted icon.

Aspiring virgin nymphos take note: yours is a performance with a limited shelf life. This is the way the world of teen sluttery ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

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