Why tomboy

Activity Zone Activity Zone. Our Stories Our Stories. Discover Girl Scouts. Learn what Girl Scouts do; about our history, research and data; and about family involvement, or try Girl Scout activities! Become a Volunteer Become a Volunteer. Alums Alums. Learn how to get involved with Girl Scouts. Join a troop, find events, become a volunteer, or discover alum opportunities. Find out how to buy Girl Scout Cookies, explore Girl Scout Cookie flavors, try delicious recipes, see how girls learn essential life skills, and more.

Invest Invest. So what's the problem with calling a little girl a tomboy? Shouldn't we be embracing the strong, bandaged-knees, doll-hating tomboy girl as a feminist icon? Or is the issue a much deeper one, about what it means to be a girl at all? It's tempting to celebrate tomboyishness. After all, it represents a "different" kind of way to be a little girl: fight with the boys, enjoy rough and tumble, ignore scrapes and bruises, and generally reject delicacy, politeness, and demureness for a wilder existence.

Who doesn't love gender rebellion? But the issues with tomboyishness as a concept run very deep, back hundreds of years, and through the many iterations of the concept in media and literature; and what you discover, when you explore a little further, is that the tomboy isn't a throwing-off of gender norms but in some ways an entrenchment of them.

In essence, girls should be allowed to do whatever they damn well want, and the tomboy concept doesn't help to move that forward. Here are the problems with the whole idea of the tomboy and why you should think twice before you lightly use it to describe a friend's kid as she makes her own treehouse or beats every boy on the block in a sprint. The issues with tomboy-ness can be traced back to its etymology, and the unusual fact that, originally, it wasn't about girls at all.

The term first emerged in the s in England, for a "rude, boisterous boy" : in other words, for a boy who acted outside the realms of normal politeness.

The "tom" in this is the same as "tomfoolery," and indicates the same kind of at the time, usually masculine behavior: the tomboy of the s would be that annoying kid with no table manners, running around after your chickens and picking fights in the street.

But then, within thirty years, it evolved, to mean "strumpet, bold or immodest woman". This wasn't about wearing trousers instead of skirts; this was severe societal disapproval.

Interestingly, they had their own unique term: tomrig. What can be seen as a benign description of a girl who hates dolls is actually a softened term for one of the worst kinds of women in society: the one who was outrageous, sexually licentious, rude, and didn't know "her place". In Scout and Annabel, both ostensibly straight young tomboys, two stereotypes are challenged. First, that girls should be girly. As various fictional tomboys continued to take center stage in literature and Hollywood, corporations adopted the tomboy for advertising purposes.

Looking to sell products by tapping into the liberated tomboy image, advertisers portrayed girls and young women who adhered closely to the tomboy stereotype. A s ad for Stayfree maxi-pads shows a young blonde woman wearing hiking boots, khaki shorts, and a plaid shirt climbing up a hill on all fours, while a man, whose face is mere inches from her crotch, smiles behind her. Even so, the ads reveal the complexities of gender: It is not something that can be neatly packaged, like hygiene products or toys.

The key distinction, of course, is that tomboyishness names a lifestyle and aesthetic, often confined to childhood and adolescence, whereas gender is an identity uncoupled to specific age and interest. Today, the increasing visibility of genderqueer and trans people—along with the increasingly flexible nature of gender presentation and discourse about it more generally—further complicates the idea of tomboys.

But as much as society is warming up to a more nuanced understanding of gender, labels that have served an important purpose are not easily dropped. Girls will continue to scrape their knees forever, no matter what name people call them. But whether the tomboy label will persist is uncertain.