Why girls should be tomboys Not all male characteristics are toxic

Instead, I was privy to their locker room talk. They would often tease each other about whom they had bedded the night before and laugh about the way the girl would wake up hoping for more commitment, more connection, more promises of care. Though I see only now that the guys were also afraid of the risks involved in love. Their mockery often concealed a lurking fear and resentment of their own need for female affection, a threat to their independence and autonomy. But I had a secret terror of becoming one of these girls, of being treated casually, of feeling unvalued. There are differences in how young women and young men respond to the risks of intimacy. As a woman, I was afraid that I might become callous and disillusioned, or wounded and hurt. The promises of the sexual revolution that offered freedoms and pleasures without guilt held little appeal for me. It wasn’t guilt I wanted to avoid, it was the self-protective cynicism that disappointments often lead to. I wanted to avoid the sexual marketplace altogether. Shedding my femininity was the easiest way to do this.

But it wasn’t just because of the influence of men that I became a tomboy. Women, too, in ways that are subtle, judge other women, especially pretty ones, with preconceived notions that I was keen to avoid. Young pretty women are sometimes seen as superficial, as dumb, as less serious than a type of woman who covers up her attractiveness by appearing to not care about her looks. Young women often earn social points with other women for having a type of look that loudly says, “I’m not vain, and not pandering to socially constructed expectations of beauty.” Baggy clothes become a sign of ethical enlightenment. Not wearing make-up a signal that one has inner beauty. That this style is itself carefully cultivated, an exercise of moral vanity, often seems to be lost on young woman. Cutting off my hair as a young woman was taking this aesthetic one step further. It was a decisive striking out against the femininity of my teenage years and a clear signal to those around me that I was not to be confined by gender expectations. (It was the late Nineties. I shudder to think of what I may have been tempted to cut off were I to be in my late-teens now.)

At any rate, it worked. Immediately I was taken more seriously by my professors, by my friends, by guys and by girls. I was seen as tough and as independent. And the more I was seen as tough and independent, the more I became tough and independent. We tend to become the person we pretend to be.

There were three aspects to the change in my appearance that seem to be absent from today’s discourse on young women and gender, all of them related. The first was that I had a deep and genuine affection for men and for masculinity. I had no interest in correcting their “toxic” attitudes and humour. I had no desire to domestic their behaviours. I adored their swagger. I loved their courage. I delighted in their jokes, their irreverence, their ridicule. The second is that virginity was a concept that had not yet been entirely corrupted by the accusation that “The Patriarchy” employed it as a weapon to keep women controlled and confined. And the last was that though I wanted to push against convention, this push was aimed at enlarging what it meant to be a woman rather than what it meant to be merely “gendered”.

I am often surprised, and troubled, now by how quickly a young woman will abandon being a woman because she isn’t at home in the stereotypical idea of femaleness. That rather than redefine the female stereotype, she jettisons her female gender. What makes her dislike it so much, I wonder? The added irony is that when she becomes a “he” or “they”, as we often see today, he/they does so without any genuine affection for masculinity. That is, rather than challenge the feminine stereotypes she clearly doesn’t fit, he/they becomes a boy who isn’t, often, at all masculine. He/they appropriates the concept of maleness into herself (himself, themself), making it safe rather than wild and scary and foreign and fun.

I am sympathetic to the young women I see today who seem to want to escape the burden of being a woman by becoming some form of nonbinary. It may feel like it offers freedom from the confines of a girlish stereotype, frees one from social expectations, and, importantly, from sexual pressures. Identifying in ways that cut against the norms of gender is often seen as a kind of power move, a way to position oneself so that others take one seriously as an individual. It answers to our desire for uniqueness and self-expression. But as it does so, it often forms a young woman into a new stereotypical type, while cementing the idea that femaleness is merely girly, an idea that feminism once worked hard to break.

I remained a virgin into my early twenties. This allowed me to not only slowly grow into my skin as a woman, but also gave me the independence from gender I was so keen to embrace. But once we label virginity as a form of male dominance, a remnant of a more repressive sexual era, one in which men controlled women’s sexual experiences in an effort to eliminate their own anxieties around female sexuality, it makes it much harder for a young woman to remain a virgin while being an oppression-fighting ethical person. (And why would men be so keen on keeping women virgins, exactly, we might ask? Isn’t it possible that men might be the primary beneficiaries of sexually available women?), In an effort to express their sexual freedom – a moral imperative – young women may feel internal pressure to have sex in order to be unrestricted from traditional sexual mores.

Being a tomboy freed me from the anxieties of sexual relations. I was able to indulge in my deep affection for males without the demands of being on the sexual marketplace. And I won respect and admiration from others I desired by succeeding in masculine pursuits. I was able to do this because, not in spite of the fact, that I remained solidly and joyfully a female. I was granted respect from the guys I spent the summer months with not because I was seen as their equal and certainly not because I demanded that they respect my “inner-truth”, but because I was a girl doing the same things they were — and sometimes even doing them pretty well. That I was a girl doing tough-guy things made me even more admirable. I didn’t have to persuade anyone to respect me by ideologically brow-beating them.

I am now a grown woman with teenage daughters of my own. I grew out of my tomboy phase but the toughness and the confidence I developed have stayed. Though often deemed as toxic, this strength helped me to deal with a painful intimate relationship when it eventually occurred. (The poetic irony of the human condition is that we often run headlong into the thing we are keenest to avoid.) The risks of the sexual marketplace are very real, and the power of a man to manipulate and wound a woman something that recent feminism has been right to emphasise. But this should not be at the expense of colouring over women’s affection for men with resentment towards them. It is this affection for manliness that I want to instill in my daughters, an affection that grows into their own identities. It is important to man-up in life, even if you’re a girl.