“Candy” and “Leg Hair” in Outlander

There is a habit within the Outlander fandom of renaming two female characters. The first I’ll discuss is Sandy, who was having a long affair with Frank and is called “Candy” by Claire and often by fans. The other is Laoghaire, who has a laundry list of complexities, issues, and wrongdoings, and is often renamed “Leg Hair” by fans. Now, if you are someone who does this, please don’t think of any of this as a call-out. It’s a question, and maybe even a plea, to rethink that habit. I hope you’ll follow me through it.

The first is Sandy. Let me say that I have no problem with Claire calling her “Candy” within the story. It makes sense for the character; biting, angry, a little sexist in referring to the woman her husband is sleeping with by a name that has immense stereotypical connotations. But all that works with Claire because she’s lashing out. It’s really easy to hop on the Sandy-hate train, though, and I think the fandom is better than that.

It’s important to remember several things about the character of Sandy. First, it isn’t the responsibility of the “other woman” to keep the marriage vows of another couple. Is it morally perfect for her to be involved with a married man? Of course not. But she didn’t break the vows: Frank did. In our society, we’re taught to blame the woman, no matter what part of the mess she’s in, but it’s Frank who did the cheating, and if Sandy danced naked on his desk covered in whipped cream, that’s still Frank’s fault alone.

What’s also integral about Sandy’s character is that she was being emotionally manipulated and abused by Frank, just like Claire. Sandy starts off as Frank’s student. That immediately puts this into dangerous if not outright abuse territory even from the outset. If their relationship began when he was her teacher, the power differential makes it completely out of bounds. There is no way to have a healthy relationship when one party has power over the other, and something like grades, academic success, or even reputation within the college, is a pretty big bargaining chip. This would be the 50s at Harvard, and a girl sleeping with a professor was absolutely the one who would get the blame.

Moreover, even if the relationship started after they were student-teacher, she was still around. The setting, the context, didn’t change much. She worked under him, another power differential, and likely some sort of grooming started when she was a student even if a physical relationship hadn’t yet. Frank undoubtedly used his position in that relationship because it’s impossible not to, impossible for her not to feel the weight of that power gap, at least at times, and the danger to her if things were exposed. Granted, it might be dangerous for Frank, too, but it’s almost a guarantee that in the 1950s, they were going to be significantly easier on the respected male professor than they were on the pretty, blonde young woman who some didn’t even think should be attending college at that time.

Further, Frank’s emotional abuse is clearly laid out when Sandy confronts Claire after Frank’s death. We know what Frank told Sandy by the accusations she hurls. Sandy believes Frank was trapped in a loveless marriage with a wife who wouldn’t let him go. Of course that’s the story he sold the woman he was manipulating into his bed. He would never be honest that he was the one who didn’t want the divorce, that he was holding onto Claire for his own selfish, bitter anger and the hollow joy of twisting her guilt and continuing to force her not to look for the man she loves. Of course Frank isn’t going to tell her that. So he manipulates. He gives some sob story to Sandy, who is in a vulnerable position as a student, and she starts to fall for this version Frank presents. Sandy is abused, manipulated, and relegated to the role of villain in her own life. She’s judged, stereotyped, and discarded, without even acknowledgement and indeed a lot of hatred thrown her way for the years she spent dealing with the abuse of and attempting to love a manipulative, broken, man.

So let’s call the woman by her real name, at least.

Now I’ll move onto Laoghaire.

I’ll start with the disclaimer that “Laoghaire” is hard to spell. I might even get it wrong on my page, even in this article. So there is, perhaps, some reason behind why one my shorten her name. And in fact, I have little to no problem with a phonetic spelling of her name (I’ve seen a lot of “Leery”); she’s a character, after all, and not a real person, so spelling and pronouncing her name right isn’t quite as integral is it always is with people in our real lives.

But I think it trains us. Fiction is one of the ways we learn to engage with the world and, particularly, to engage and empathize with people different from us. Pronouncing the names that seem “hard” just because they are not familiar to a usually white or culturally white-centered population is not only important but absolutely paramount. Too often, marginalized peoples have been forced to give up their names in order to make it easier on the people around them, and that is an indignity no one should have to suffer. Now, Laoghaire isn’t an ethnic minority or POC. She isn’t marginalized in that way, but the habits we get into when we read are important because they’re real world practice.

Laoghaire is, however, a woman. In fact, another young, blonde woman like Sandy who does what she does for what she perceives as love. Laoghaire does far worse things with it and certainly goes through a different lived experience than Sandy, but the parallels are at least outlined between the two if we care to draw them. And perhaps foremost among that is that society has trained us to love cutting down a pretty blonde woman, and especially a pretty blonde woman who has seduced the brunette main character’s husband, boyfriend, love interest, etc.

The fandom hates Laoghaire, hates her with a vitriol I understand. At one time, I hated Laoghaire with a vehemence to match almost any other character in Outlander other than perhaps Black Jack. But honestly, my empathy for her has increased immensely, and my hope is to articulate why.

To be fair, Laoghaire tried to have Claire killed. That’s bad, and there’s no excusing it. But taking it from her perspective, the boy she has been in love with since she was seven years old waltzes back into her life. He’s her knight in shining armor, saving her not only from a beating but unbelievable public humiliation as well. Laoghaire is swept off her feet, as I think any one of us would have been at sixteen and likely most or all of us would be now, at any age. Gorgeous Jamie Fraser is her hero, and then he gets to kissing her. Maybe Laoghaire initiated, maybe Jamie did, but either way, he is into it. Since we’re following Claire and we know what’s coming, we understand that Jamie’s heart is elsewhere. But his lips are firmly planted on Laoghaire’s face. And honestly, that would be more than enough to convince me at twenty-three that he was at least pretty into me, let alone at sixteen.

She doesn’t even miss the obvious signs that Jamie is into Claire, so she shows a bit of self-awareness in that. She’s not lying to herself, but taking the evidence laid out and trying to make sense of it. Laoghaire goes to Claire asking for a love potion to turn Jamie’s heart. She knows he wants her body, but he doesn’t care for her heart and mind. That’s a rough thing to know at sixteen, and something that might make you bitter. To be used by an older guy — Jamie is twenty-three here, so a guy who is out of college age and a girl who should still be in high school…though times were a little different it’s still not great — just for her body is not a fun, and really not an okay, thing. Laoghaire is wounded, and goes to Claire for help. She trusts Claire.

Then, a few weeks later, Jamie waltzes back into her life, married to the woman Laoghaire trusted to help her win the heart of this man. Laoghaire looks to an older woman to help guide her in matters of the heart, and not only is that trust stolen away, it’s stomped on when, from Laoghaire’s perspective, this woman swoops in and steals her man. At sixteen, I counted boys I had a crush on — let alone kissed — as off limits to anyone who called themselves my friend. Again, Laoghaire doesn’t have all the details, and, again, being fair to Laoghaire, Jamie doesn’t really give them to her. All she knows it what’s she’s told, and what she sees, which is Jamie and Claire in the middle of a fight and barely speaking to one another.

So Laoghaire throws herself at him, a move that honestly takes a lot of bravery. She’s young and in love and puts herself out there. Yes, Jamie’s married, but she thinks solely out of duty. The fandom tends to hate her for this, but I think it shows the depth of feeling in her. It shows the woman she could be if she was cared for, guided, cultivated, instead of used and discarded.

Jamie rejects her, as gently as he can, but it definitely comes across that he’s tempted. Whether or not he actually is, if I’m Laoghaire, I read tempted into that exchange. I read that he’s still into me, even though he never has been more than just as a distraction, but all the evidence from Laoghaire’s point of view has led her to believe that he has at least some interest, and that maybe they could have been together if Claire hadn’t swooped in, totally broke girl code, and taken him for herself. Again, all from Laoghaire’s perspective.

Granted, she does some indefensible things. One, really, because putting an ill wish under their bed is a very relatable teen girl move. Then she tries to get Claire burned as a witch. Yikes. Where she really starts to lose sympathy for me is in her testimony, though I think there’s some mitigating circumstances there as well. She’s an active participant in the trial, but there’s a reason minors are held to different standards than adults. Her brain actually isn’t done growing. She can’t fully wrap her head around the consequences of her actions. It of course doesn’t make them any more right, and she fully intends for Claire to die so she can have Jamie. There isn’t really any excuse for that. But there is, perhaps, a little bit of empathy for a teen girl who has had her trust ripped apart not only by Jamie, but by Claire. It’s not defensible, but it is, at least a little, understandable.

To be fair, it also seems like Laoghaire really does think Claire is a witch. She went to her for the love potion that didn’t work, unsurprisingly because Laoghaire discovers Claire wanted Jamie all to herself. Laoghaire uses the ill wish, apparently still believing in the power of spells. From her foolish and limited perspective, like the people around her, she does seem to actually think Claire is a practioner of the dark arts. It’s also a way for a brokenhearted Laoghaire to justify why the man who by all rights seemed very into her turned suddenly around and is now in love with this woman who — again remembering that she’s sixteen in 1743 — is old and spoiled goods. It would probably not make a lot of sense to a sixteen year old virgin with a broken heart, and witchcraft is a good scapegoat. Again, it’s not good and not right, but maybe makes her actions at least slightly more understandable. She’s working within an existing system that puts Claire’s life at risk for flimsy, ridiculous evidence. Laoghaire was a more than willing participant, but she definitely didn’t do it alone.

Of course, she spends the rest of her life in a lot of trauma. We don’t know exactly what happens to her, but by the time she marries Jamie, she’s been hurt, physically and emotionally and sexually. She’s been raising two daughters on her own, and when she finally gets the man she’s loved all these years, they’re both so different as to be unrecognizable to themselves, let alone each other. In the books, we even discover that Jamie calls out for Claire in his sleep. Again, from Laoghaire’s perspective, that is unbelievably hurtful. She can’t compete with a dead woman, and has been abused her whole life into a bitterness that makes emotional growth really unlikely and life incredibly difficult.

So all of that is really just to remind us that Laoghaire is a person. That alone deserves some basic human decency. She’s also a young girl responding from hurt and fear, and a woman responding from years of trauma and pain.

For almost every person I talk to, Laoghaire is in their top 3 of, if not their #1, most hated characters in Outlander. Yes, she tries to kill Claire, but honestly there’s a pretty long list of people who have that dubious honor. Significantly more have tried to kill Jamie. So why is Laoghaire the one everyone hates on? Even of the other female characters who have done terrible things, over Geneva, who raped Jamie, over Geillis who raped Ian and tried to kill Bree? What is it about Laoghaire that we so hate on a gut level? It’s a message that runs deep in pop culture, a lesson ingrained in us from a young age, and I think we see that come out in one of it’s most vitriolic forms in the hate on Laoghaire. And where the biggest cultural element of this comes in is this dark desire we have to watch the destruction of the archetype of the pretty, slutty, blonde cheerleader. It’s been ingrained in us over decades of pop culture that gets us to root for the hot blondes to get cut down to size, if not simply taken out for the sin of being pretty and mean. We watch Regina George get hit by a bus. We watch the Heathers get taken out one by one. In just about every single show or movie that has a high school or high school reunion, there’s the pretty mean girl who had it all. And we love to watch her fall.

We want to hate Laoghaire. She’s a symbol of what culture tells young women not to be. She’s sexually forward, namely, and she has the fault of being blonde. Media tends to hate on blondes, and viciously stereotype them as stupid, mercenary, slutty, and not worth our empathy or respect. At least until they get knocked down a peg or two. It’s a vile hatred that’s been engendered inside us since we were children that makes it so satisfying to watch a girl like Laoghaire get her comeuppance.

And of course, what that looks like in Outlander is that she was raped and she got fat. It’s an attack on her femininity specifically, especially in the books. The body, the sexuality, that made us hate her at the beginning, that tempted Jamie, even momentarily, away from the smart brunette we’re allied with, are stripped away from her. She was hurt by one of her husbands so sex terrifies her, which feels like very specific punishment for the way she was sexually forward when she was young. Which, by the way, she was going to get beaten for, so her sexuality has over and over again been punished because she was doing it outside of marriage. Laoghaire is left as a caricature of what every man fears that perfect, blonde, high school cheerleader will turn into: a bitter, nagging shrew whose best days were in her teenage years. It’s misogyny through and through, and so often, it’s internalized so that we as women are the ones most often calling for her head.

And I can’t help but think it so disturbingly fitting that the moniker she’s given when we’re at our heights of hate and disrespect is “Leg Hair,” yet another misogynistic attack on femininity itself.

You can still not like Laoghaire. You can still not like Sandy. This isn’t about “like” or “dislike,” but about empathy and respect. It’s about training ourselves in fiction to do better in the real world. Really, my argument is simple. Sandy and Laoghaire are complex. Neither are perfect, but let’s stop the patriarchy in it’s tracks in getting women to disrespect other women. Let’s call them by their names.