WK 5 WHO AM I

I have spent my whole childhood hating girls. I never wanted to play with them, I never wanted to wear girly clothes, I disliked their cuteness, and I was repulsed by their weakness. This was misfortunate, because I am a girl. I had always considered myself different from them. I thought my tomboyish behaviour was far superior; I never needed a strong boy to help me carry my bag or defend me from bullies, because I was that strong boy. I played with boys, I got into fights, I was loud and scary and big. On the surface, I was proud of whom I was, no one could touch me; no one had the guts to approach me and mock me. But the thing is, they did not have to. I was fully aware that the kids at my school were scared of me, I had very few friends and the kids that did not know me thought I was strange and aggressive. On the surface I was proud, but deep down I was sad and alone. It took me a long time to admit that, in fact, I wanted to be a girl. I even remember asking my mother to enrol me into ballet classes. But she did not do that. Once people started seeing me as the angry “tomboy”, that was the label they would assign to me. Nobody bothered looking beneath the surface. But the real question is – Why did I feel the need to act that way? Why was it that I associated “girlyness” with something bad? Well, the answer is society itself. No one ever told me being girly was bad in itself, but the fact that girls are deemed as weak, fragile, clumsy, pretty, cute, neat, quiet and submissive was something I did not like, I jumped to the conclusion that everything about being feminine was bad. I could not understand that being feminine did not necessarily mean weakness. It was not until I started educating myself in my late teens and now in my early twenties, that I realized that femininity comes in many different forms, and that is not only reserved for women. In the article Gender Roles and Behaviour, Aron Devor discusses this fact. Gender roles are a necessity, but they are a construct created to make life easier. Each gender is assigned a set of predictable behaviours and abilities, which are not the result of natural circumstances. Masculinity and femininity as we know them are the result of these roles, and not the cause. Unfortunately, since each gender is assigned their roles, any kind of behaviour that does not coincide with what is expected is often seen as strange, unorthodox or even unacceptable. Now, because western culture (the one I was born into) values more the characteristics that just so happen to be associated with masculinity, I took it upon myself to become just that – masculine. Mind you, I realized this at a very young age, in my early years in primary school. But in the end, I never felt more valued, I just felt confused. Who was I? What did I want to be? Luckily, gender roles are not biologically conditioned, which makes my life much easier. Why? Because this means that I get to choose what I want to be, based on my personality and my nature. Never again will I have to pretend to be either this or that, or identify with labels. I have the freedom to be whatever the hell I want to be. And if I do, so does everyone else.