As you’ve almost certainly heard by now, Britney Spears is having a celebrity breakdown. We know this because a) she’s bald, b) she’s started to fly economy, and c) she’s spending a lot of time in LA. I’m delighted to hear all this, because it means that by those very same definitions, I am also having a celebrity breakdown. Perhaps I can now convince my boss to pay for my rehabilitation in Antigua.

Ah, but I shouldn’t joke. The existential crisis of “Britney Shears” (I have absolutely no shame in repeating this tabloid pun) is definitely uncomfortable to watch. On the front cover of the New York Post on Sunday , Spears looked almost deranged: that slow, witless smile; the dead eyes; the hooded jacket; the electric clippers, gripped tight in a fit of self-mutilation. The headline got it spot-on: “Shear Madness”.

Now, as you might imagine, I’m something of an authority on baldness. My own hair loss, of course, was involuntary (my breakdown was genetic, you might say). At the age of 25 my head was already beginning to resemble a hairy egg: smooth on top, bushy at the sides. Fans of Seinfeld would have immediately recognised it as a George Costanza. That was when I decided to get the lawnmower treatment. To this day it remains the most liberating thing I’ve done, aside from exchanging Y-fronts for Boxers in the late Eighties.

Historically, of course, a shaved head has rarely been a good thing. In Ancient Greece, it meant you were a slave (the longer your hair in those days, the more cash you had). In Australia, it meant you were a convict. And in France during the Second World War, it meant you’d been sleeping with a Nazi. But then, thanks to the adoption of the crew cut in the US Army, the shaved head became suddenly respectable (it was intended to prevent the enemy from grabbing you by the hair, a marginal advantage in the era of atomic weapons). In the years after the war, however, the hairstyle struggled. It was associated for a while with football hooliganism and neo-Nazism, and finally, thanks to some canny reverse psychology, with that bloke from Erasure, and an emboldened gay movement.

Then came the greatest discovery in hairstyling history: “the buzzcut”. Cooler than a crew cut, less scary than a skinhead, the buzzcut quickly became to balding men what Spanx Power Panties with Tummy Control are to overweight American women. Even men who weren’t having trouble with their topsoil, men such as David Beckham and the rapper Tupac Shakur, got buzzcuts of their own free will. It was great.

But now, thanks to Spears and that LA freakout, it could all be ruined. It’s not that she’s a woman: Demi Moore and Natalie Portman both looked great with shaved heads. No, it was the lunacy of the execution that made it such a disaster. So thanks, Britney, from all of us bald men for making the buzzcut unfashionable for the next two millennia. By this time next week, expect to see us wearing bandanas.

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