Day Twenty One: Tomboy

I am a tomboy.

Remember my last blog I mentioned that I would tell you the fabulous tale of how I came to be. Well, I was raised primarily by my father. My mom was working most of the time, so I spent a great deal of my early impressionable years being raised by my dad. I went to boy scout meetings, I fixed cars, I went camping, I learned how to use power tools. When I was six, my mother came home to find me using a table saw; I could barely see what I was cutting.

When you’re a little girl, liking boy stuff alienates you from other little girls. This means that you spend most of your time around little boys, which just makes the cycle continue. I did have little girl friends when I was a child, but I was always closer with boys. I’ve always been more comfortable with guy friends.

Now that I’m older, a lot of my skills from my years as a tomboy have done me well. I can pretty much fix anything that goes wrong in a house and I’m not at all scared to go out in the dark to find a circuit breaker. I don’t want to make it seem like my ability to do presupposed manly activities makes me somehow better than girls who can’t do these things. I simply have a skill set of which I am proud.

(Soapbox)There is one type of girl I can’t stand: The Bystander. Every guy has one of these girls as a friend or possibly an ex-girlfriend. They will sit by and use their gender as a defense from having to do or learn anything that might allow them to help themselves. They’re the girl who calls a guy to fix every leak, kill every spider. They’re the girl in the horror movie that hides in the cabin while everyone else hunts the zombies.

All I’m saying is that any capable woman who can do something for herself is exuding a certain sort of manly trait. Two hundred years ago, it was pretty much universally perceived that women were next to useless for anything other than cooking, cleaning and bearing children. Some cultures, some places and some people still believe this.

I use the term tomboy the same way you might use the term capable. It is a compliment. My father taught me from a young age how to be independent and self-functioning. It’s not that my father raised me to not need a man and I’m some kind of man-hating butch bitch. I was raised to do things on my own, that’s all that being a tomboy means.

Challenge to my Readers:

In the spirit of true tomboyishness, do something for yourself today. Go to Home Depot and learn how to do dry-walling. Go online and learn something you haven’t before, like how to change the oil in your car or how to get rid of ants.