On Being a Tomboy

 The topic of this post means a lot to me. It is something I have been struggling to come to terms with, spearhead, and deal with everyday over the last several years. It covers a topic that I have had to define as I grow into my "adult" self, as I navigate the turbulent waters of adulthood.  The topic is, broadly, what femininity is or isn't, and why and how that applies to one's every day life.

 

I was a pretty standard toddler/little girl. My favorite color was pink, and my favorite dress--which I called my "faggy" dress because kids say the weirdest shit--was white, capped sleeved, and covered in bows, ruffles, and lace. 

But after I outgrew my "faggy" dress, I felt a shift in me. I stopped liking the color pink because I actively decided that it was too prissy. Instead my favorite color became red, because it was more powerful and less dainty. To this day, it is still my favorite. I outgrew other accoutrements of girly-ness: dolls (that is probably a story worthy of its own blog post), playing house, "girly" toys such as fake dishes or food or makeup, and always pretending to be a princess. Instead I started finding myself more interested in more "boyish" toys, such as cars, legos, blocks, and the outdoors. I even still have a handful of my favorite cars from my childhood. I keep them as the chatchkis on my bookshelves and on my microwave.

The hatchback has been my favorite since I first ditched the color pink. Then there's a "Z120" that is supposed to be like the datsun Z240 I have always wanted, and in back there is a little 4runner. (I seized the engine on my beautiful doomsmobile of an '86 4runner on this last Saturday. sadface)

 

 

 Not pictured is the toy car a la fords with the suicide doors from the late 20s early 30s. FUCKING LOVE THOSE CARS. I rubberneck every time I see one on the road in real life.

But my ABSOLUTE favorite toy from this point of my childhood was actually this set of three plastic rats. I still have one, but I didn't feel like digging around for it to display on this blog, but when I have a real person job where I sit at my very own desk, it will undoubtedly be my little desk guardian. I fucking loved those rats. I genuinely cried tears of distraught grief when I lost the grey one of them as a little kid. For me, it was like losing a beloved pet. I took those things everywhere I could with me, so I am thoroughly amazed even one made it with me into adulthood. 

As I grew older, my three real hobbies were legos, reading, and clibing and/or building shit in trees. That's all I really wanted to do. Other than sports. The girliest physical activity I was in love with was double dutch, which to this day, I'm not gonna lie, I still kind of fucking rock at. But really, if I wasn't building intricate castles out of legos, I was reading a fantasy book marketed to kids older than myself. If I wasn't reading, I was outside, climbing up the flowering pear trees in NC or out exploring the chaparral in the middle coast of CA catching small lizards, all the while building what my mother always referred to as "Shanty Towns" in the trees because of my affinity to build myself a clubhouse with found materials. 

As I became too old for building shanty towns to really be an okay thing to do, I just biked. I would bike for hours and hours, easily clocking in 10-20 miles. In ND I found out there was a small BMX course on base and I would spend hours at it just trying to get more air, or jump across an entire hill the the small bumpy section. I started running track, after discovering in 6th grade that I LOVED running with all my heart. I learned volleyball, and eventually played on my high school's coed soccer team. I still run, and try to play a pick up game if the opportunity presents itself.

No matter what I was doing, I never questioned myself. I never stopped to ask if it was "okay" if a girl was doing what I was doing, I just did it. I didn't care that other girls were doing their hair, or putting on gaudy amounts of makeup, or trying to talk to boys in a way I didn't comprehend. I mean, I talked to boys--I talked to them about sports and climbing shit and cars--I didn't understand what all of the fuss was about. 

The first time I was forced to think about what was a "girly" thing to do and if it made me weird for not doing it was in 6th grade. I remember the girls in my PE class talking shit about the fact that I didn't shave my legs. I had never thought about it before. I had long been one of those scrawny kids with knobbly knees and I just never thought about my legs as being anything more than bike-pushers or scrape magnets. I don't remember how it went, but I ended up getting my first razor, but I was too fucking lazy and just flat out didn't care enough to shave my knees. I remember the whole month of girls in the locker room making such a fuss about the fact that I still hadn't shaved my knees. Thinking back, I probably did look a bit ridiculous, but a small part of me still doesn't really understand why it mattered so much to those girls.

My hair was the next big issue people started asking me about. When I was younger, I was aptly nicknamed "ragamuffin." My hair was this waist long train wreck that was affectionately called a rat's nest by my family. My "favorite" of their descriptions was that I always looked like someone drug me through a bush backwards. I guess that was semi appropriate since I was always climbing into the greenery and never used a ponytail holder for years, but still. I hated that. Then I got a bob in 5th grade, and as it slowly grew out I had to deal with my hair now that I had become unaccustomed to having it in my face all the time. I just threw it back in a low, sporty pony or, for a while, did this weird flipped out bun/braid combo thing that always left me with this spray of hair coming out of the back of my head. I don't think I could make it happen again in my life if I tried every day for the next five decades. But eventually, my chick friends got on my case about the weird way I wear my hair, and how it would be better pulled back into a high ponytail. I eventually learned, sort of, how to do more hairstyles, but again, it was an aspect of being a female I had never cared nor dealt with prior to being normalized by my peers.

The final, and most ridiculous, in my opinion, feminine concept I have been normalized into following, even if poorly, is painting my nails, but most specifically, my toenails. I never cared before...why should I? I was always wearing tennis shoes and climbing shit and had better things I could be doing with my time than bothering with my toes. Plus I chip the paint on my nails almost immediately, and I can't do anything for like 3 hours while it all dries....it is just a pain in the ass really. 

But apparently there is something so inherently feminine about painting your toenails that I have been chastised, sometimes more seriously than others, about the manliness of my feet. In fact, that is actually how I decided to date my high school boyfriend. 

He was over at my house during the summer between our sophomore and junior years of high school, and I was barefoot because it was my own damn house. He made some comment about how my unpainted toenails made my feet look too manly and how I should fix that. So I dared him: if he was willing to paint his nails I would paint mine. To his credit, he had the balls to do it. His toenails were purple and sparkly for like 3 months.

It has been commented on by good friends in college, and even by my only real romantic interest in college as well. I guess, somehow, me not caring enough to maintain my toenails in perfectly pedicured designs has proven me somewhat less of a female to some people? I still don't really understand.

 Since it has been SO desperately long, I did paint all my nails tonight. It was....fuck...before graduation that I last painted my toenails I think, and I last painted my fingernails before running out the hotel door to my friend's wedding a little over a month ago. To me that is really recent.

  

Clearly the ONLY way to spend your night in. Drink raspberry beer and huff nail polish.

Expect please don't actually huff anything. Especially nail polish.

 

 Yes, I do in fact have hobbit toes. I don't give a Fuck--and I think that is cat fur stuck on the paint. Lovely.

 

 

Somehow hot pink and rose gold combined to make Barbie Pink (TM) haha.

For real though, in the flash it isn't quite the same, but in the yellowy light of my room it looks like Barbie vomited on my fingers after a night of hard Ke$ha style partying. 

There's one part of my life that, at least from the outside, never stopped being "girly" or at least feminine: fashion.

I genuinely miss that outfit. I loved it so fucking much. I recently found a similar incarnation of the same geometric color blocking style in a dress on modcloth. Fuck yes.

While I gave up playing house and never did start planning my wedding while in 5th grade like most of the other girls I knew, I never did give up dress up. Or paying silent attention of the fashion of movies, shows, and street life. But that was because fashion was to me, like I have begun to realize it is for many tomboys, all about the expressions of self and of power. I knew and understood that. In college the first student group I became involved with was the fashion club where I met a half a dozen other tomboys all finally expressing their closeted fashionistas in a manner that displayed our real understanding of fashion: design and power.

I think that is why people have had a hard time accepting that I am not a really feminine person. People have become accustomed to believing that girls that like fashion are "girlier" and more feminine, but I just am not like that. They try to place me into this idea that because I like fashion and am almost more comfortable walking in 6" heels than flats, I should also be the kind of girl know the name of the bakery where I will by my wedding cake, be damned if I don't actually have a man stupid enough to go through that ritual with me yet.  But in reality, I understand the kind of message a certain combination of colors, cuts, and patterns display and I like to use that to my advantage.

I've been told by many people over my life, but most--I want to say painfully, or regretfully, or something--annoyingly (maybe?) by the only two long term friendboys I have ever had that I am not feminine enough for them. I don't know if that means that I am just some troll running around emasculating guys, or if that just means that we haven't become a society where it is okay for a girl to not be feminine yet still be straight yet.

Moreover, one of them tried to tell me for several months that he believed he had somehow taken away a large part of my femininity. I never managed to make him understand that it is impossible to remove from someone something they never had. And that it wasn't a matter of myself not being aware of something I had and him taking it from me--in some sort of illogical metaphysical cat burglary I guess--but that I honestly have never had, felt, or even wanted, let alone comprehended.

  I have never really been feminine. I don't care for it. I am more at home with a tool set than I am gossiping, or owning a bajillion pink colored things, or doing my hair. For fuck's sake I don't even own a hair dryer. I kind of fucking hate the millions of scented lotions I have been given as gifts from people who think that all girls love that kind of feminine crap, and I wish more people understood that I really, really, really have never had the intention of getting married. It isn't that I just have to wait to find the right person. I just want my career. And my cats haha. 

But really though, this is as much of a problem of over pervasive heteronormativity as any of the other issues my generation has been fighting on behalf of. Can we, for the sake of us tomboys and every other non binary fitting person, just dump these stupid expectations?