cjsmith | Long Hair: Realism

One of my pet peeves is authors, usually fantasy authors, who give a character enormously long luxurious hair and then never mention it when it would matter. They linger over descriptions of the protagonist they wish they could be, but when they put her (always her) in a situation where her hair would have to interact with something, somehow nothing happens. The laws of physics are suspended! They're wanking, these authors; they haven't done the simplest research.

People who haven't had buttlength hair may not know this stuff. (Authors who make shit up have no excuse not to ask around about it.)

There's a good reason you don't see many long-haired athletes. Consider an aikido roll. Imagine standing up with your knee or foot on your own braid. At least in a roll it's the hair-bearer's OWN knee; in a pin, often it's the other guy's knee. Exercise for the reader: list female protagonists with "a braid as thick as her wrist" who do hand-to-hand combat a lot.

My hair takes most of a day to dry. Blonde hair (beloved of fantasy authors) has the slenderest strands of any human hair type. According to one medical site I found in ten seconds on google, blondes also have the most numerous follicles. THIS HAIR TAKES A WHILE TO DRY. Put it in a ponytail, and my hair may not dry until my next shower. This is worth knowing if an author wants to describe the effects of a nice breeze half an hour after that dunking in the river.

Let's not talk in detail about jobs such as scooping the litterbox or cleaning up what the cat left on the carpet. I'll just say that a headband, ponytail, or braid does not keep a gal from having to wash the ends of her hair. What keeps that from happening is the habitual, nearly-unconscious shoulder and neck movements that keep the hair behind her back. If the character has these habitual movements ingrained, Mr. Right is not going to catch his first sight of her with her hair caressing her breasts.

How about that old squeeze-through-the-narrow-window-in-a-stone-castle trick? If the loose hair is not in her eyes, it's in between the shoulders or hips and the stone. It's gonna hurt. Somehow, though, what stings afterward is a knee. Go figure. (I won't ask why they all seem to go headfirst. You'd think after sequel number two or three one of these chicks would learn.)

I love this one: the heroine of a romance novel whose hair is drying while "spread out around her head in a fan on the pillow". Just how far away from the headboard is this pillow? Two and a half feet? Maybe our heroine is only three feet tall.

And how come the wind never blows hair into the owner's face? Do proper long-tressed maidens or mage students have built-in headwinds?

Okay, I'll stop now...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh, that's another GOOD rant. I grab myself in both hands when going down stairs. I gotta! And I'm fond of saying that when I jog I need the "Gothic Flying Buttresses Concrete Bra". If only they made such a thing. I think authors who make a point of what enormous knockers the character has are probably small-breasted themselves. (Perhaps vice versa, too, if I expand that to the whole body type. Slender, small-breasted waif-like character who never gets cold and is strong as an ox? Hmm.)

I also love how no female protagonist of any genre fiction book I have ever had the pleasure to encounter HAS CRAMPS. Most of 'em don't even BLEED. The female authors, at least, should know better!

Heh - I ran across that in the last month or so. I was reading a book with a female character on some sort of quest or something and it went on for months ... and I wondered "I wonder what she's doing during her menses." *grin*

I've noticed that characters rarely go to the bathroom either - unless the bathroom has some specific function to the plot.

Well, true. There are some details that don't need to be written down 'cause they're irrelevant and boring. When they're not, though, they get mentioned: how to pee in a spacesuit. How about changing a tampon in a spacesuit? Never happens, does it, even on those two-day excursions?

I know some women have it easy. But does *every* female protagonist have to have menses so easy that they can swing a sword without worrying about it? Maybe they're all so undernourished that they don't bleed. That would explain why they have nothing to bury when trekking through woods filled with predators.

There are some details that don't need to be written down 'cause they're irrelevant and boring.

Yet we get told about every meal, bugs they see that interest them, and the colour of the sky. ;)

No, I do understand your point about irrelevant details, I just find it annoying when you follow a character for three days straight but not once is there a "went into the bushes for a minute" reference.

Then again maybe we're just weird for being bothered by non-references to things that most people don't refer to in everyday life either?

There are no bathrooms in most F&SF universes.

At least in the SF case, I rather hope that by the time we can build starships, we can also control body processes much better.

I doubt that. Consider that toilet paper is little better than a handful of leaves on a roll...

Having used leaves, I think toilet paper is a lot better! :)

One of the Beverly Cleary books addresses this issue. Maybe Ramona The Pest? A group of children are listening to that old kid's story about a steam shovel operator being read. One of the kids asks when he went to the bathroom. (What was that story called?)

One of the nice touches in this regard in Bujold's Vorkosigan novels is that Miles is *small* and so often ends up borrowing women's clothing -- and spacesuits, for short term use, "without the plumbing hookups". (Not in terribly much detail, but an acknowledgement of the issue...)

Yeah, a simple acknowledgement of something like that is enough to reassure the reader that the author's world is well-constructed.

For sci-fi stories, I just assumed that we had figured out a way to stop the biological clocks. So maybe you get one period when you start, and then no more until you are ready to have kids. Like in "Even the Queen" by Connie Willis (excellent story that deals with this).

For fantasy, if they live in a world with rubber, they could use a keeper (http://www.thekeeperinc.com/). It is great all the time, but especially when camping and whatnot.

Tamora Pierce--Alanna
Mercedes Lackey--Lark
Robin McKinley--Aerin

by Leigh Richards. Addresses monthly bloodtimes explicitely. Not to mention I'm really enjoying it in general.

Califia is someone I'd expect to "get it right". In a lot of ways!

No, it isn't by Califia. That's part of the title.

Long Hair: Realism

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Re: body processes

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spacesuit plumbing

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"Califia's Daughters"

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