Actress Rose McGowan: I shaved my head to remove sex target from my back
The actress has explained why it was so important for her to go bald.
Rose McGowan has spoken out about her reasons for shaving her head, saying she refused to be pigeon-holed as a sex symbol.
The Charmed actress shaved off her trademark long locks in November 2015 and has kept her cut short since then, labelling it a “battlecry” against society’s expectations of women.
In an article for i-D magazine, she wrote about her reasons for getting rid of her hair, saying it made her angry that the most commonly asked question was whether she did it because she broke up with someone.
She wrote: “I realised I had broken up with someone.
“I broke up with you. The collective you, the societal you. I broke up with the Hollywood ideal, the one that I had a part in playing.
“The ideal version of a woman that is sold to you by every actress in every hair commercial telling you, ‘this is the secret to being beguiling, the secret to getting a man to want you’.
“My long hair had always made me uncomfortable. It felt like I had a plant on my head and a sex target on my back.
“It made men en masse look at me while the real me disappeared.”
The Grindhouse actress said that growing up, she had mostly had short hair and had felt happier with her image.
She wrote: “I liked very much being an individual. I liked looking neither female nor male, but hovering somewhere in between.
“The two periods of time when I had long hair were the hardest in my life, the times I was most lost from myself – my teen years when I suffered from a raging eating disorder and later when I suffered from a mental disorder called Hollywood.”
Explaining why she had grown her hair long, she wrote: “I was literally told I had to have long hair otherwise the men doing the hiring in Hollywood wouldn’t want to f*** me and if they didn’t want to f*** me, they wouldn’t hire me.
“I was told this by my female agent, which is tragic on many levels.
“I was dying on the inside and embarrassed by what I looked like on the outside.
“See if you’re a Jennifer Lawrence America’s sweetheart type, you have simple blonde hair, if you’re the vixen, it is long, dark and big.
“Those are the rules, do not deviate.”
