Tomboys Grow Up

The past rhymes with the future. Always.

When I was a child my favorite games were those played outside with a certain amount of mystery and imaginary play associated with them. This means, me and my friends would play out the scenario that we were kids running away from home and having to survive in the wild. Other times, we would divide ourselves into two groups to play scavenger hunts where one team left first and the other group needed to find the first by following signs and clues the other team had left.

We built huts out of branches in the wood and we climbed trees. We would take our bikes and ride around from morning to the time it got dark. We jumped into puddles or across creeks and sometimes our boots would get stuck in the mud in the fields and we had to walk home in our sock feet carefully anticipating our mothers’ yelling at us for being careless.

I did not play with barbies or dolls. I had one. But I never really liked her. I never volunteered for babysitting. The only time I was ever asked to, I basically spent my time reading a book in a corner and ignoring the kid I was supposed to watch. Needless to say that I was not hired back.

I was a tomboy.

But so were the majority of girls when I grew up. I think there was a time in the 80s and 90s were girls finally were set free. The expectation to act girly was just not set for us. We could wear jeans, hair short or in a ponytail, just wearing a T-shirt. Nobody really cringed when we played soccer with the boys. My mom dressed me in boy’s lederhosen and she kept my hair short until I was about 9 years old; it was just too fine to wear long and I was not the best at brushing it anyways.

My grandmother was occasionally concerned, because I just had not learned to peel potatoes at age 10. And my sewing was sub par. And one of my aunts was really appalled that I joined the first official girl’s soccer team in my region. “Soccer is a boy sport.”

But we all recognized that these sentiments were becoming outdated and more and more extinct. At least that is what we thought when I graduated Highschool in the 90s.

I noticed a concerning trend first time in the 2000s which I initially attributed to moving to the US. I became a first time mother to a girl in 2005 and the expectation to dress her girly was so much higher than what I remember from my own childhood. I just assumed that the US was just more sexist than Germany. Not true. I did not realize a trend towards rigorous gender expression was forming in the West in general.

I addressed my concerns by telling friends and family not to buy “pink” for my daughter. And I dressed my daughter in blues and jeans and encouraged multiple different activities from gymnastics, to martial arts, to soccer. I was somewhat successful to give her options. She became a girly girl, but she also is not shy to explore more masculine traits. She is studying coastal environmental science and small vessel operations at a small college whose student body is primarily male. She is doing just fine. I am proud of her for finding her way.

When I look at the currently most active podcasters and media celebrities that are somewhat my age like Megyn Kelly or Heather Heying, they almost all claim to have been a tomboy in their childhood, but now they are devoted mothers and in all honesty dress and look more feminine than the majority of women I know. There is a parallel in how they portrait their childhood compared to how they live their life today: unapologetically being themselves and working in an area of interest to them. Not shying away from backlash and criticism.

I do believe that the girls in my generation (Gen X) were given a gift. We were allowed to explore our areas of interests and we did not have to remove the roadblocks to play with boys or study in a normally male dominated field that girls in previous generations faced. We got a hall pass, a choice, that allowed us to become strong women. Feminism had worked for us. It had not morphed into the joke it is today.

I wish we would have stopped feminism just then and there. At a high note. I strongly believe that activism desperately needs an expiration date. Solve a problem, then leave.

Instead we let it chase its own tail and consume itself.

Where does it leave us now, the last true tomboys the world has seen? I am saying the last tomboys, as we are the last girls that were not asked to pick a side: girly girl or masculine boy. Girls today are pressed into a binary that is hard to escape and the third alternative of going non-binary is just a trap that too many girls fall into just to avoid the negative consequences of being a girly girl.

What are negative consequences? Thanks to the push to the two stereotypical extreme existences between boy and girl, being a girl has been associated with a lot of undesirable traits: being submissive, doing the majority of house chores, needing to be pretty with lots of make up, wearing dresses, being objected to cat calling, being a sexual object… Very few women and girls would sign up for this. This is why feminism broke women out of this stereotypical existence to begin with. When girls see this living as an extreme stereotype as the only option, is it a surprise that so many opt into alternative identities when they are presented to them? I think not.

When feminism married intersectionality and everything became a conversation around gender expression and the identity category one must fit in. Doors we previously just shut were opened again just to let men into spaces that were supposed to keep women safe.

Tomboys have a hard time in this new world. They now have to share a space with boys no matter what they do. They essentially are asked to leave the female space and join the male when they are seen as too masculine presenting or their female space is diluted with males thinking they are girls. There is no escape. Given these options it is relatively clear that they will make a choice that will hurt them.

We have seen the rise and the fall of the tomboy.

I think it is time to reflect and speak out about where do we want to go from here? We need women and girls that can cross the barrier between male and female to create understanding between the two groups. We need women and girls that can make male friends without having to include “benefits”. Women want choices that allow them to work jobs they love while still being just that a woman and a mother. We want choices not limitations. We do not want to be pressed into a narrow category.

The era of true choice for women was very short lived. It basically only lasted a generation. We Gen X females are unique that way.

We lived it.

It is sad to see that things can change so drastically in so little time.