I’ve always been a tomboy. As a kid I never played with dolls or dress-up. I played Cars and Destroy Things. I had short hair and dungarees and loved to get dirty and build fortresses and playfight. I was always being mistaken for a boy.
There was a time in my teenage years when I tried being a Girl. I grew my hair and wore make-up. It just wasn’t me.
Now I’m all growed up I have reverted to my natural tomboy state. You couldn’t mistake me for a boy anymore (two things kinda get in the way) but I’m a tomboy nonetheless. I don’t wear make-up. I don’t own any skirts. I do have one dress that fits but that’s for Special Occasions. I just don’t do the girlie thing. It’s fun to play at it sometimes but my natural state is tomboy.
So… uh…
kicks dirt
…anyone else? Wanna trade scar stories? Play Fortress?
My Dad taught me how to fight (he knew I’d need to know) but also taught me restraint. He also told me that if he ever found out I kicked a guy in the balls, I wouldn’t be able to sit for a week (attempted rape was the only exception). He taught me that a splash of blood usually ended a school fight quickly, and taught me how to pop a guy on the nose without doing real damage.
I know the above sounds an odd thing to teach a young girl, but my circumstances were such that there weren’t too many other options.
So yeah, I’ll join the tomboy club. Even though I don’t fight anymore, I still give my mother heart flutters with my posture, sprawled seating and colourful language. I think she’s starting to accept it, but she’s still horrified at the things I think about (I think too much for a lady, apparently -> FTS!). And I’ve worn make-up less than 20 times in my life.
I’ve always been attracted to tomboys. Some women are just to girly, like they want to put curtains up and buy “cute” things to put in the garden. I’ve always liked the “Dorinda Durston” type. (Irene Dunne in A Guy Named Joe and Holly Hunter in Always.) It’s been a while since I’ve seen A Guy Named Joe, so I’ll have to go with the Always version of the scene (potential spoiler):
Holly Hunter (Dorinda) is angry at Richard Dreyfuss (Pete). Pete gives her a box for her birthday presend. Dorinda doesn’t want it and says, “Do you think you can win me over with something you picked up in an airport gift store?” Pete takes the box and trows it behind her. She turns to see the box, which had fallen open, contains a beautiful dress. She goes over to see it.
“Girl clothes!”
“So you like dressing like a girl?”
“It’s not the clothes, Pete. It’s how you see me.”
I like women who are confident enough that they don’t worry about what they’re wearing, whether they’ll break a nail, or that sort of thing. I like women who can be a pal.
[sub]I thought I found a girl like that, but she left me for another woman. [/sub]
Tomboy is an Attitude. You don’t need to qualify. And I’ve never even been in a real fight! Like your mum, mine gave up on trying to make me a Lady a looooong time ago. Who cares if you break a nail? You’ll grow another one.
Matt, you can be the person who we are guarding in the fortress. You stand at the back and you pretend to be really scared and we will be Brave and fight off the Enemy. But you have to, like, pretend to make us a cake or something. Out of leaves! Yeah!
Another tom-boy joining the club. I’ve never been girly-girl, but when I occasionally dress up, I always get the “holy cow! You’re dressed like a girl!”
The girls that grew up hanging out with all my friends (who were all guys) have come to me over the years and told me I intimidated them. Me? Intimidating? Never! Only if there are boys being jerks. Then I can be intimidating as hell.
I’ve never been confused for a boy, if you know what I mean. No one ever taught me how to fight or how to wear makeup or anything like that. I just kind of had to learn both on my own. Now, I can dislocate your jaw, or put on liquid eyeliner without smudges. I’m working on putting away the tomboy part and getting more into the girly thing. The SO likes it when I’m girly, and he’s working on changing some things for me, so I feel like it’s a fair trade.
I’m a hybrid. I always like looking as female as possible, but my favorite toys were my erector set, building blocks and electric train. Once the hormones started flowing boys became my favorite toys, (I exchaged the erector set for an erection set). But I’ve always loved to build things and have always been mechanically and mathematically inclined. Back in the day, the highest compliment I recieved was when a guy would tell me “You think like a man.” (That was the days before feminism took hold.) I had a few dolls as a girl, but they didn’t get much play time. I’ve never been athletic, so I related more to the nerds than to the jocks.
I never related well to other females and usually had boys and later, men as my friends. As a teenager, boys didn’t know what to do with me, so I went out with men instead - it’s a wonder that my parents survived my teen years.
When my daughter was a kid, she’d get a little frustrated because I couldn’t play dolls with her. I did however teach her to play blackjack at an early age.
Tomboy. I played in the mud, played with Tonka trucks, tractors, and Hot Wheels cars, asked for and finally got a Daisy air rifle (and didn’t shoot my eye out!), learned to pitch and catch from my dad. I wasn’t that good at athletics but tried, and liked “boy stuff” much more than “girl stuff”. I had a good gender mix of friends even during the period “boy germs” were feared by girls and when boys thought that girls were icky.
These days I rarely wear makeup or skirts, but look good when I do; I’m well-groomed otherwise. My husband, when he met me in college, was impressed that I wasn’t feminine so much as “womanly” - I didn’t act so hung up on appearance as many college girls that he knew, and was down-to-earth and could relate to guys well.
I love tomboys. It would be great to be in a relationship with one, because it would be more likely that they would share some of my ‘masculine’ interests. Any girl who can kick my ass in Marvel vs Capcom 2, Starcraft, or the Warhammer 40k tabletop game deserves a lot of respect. And gets ogled a lot by nerds.
There is a gaming store I go to regularly to play tabletop games. Most females there are boyfriends/husbands/sisters who got dragged along and often seem bored out of their skull (just like how a guy would be at a hair salon I guess). If there ever was a serious female gamer present who was good at the game, you’d have every guy in the place clamoring to play her, and got help you if you let her win…
I used to be a huge tomboy. I loved He-Man but hated She-Ra (and was always pissed when somewhat-distant relatives gave me She-Ra or Barbie toys), and even dressed up as He-Man one year. I climbed trees, built forts, and played rough-and-tumble games. My mom says that at one point I asked her when I would turn into a boy (standard disclaimer–I am quite comfortable with my gender. I have to watch who I tell that to, because sometimes I’ve gotten some funny looks).
Now I do more “girly” stuff–I’ll wear makeup, I like wearing dresses every once in a while. But I still think I have some more stereotypical male interests, and most of my friends and aquaintances are men. But then, I am an engineer, and that could have something to do with it.
Half-and-half now. I played mostly with boys when I was young. There’s a family story about me opening presents at age three- I cheerfully ripped into a highly decorated box, peered in, and my face fell. “Oh, a dress”. Threw the dress over my shoulder and went on to the next box.
However, I think by fifth grade I’d started to like wearing dresses for special occasions. This din’t mean I stopped swordfighting or playing cowboys and Indians.
I like pretty clothes, but I prefer them durable, just in case I have to climb a tree. I still build snow forts every winter. Can we build one? Can we have a snowball fight?
I was a girly tomboy. I was the kind of little girl who loved to dress up in frilly dresses and play with makeup (though I hated Barbie), and then I’d go out and climb trees or play with trucks in the mud, thereby ruining whatever frills I had on. While growing up I had mostly guy friends. They always made me be She-Ra or the horse or the red-headed girl in the GI Joe cartoon, and that pissed me off. I wanted to be SKELETOR!
I’m still like that. Girly and tomboyish at the same time (I love to dress up, yet most of the time I’m a very low-maintenance, no makeup or frills kinda girl) and most of my friends are guys (still).
On the rare occasions when I have to dress up, I don’t think I pull it off very well, even though people ooh and ahh and make a fuss–I think they’re just trying to strengthen the dominate paradigm by encouraging me to adopt gender-appropriate dress more often.
I feel sorry for boys, sometimes, 'cause I can dress like a boy and stuff and nobody cares, but boys who want to dress like a girl have a harder time.
I’m another big ol’ tomboy. When I was little, my mom tried desperately to turn me girly; she used to dress me in those little frilly dresses with the net skirts. She’s still a little bitter because I locked myself in the bathroom with the scissors and cut all the netting out. (I was about four years old at the time.)
When I took ballet, it turns out that my main talent was jumping. Since this is usually a male talent, I got to take class with the boys. I was better at it than they were.
I still don’t wear more than minimal makeup, and I’m working slowly to build up a decent collection of power tools. My favorite shoes are cowboy boots. My second favorite are hiking boots.
To paraphrase Nora Ephron, I was rotten at being a girl. Fortunately, I’m not half bad at being a woman.
I’m in. Once Xmas when I was a tike, my brother and I opened our gifts. My brother got a cool Tonka truck camper and I got a very uncool Tonka pink Jeep with a pink stripped awning. I cried and cried.
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