NOT FOR GIRLS

I was just as shocked and offended as any other self-respecting woman or girl when first hearing about ‘Lego for Girls’. Like most other toys, there are set options for girls and boys. Barbie or Action Man, a fake kitchen or a fake gun; but what if you want to have both? What if you want to spend a day at the shooting range then come back and cook up a lovely homemade meal? From birth, society has little girls and boys believe that they must fit into unrealistic stereotypes and if you don’t, well, you’re just plain queer. A boy who wants to style Barbie’s hair? Must be gay. A girl who wants to put on camouflage and makes guns out of sticks? Must be a tomboy.

I have been called a tomboy ever since I was very young, and I put this all down to the fact that I have an older brother who had very stereotypically boyish toys that I liked to steal. I was never discouraged by my parents from playing with these ‘boy’s toys’, however I was regularly called a tomboy nonetheless. When this word is carefully considered, it becomes evident that as a young girl you are not given permission to be a girl who likes climbing trees or playing in the mud, you are a girl who is trying to be like a boy, but you will never be a boy, and you will presumably never be as good as one. This is how many women feel throughout their entire lives: school, puberty, relationships, sex, jobs, careers etc.

I want the term ‘tomboy’ to be reconsidered, because even though I fell under this category as a young child, and possibly even now as an adult, my Barbie dolls were never far away and I did own a plastic kitchen or two. As a young adult woman I adore cooking, styling my hair, doing my make-up and picking out my clothes. However if I am also daring, intelligent and brave, I am not called a strong girl, I am called a tomBOY. As a very young girl this lead to me telling myself that I didn’t want to be a girl, I wanted to be a boy. I wanted to be stronger and faster and braver and cooler and girls just aren’t any of those things. Girls are dainty and they stand at the side of the playground watching the boys do dangerous things.

It makes me incredibly sad to think that I was not proud to be a little girl, but as the stereotyping between boys and girls has only got more complicated and more irrational with age, I have begun to learn to love myself and understand that I can be strong and intelligent as well as being feminine and I can be proud to call myself a woman, and a woman only.

For more information on this issue, please visit here, here and here.

-ANNA