In the 1970s and 1980s you could just be a "tomboy" and that was fine, because everyone know that tomboys outgrow their tomboyish ways and become women (and srsly, if you pick up some vintage middle-grade lit, you'll find many MANY books where there's a tomboyish girl who does all the cool adventurous stuff with the boys for most of the book, and then in the final chapter, she puts away childish things and does her hair and goes off to learn to be A Lady. You see that scene in Caddie Woodlawn, but it's also in many far-less-known books -- I remember being really fond of the Katie John books, and very irritated that she caved and became girly at the end. And there are many many others.)
Girls don't have to grow up and go femme anymore. They have other options. I think that fuels the sense that the gender-policing has to start at birth. Not, mind you, that it is a BAD THING that girls can grow up to be butch lesbians if they want, I'm just saying, I think the gender-policing DOES start earlier now and I think it's specifically a backlash against the fact that women can defy a lot of these gender-specific norms and not be shunned by society. If you can be a tomboy and STAY a tomboy, then clearly little girls cannot allowed to be tomboys, period, at least in the minds of the assholes cited in that article.
(Also, you might have been dressing up as Peter Pan at Halloween, but if you had long hair you were still adequately girly, even if you lived in blue jeans. Halloween is special; you can break all sorts of rules at Halloween, which is part of why the fundies hate the holiday so much, IMO.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-03-10 03:50 am (UTC)Girls don't have to grow up and go femme anymore. They have other options. I think that fuels the sense that the gender-policing has to start at birth. Not, mind you, that it is a BAD THING that girls can grow up to be butch lesbians if they want, I'm just saying, I think the gender-policing DOES start earlier now and I think it's specifically a backlash against the fact that women can defy a lot of these gender-specific norms and not be shunned by society. If you can be a tomboy and STAY a tomboy, then clearly little girls cannot allowed to be tomboys, period, at least in the minds of the assholes cited in that article.
(Also, you might have been dressing up as Peter Pan at Halloween, but if you had long hair you were still adequately girly, even if you lived in blue jeans. Halloween is special; you can break all sorts of rules at Halloween, which is part of why the fundies hate the holiday so much, IMO.)