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TOMBOYS: THE
LAST HURRAH Byline: SHERE HITE My best friend and I were cowboys, with guns and holsters. We rode horses like the guys | (In our minds, we lived in the city.) l didn't know which sex I was: I was neither. l wasn't like my father, I wasn't like my mother. I was smaller. I was a cowboy." My best friend and I were cowboys, with guns and holsters. We rode horses like the guys | (In our minds, we lived in the city.) l didn't know which sex I was: I was neither. l wasn't like my father, I wasn't like my mother. I was smaller. I was a cowboy." According to the findings of this Hite Report, many girls enjoy a brilliant period of independence and freedom just before adolescence, a period which stands out with clarity in their statements, so different is it from the period of imposed sexual identity that comes down (or tries to come down) heavily just after, and which continues in one form or another (reproductive choices, worry about menopausal 'looks', feminist and post-feminist 'dos' and 'don'ts') for the rest of their lives. This period is like an Indian summer of the self, the undisturbed self, before the child is "heavily trained" in "sexual identity" by society. "Were you ever a tomboy?" Sixty-nine per cent of women answered yes to this question, and proceeded to describe with relish a period in their lives of independence and freedom, fun, physical daring and action. The clarity with which they remember those days is like a snapshot taken with a perfectly focused camera: "Was I a tomboy?," wrote one respondent. "Man, there wasn't a tree within a 50-mile radius that I didn't at least take a try at climbing. I loved the power of sitting up there, being able to see far, far. On the other hand, I spent a good bit of my childhood in casts, and, of course, incurred the wrath of both my parents for these exploits. Mother devoted her life to trying to make a proper lady of me. I think her greatest woe is her miserable failure in this. I had all the usual prohibitions - modulate the voice, sit with my knees together, don't eat too much, don't expect too much of life, don't chase boys, don't smoke, don't do too well in school (I was a very bright little girl), don't look for a career. My mother and I cleaned the house, did the laundry, all that kind of thing." Or from another: "Being a tomboy, it was just being a kid and doing kid stuff - I climbed trees a lot. I can remember the feelings, the freedom and the openness of standing in one specific tree down the road from our house. I could see the sky opening up above and around me from the perch and I felt strong and (I realise now) clean and in control. Ah ... I guess if this is tomboy-like behaviour (the term 'tomboy' stinks |) then it is vital and powerful." But through anti-tomboy rules imposed on many girls by their early teens, girls are systematically kept from developing physical strength (and in similar ways, are inhibited from developing their economic-educational strength), possibly making them more submissive and less assertive as adults. Many girls object to the heavy conditioning implied by use of the word"tomboy" to label their interests. (Who says that these are boys' activities in the first place?). "In California," wrote one woman, "climbing trees was no big deal. Many of us preferred baseball and such things to sewing and cooking, but no-one ever made anything out of it. I did all the boy things, but I wasn't called a name like 'tomboy'. I just enjoyed it - I was not discouraged or encouraged." It's a big mistake to label girls 'boys', just because they're active | Of course, women can be "tomboys" at any age: "I have always been and always will be rebellious, feisty, and a wild thing", wrote one woman. "I value this greatly in myself, and have the attitude that I can do anything." Perhaps women's extreme pleasure in remembering the time when they were tomboys shows how tortured we feel, without even realising it, so used are we to carrying around the burden of how the world sees our bodies. Tomboy-hood was for most women a time when they could enjoy their bodies with little self-consciousness and few worries about "beauty culture". We should be able, as women, to enjoy our bodies | To use them for our pleasure and needs - rather than as outward symbols of pleasure for others. This is our reality, our stamina, our physical action, being stolen from us. Don't let it be | If we reclaim it, this strength will inform and create our true identities. ---------------------------- Publication: Sydney Morning Herald - Publication date: 26-2-1994 - Edition: Late - Page no: 8 - Section: Spectrum |
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