Miriam

It occurs to me occasionally that even though I only really started to learn about feminism in the last year, I’ve had a problem with certain gender roles for maybe my whole life.  I just didn’t always think about it this way.

I was told pretty explicitly by my brother and next door neighbor when I was, I don’t know? six? that if I wanted to play with them I needed to through away my barbies and pretty ponies and glitter and angels and become a “tomboy”.  Like, we went through my room and together quite literally threw all these things away (except for a box of horse toys that I hid), and covered the walls with pictures my neighbor deemed acceptable so that they wouldn’t be pink anymore.  And then I cried.  So, in my case, the message that certain kinds of behavior were preferable to others (it’s better to act like a boy than a girl), was not remotely subtle, even though for some reason I often imagine children learning this message slowly over time from multiple sources in a rather ominous fashion.

But the reason I’m writing this is because it means that I have always pretty consciously felt a pull to act in a “masculine” fashion and questioned why I should have to.  For example, when I was always a complete failure in gym class–uncoordinated, slow runner, too tentative to  hit anything very hard or throw anything very far, etc–I would ...