This is one of the custom blogs I do for my facebook friends. I asked if there was anything they wanted me to blog about, and I’m writing a post for Rachel because she answered.
The difficulties of not being a stereotypical woman who is obsessed with make-up and clothes and watching other stereotypical women on tv. I have a hard time relating to most women because I don’t give two shits about eye shadow and most of my shirts are t-shirts.
Oh. My. God. Rachel, you minx, it’s like you read my fucking mind.
I’ve actually been trying on and off to write a blog about this for years (real talk). All my attempts just ended up sounding like those college sophomores on tumblr who call themselves “non-binary,” but what they really mean is ‘I’m majoring in Social Studies.’ Which is fine, Social Studies is just as valid a gender expression as whatever the fuck anybody else is selling. I’m just saying, that’s not really me.
It took me a really long time to realize that other women weren’t completely faking their femininity and just doing a massively better job at it than I was. I seriously thought that everybody was more in the middle, like me, and that for some reason I just missed the lesson where somebody sat all the girls and all the boys in separate rooms and told them what they each were supposed to be and like. And not for lack of trying on my parents’ part. All the baby dolls and barbies sat in milk crates in my room while I begged for a remote control truck, and played with micro machines trucks, and talked about my future truck, and the only barbie accessory I appreciated was the little jeep, because it’s truckness overshadowed it’s pinkness.
I didn’t really get it when other little girls would talk about their weddings, or their future children. That seemed weird to me. I never wanted to be any female heroes from TV, in fact I kind of hated all of them because they were whiny and dumb, with the exception of Wonder Woman. I was clumsy and frequently dirty. I loved mud, and climbing and making loud noises in that order. I’ve grown out of the mud-love, but that’s about it. Even when the other tomboys I knew started to get interested in feminine things, I couldn’t be bothered. Although I do admit I did develop an interest in clothes and fashion in my early teens, but that was thanks to DIY punk rock, and had nothing to do with being girly.
All my life I’ve been mistaken for a lesbian. On the one hand, that’s cool, there are some pretty great lesbians in the world. On the other hand, I felt like I was broken because I had this dikey attitude but I liked boys and I wanted boys to like me. Which, if you haven’t tried, approaching terrified middle and high school boys in the same way that they approach terrified middle and high school girls will not get you laid. At least not if you dress like a dude and view physical challenges as flirting. Oh childhood me, what a mess you were.
As an adult, there are things about women that I don’t think I’ll ever understand. Just about every single “women act like this; men act like this” joke fails to apply to me. Nearly every time anybody makes a generalization about women, I fall clearly outside of it. I’m not warm, or understanding, or nurturing. I’m frequently either distant or aggressive. I need to be able to retreat into my own head sometimes, and I am not really interested in emotional intimacy. Although I have learned over the years how important it is to regular emotional functioning.
The fact that there were no women like me on TV or in literature growing up was really hard. It reinforced the message I was already getting at home and at school that I didn’t belong. Most of my alienation had nothing to do with my boyishness, I came from a home where there was physical abuse, where my parents weren’t really in the picture at all, and where I was very clearly unwanted for a host of reasons that had nothing to do with my personality, good, bad or indifferent. I could have been the most delicate princess ever and it probably wouldn’t have made a lick of difference to my angry, violent grandfather. In fact, life probably would have been a lot worse if I wasn’t so hearty.
It’s been suggested to me before that the reason I’m “overly masculine” is because of my tough upbringing, but I don’t think that’s really all of it. I remember seeing how my grandmother and mother were mistreated by men, and I swore that I would never share their weakness. But it wasn’t their femininity that got them into trouble, it was their dependence. So I used the tools I had in order to ensure self-sufficiency in whatever way I could. Did that make me more butch than I would have been in a loving home? There’s no way to know.
That got dark fast. Then again, isn’t that kind of my specialty? Anyway, hooray for tomboys!
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