hair symbols

[egypturnash]

I think about weird things in the shower sometimes.

There's this oft-seen convention in furry art: girls have human-like hair in addition to the pelt that covers their whole body, while boys just have shortish fur everywhere. It's not just a matter of letting the fur grow long on the head; it gets handled in an entirely different matter, with strongly-contrasting color to the rest of the fur.

Now, of course, this is really just an encoding of human culture: women are encouraged to have long hair, men are encouraged to have short or no hair; it gets abstracted. And yes, there are many people who don't use this stylization, preferring human hair on both genders, or smooth pelt on the head of both genders. But it's a pretty common stylization nonetheless.

Imagine how much it must suck to be a gender-blender in a culture of creatures with that hair pattern. You can't just grow your hair long and look femmy, or cut it short and look butch... either you have hair, or you don't, and you have to cut short and dye to match your fur, or put on a wig. So much for casual drift! And what troubles would transsexuals have? Would hormone therapy alter the hair follicles, making female hair slow down into fur and male fur speed up its growth into hair? Or would they be stuck with this huge, obvious symbol of their birth gender?

I think about weird things in the shower sometimes.

Comments

[fourprint.livejournal.com]

And presumably the opposite applies for lions.

A while back I had a female cheetah muck character, but with no head-hair beyond the standard fuzz - a rather butch little accent on a generally feminine appearance and manner. And of course, now that I think of it, she was biologically male. :D

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

*grin* Yay for genderfuck!

On a muck, of course, people go by the pronouns. Which gives rise to another interesting thought experiment - how would people react to a character whose name implicitly said 'female' who used male pronouns?

Mary_Vixen covers his mouth as he yawns.

---

I was thinking more about the implications in a society where the head-hair thing is pretty standard across everyone; on mucks, some boys have it, some don't, some girls do, some don't, all depending on what their player likes. It'd be like the conservative reaction to long male hair or butch girl hair ten times over. Or like tits on a man or a beard on a woman!

[403.livejournal.com]

So far, I've met a female character who goes by 'Larthan' and a male who's chosen to name themself 'Sestra'. It's not uncommon for people to confuse their genders (I've known Larthan for more than a year now, and still sometimes find myself thinking of them as male.)

[dingybatty.livejournal.com]

Not weird.. I was pondering the same thoughts this morning in Art History.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

you stole my mind!!!!!

[dingybatty.livejournal.com]

And I ate your soul!!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

OPh, that's fine, I sold it long ago anyway.

[paka.livejournal.com]

I figure the "hair" convention is mostly due to trying to hide clunky neck mechanics in trying to join a non-human styled head to a human body.

On a less superficial level, I figure a "real" society of anthropomorphics would vary as far as hair goes, by whether people had inherited human styled hair patterns from human ancestors. Lions, hyenas, horses and a few others would be the big exceptions.

I'd assume that much like the real world, occasionally you'd have to guess gender and you'd get it totally wrong. Eg; from behind, can you guess the gender of that horse with the beautiful, elaborately braided mane? is the deep-voiced person on the phone a male wolf, or a female rottweiler?

[hydra-velsen.livejournal.com]

I'm all for sexual ambiguity! That's become rather a kink of mine. Pasting a huge set of tatties or long hair to make something obviously female takes the fun out of it.

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

Yeah! More bald women and more long haired men! That is what this world needs!

Or am I just going overboard? :')

Hair often makes a statement. That statement is always "fuck you."

[(Anonymous)]

Think of ten different hairstyles, just off the top of...I mean, pick the first ten that come to mind. Now consider: why would people wear them? Who would those styles piss off?

Hippies. Punks. Skinheads. Mullets. Pony-tails. Flat-tops. Corn rows. Mohawks. Afros. Buzzcuts. Dreadlocks. The difficulty is in trying to find a hairstyle that isn't meant to offend some segment of the population, be it inside the mainstream or out.

If hair says anything at all, it says "fuck you." Different styles result from different meanings of "you."

--The Age of Aquariums.

[slinky-treecat.livejournal.com]

I have that situation come up in a comic I'm working on; an intersexed character who's a girl at the start of the story complains about her 'mane' not growing in properly, which leads to her eventually changing genders, moving to a new town and living a male life. It's more complicated than that, and the story starts up after the move, but it's a world where, as you describe, the males have no human-like hair but the women do. It is a bit of an odd commonality amongst furry folk.. perhaps in the absense of the ability to show the more subtle facial structures suggesting femininity due to fur, animal face structure and the like, many people opt for long hair on females to help carry the gender message. Kind of like a pink bow on Minnie Mouse.

Have you ever noticed that most female animal characters in animated films are coloured lighter than the males?

[ilthuain.livejournal.com]

Pandemonium is one of the greatest tunes of our time.

You're a good manwoman, Peggy. I raise a glass to salute you.