Doja Cat, 27, dislikes trolls comparing the buzz cut she debuted in Aug. to Britney Spears‘ shaved head in 2007. The rapper talked about how online critics lightheartedly suggested she may have been going through mental health struggles, like the now 41-year-old pop star had, because of her decision to shave her locks off, and admitted she felt it was very “disrespectful,” in a new interview with Variety. “It’s so incredibly disrespectful for people to be minimizing what Britney went through and make a joke out of something that was very serious and a big deal in her life,” she told the outlet.
“Every time I see a comment like that, I can’t compute what’s happening, other than it’s just an awful thing,” she added. Britney made headlines over the past several years when she was under a conservatorship by her father, Jamie Spears, and was mandated to regularly attend psychiatric care during a reported mental health battle. She was freed of her conservatorship in 2021, after 13 years.
In addition to defending Britney and her struggles, Doja talked about why she decided to change her look without warning. She opened up about publicly stating she wanted to quit music after she was criticized for canceling her performance at Paraguay’s Asunciónico festival due to flooding. She started focusing on her hair and thought, “Get this s*it off of me.”
“I needed to change something,” she said. “I wasn’t working out and wasn’t really taking care of myself in the way that I wanted to. I was like, ‘I need to do something,’ so I just chopped it all off.”
After the bold move, she mentioned she could “see the shape of” her head and “whole face” without wearing a wig, which she had done many times before that but didn’t like doing. “It doesn’t feel good. It’s stressful if you want to work out, and then it slides off your head while you’re in a public gym,” she explained. “It’s the best choice I’ve ever made, and I’ve never felt more beautiful.”
“And you know what? I still wear wigs, and they look better now because I don’t have so much hair,” she continued. “Now I have a f*cking hair hat — a shake-and-go — and I just slap it on and it’s cute and I look like a little Pulp Fiction girl.”
Despite the confidence she feels about her new look, she is still bothered by the haters who often comment on how they don’t like it and feel it may mean she has deep issues she’s not addressing, on her social media posts. “Now, I’m being flooded with people, who have these preconceived f*cking notions about me, and they come in and try to troll. Which I’m very good at handling,” she said.
“A lot of people think I’m not good at handling trolls because I respond to them,” she added. “But that’s the art of it: I love to go to f*cking war with trolls. That’s just what I’ve grown up with; I’ve been on the internet for 1,000 f*cking years and it’s just part of me: that I need to respond.”