Long Hair Is Feminine: Difference between revisions

[[File:LongHairFeminine 4975.jpg|link=Sleeping Beauty (Disney film)|frame|Lovely hair for a lovely [[Princess]].]]

 

 

Long hair tends to be among the [[Tertiary Sexual Characteristics]] used to establish a character as female.

 

Contrast [[Boyish Short Hair]].

 

* ''[[Mazinger Z]]'': Most of the female characters wore long hair: Sayaka, Misato, Erika, Hitomi, the Gamia sisters... Sayaka even wore [[Hair Decorations]] (a pink headband). Of course, it was considered a girl seemed more feminine like that. In ''[[Great Mazinger]]'', Jun—and even a villainess like Marquis Janus—wore also long hair. It was kind of subverted in ''[[UFO Robo Grendizer]]'', though: Hikaru—a feminine [[Yamato Nadeshiko]]—wore short hair, and her best friend Maria—a [[Tsundere]] tomboy—wore long, curly hair.

* In ''[[Samurai High School]]'', when Tsukiko decided to enter school as a boy, she considered cutting her hair but her brother said it'd not be necessary. Just holding it in a ponytail would be enough. He was right. Also, he wore a wig to pose as his sister.

 

* In the [[The Sandman]] story "A Game of You", the [[Transsexualism|transwoman]] Wanda has long red hair that, according to her friend Barbie, she is rather proud of. {{spoiler|When she dies, her family, who never accepted her as a woman, have her buried with short hair as part of their erasure of her female identity.}}

 

* In most fanfics which feature a male character [[Gender Bender|turning female]], said character will automatically get long hair. Because hair length is clearly determined by the presence of two "X" chromosomes.

 

* The Disney Channel movie ''Motorcrossed'' had a girl cut her hair short to make her look identical to her twin brother.

* The [[Milla Jovovich]] version of ''Joan of Arc'' has Joan annoyed that the soldiers aren't taking her seriously because she's a woman, so she hacks off her hair in the hope that she'll be considered as one of the men.

* In ''[[The Brothers Grimm (film)|The Brothers Grimm]]'', one of the village children is mistaken for a boy because she had short hair while all the other little girls had flowing long hair.

 

* Fantine in ''[[Les Misérables]]'' is heartbroken to have to sell her hair — her crowning beauty, which [[Rapunzel Hair|falls all the way to her hips]] and [[Hair of Gold|is a beautiful blond color]] — but she does it without a second thought to earn money for her daughter, Cosette.

* Della, in ''[[The Gift of the Magi]]'', has hair falling almost to her knees. She [[It Was His Sled|has it cut]], obviously, and frets that now she looks like a "Coney Island Chorus Girl".

* One short children's book (the name escapes this troper) dealt with a girl lamenting over her shortened hair making her look like a boy after a haircut. The trope is [[Inverted]] when she meets a contruction worker with long blond [[Compressed Hair]] who reminds her that hair length doesn't make the gender.

 

* In ''[[Veronica Mars]]'', the Veronica of flashbacks, when she was a fairly stereotypical high school girl, has long hair; present-day Veronica, having become a [[Guile Hero]] by way of [[Break the Cutie]], favors a much shorter, more severe cut.

* An episode of ''Chicago Hope'' had a subplot about a boy who had been raised as a girl. When s/he found out, s/he cut off all his long hair to look more like a boy.

* Morgana, Guinevere and Morgause from ''[[Merlin (TV series)|Merlin]]'' (as well as most of the female guest stars) all have beautiful long, shiny, styled hair.

 

* [[Hello, Nurse!|Princess Voluptua]] in ''[[The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob]]'' has [[Rapunzel Hair]] that [http://bobadventures.comicgenesis.com/VolTurn.html spills down to the floor.]

** Tedd keeps his hair long [http://www.egscomics.com/?date=2008-05-05 because of this trope] as it distracts people from his naturally feminine face and gets them to blame his hair for his looking feminine. At least, [[Insane Troll Logic|according to Tedd it does]].

* Most [[Rage Comics]] faces are drawn without hair and assumed to be male by default. When an author wants to indicate a character as female, they simply add shoulder-length hair (with a [[Hair Decorations]]) to the corresponding rage face.

* [[Minus]] invokes this [http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus36.html here]—she is mistaken for a boy, and consequently grows her hair (previously a bowl cut) long and wavy, wears an ankle-length dress, adds [[Hair Decorations|a bow]], [[Pink Means Feminine|pink]], to her [[Idiot Hair]], gives herself [[Fertile Feet]], and makes a couple butterflies for good measure.

 

 

* In ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'', Katara, the first prominent female character, is the only girl in the core cast whose hair is long and worn down (if not loose, i.e. braided) at all times. Katara is also the most mothering, nurturing and feminine of the cast — in addition to being the [[Love Interest]]. [[Cute Bruiser|Toph]] and [[Manipulative Bitch|Azula]] both have long hair that is almost always up, and [[Action Girl|Suki]] has short hair.

* Played straight with most female human characters from the [[Disney Animated Canon]] films, but subverted with [[Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney film)|Snow White]], [[Cinderella (Disney film)|Cinderella]], and [[The Princess and the Frog|Tiana]], who all sport [[Bob Haircut|bobbed hair]] (most likely because the first two were both given hairstyles corresponing to [[The Thirties|the]] [[The Fifties|decades]] their respective films were released in, and the third to match [[The Roaring Twenties|the time period]] her film takes place in), as well as [[Mulan]] and [[Tangled|Rapunzel]], who both start out with long hair, but inevitably have their hair cut short.

* Inverted with [[Tomboy and Girly Girl|Jessica and Emilie]] in ''[[Wheel Squad]]''. Jessica has the longest hair of the duo and is so much of a tomboy that, when she entered a figure skating contest and some of her rivals said she had no chance for not being feminine, her friends weren't able to say she was.

 

* The ultimate expression of this trope: The [[wikipedia:File:Pioneer plaque.svg|Pioneer plaque]], meant to show aliens what humans look like, depicts a man with short hair and a woman with long hair.

* Nuns entering a convent would cut their hair off as a sign of them giving up their femininity to serve God.