boomerang wrote:
To me, being a tomboy is not at all about wanting to be a boy. It's more about not understanding why anyone would spend $30 a week on their fingernails, or take their curling iron to the camp ground, or wait by the phone for some boy to call -- the things that my girlfriends did or the magazines told me girls did.
that'd the perfect explanation of a perfect tomboy
anybody know the origin of the phrase tomboy?
I was a tomboy when I was a child and still am one now.
Osso is a woman after my own heart. Simple easy clothes, preferrably jeans, and GREAT earrings.
That describes most of my wardrobe.
As a child I wore the dresses.. when necessary. But was more comfortable in baggy shorts , sleevless shirts and tennis shoes.
I never did have many 'girl'friends and still dont.
I do enjoy dressing up on occasion, and own a skirt.. maybe 2 if I dig hard enough..
I am the kind of woman now who will pull over to the side of the road to stare at a weird animal , explore a rock cave, play in a small dirty stream ( or photograph it) , climb a tree, or stare at a dead animal with the curiousity of a 5 year old boy. I dig for bugs, stones, and inscts. ( yeah.. at my age... haha) I can throw a football with the best of them, and yet, still wear fabulous earrings.
okay i found this
Where did the word tomboy originate?
Answers
1.An english language print reference to the term tomboy can be
traced back to 1553 when it was used to describe a "rude,
boisterous boy." Another reference, in 1579, as a "bold or
immodest woman" and in 1592: "a girl who acts like a spirited
boy." This development of the word is largely a corruption,
through misinterpretation and mistaken use over centuries
and is derived from the Anglo Saxon "tumbere" meaning
dancer or romper, from the same roots as the French
"tomber," to tumble about. Hundreds of years later the
early meaning of a promiscuous boisterous girl or woman
resurfaced in the shortened slang term Tom, meaning
prostitute, when in the 1930's London Police used the term
to describe a prostitute working the Mayfair and Bayswater
areas. Australia and USA underworld slang both feature
similar references.
2. A tomboy today usually means a girl who isn't always "girly". She can be attractive and well-mannered, but she isn't afraid to participate in rough sports or get dirty. She can be "just on of the guys".
hmm.
what i get from those definations is that Tom ment a woman who spoke her mind and wore COMFORTABLE clothes instead of those fluffy boob squishing corsetts.
djjd62 wrote:anybody know the origin of the phrase tomboy?
Curious for an answer to that question, i poked around online a little, and found only that the derivation was from the 16th century, until i found this:
Quote:tomboy.
We understand tomboy as the term applied to a girl who behaves in a manner usually considered boyish. It's easy to understand the derivation of tomboy: Tomtom o'bedlam, peeping tom, and tomcat, for example. It isn't surprising that, back in the 1500s, tom was paired with boy to describe an uncouth or boisterous lad.
Lad? That's right. Until the end of the 1500s, tomboy referred to a boy. But just as the popularity of that usage was fading, two other senses came into being and crossed genders. Since the late 1500s, tomboy has been used to label a girl who behaves in a way considered boyish (this is the sense that has lasted). Back in the late 1500s, tomboy also came to name a forward or immodest woman; a strumpet or harlot. This latter sense disappeared from currency within a few hundred years, although it can still be found in Shakespeare.
from Merriam-Webster Online, "Words for the Wise."
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So it appears that it was applied to girls with boyish ways simply by extenstion. However, i suggest that the Shakespearian sense is not apposite . . .
You harlots ! ! ! You strumpets ! ! !
Okay so I'm a tumbling, boisterous, strumpet.
I can live with that.
boomerang wrote:The butch thing I don't get at all. I'm very comfortable in my body and my body is obviously that of a girl. I'm more likely to show it off a bit than try to disguise it.
To me, being a tomboy is not at all about wanting to be a boy. It's more about not understanding why anyone would spend $30 a week on their fingernails, or take their curling iron to the camp ground, or wait by the phone for some boy to call -- the things that my girlfriends did or the magazines told me girls did.
I remember friends always saying "You always have the best boyfriends" and I always did have great boyfriends. I think it is because I understood where boys were coming from and what they wanted in a relationship -- because that's where I was coming from and that's what I wanted too.
dlowan - I remember my sister always wanting to play house. I would only play if I could be the dad and leave for work. Maybe that is a reflection on my parent's marriage....
Ohmigoddess YES!!! To the goddamn curling thing - and the NAILS!!!!!! Ewwwwwwwwwww.....
I DO, however, have a sort of perverse admiration for the women who do the whole make-up and hair thing when camping - there is a sort of pride in it, though one I do not share, under the circumstances.
I remember thinking the same things about getting married and having kids -- that it was something that nobody would do if they had the choice. I changed my mind about that later, but it's still a daily struggle for me to maintain a level of respect. I will say that being a tomboy mom is a hell of a lot of fun once the kids get old enough to play with you. I'm having so much fun now with my kids -- playing soccer with them, running around and chasing them, riding bikes with them, jumping off of stuff, making up obstacle courses, etc...
Oh, and I'll be looking for my invitation to that menopause shower.
Hmmm - it is kinda, it seems, then, that we are discussing the kind of woman who is a human before being a girl - just as I judge men on whether they are humans before being men.
I think what I mean by that, is that our societally defined gender roles are not predominant for them - that they just follow their own bents and are not restricted in any way by what is seen as not-ok for a particular gender role.
Don't mean we aren't FEMALE or MALE - just we don't let role specifications stand in the way.
Not that some very girly women do that - I have a dear friend who won't mOVE without full make-up and a hair straightener, is terrified of bugs, and calls for help to change a light-bulb (literally!) Doesn't make her any less intellectually and emotionally tough, and a Mensch.
Thanks for the leg work, guys, in finding the definitions. Maybe tomboys were considered immodest because they didn't follow the conventions of sexual rules. You know, sex feels good, so they partook in it. Or maybe it just meant they were prostitutes.
Yep.
One thing that I haven't identified with here (among the many things that I have) is that I don't remember receiving a momement's censure for my "boyish" ways, whether overt or more subtle. Was born in 1970, grew up with "Free to Be You and Me," received pretty much only positive reinforcement from both adults and peers for facility with sports + math and such. It's not that every girl was as tomboyish as I was, but rigid adherence to gender roles was seen as, like, SO old-fashioned (in my neck of the woods, anyway). This went for boys, too; "It's All Right to Cry," "William Wants A Doll," etc.
Teenage years were heck but does ANYONE sail through those? For me the hearing loss thing looms above all else, though there was a lot of that anthropological examination -- again I think common for most everyone, no matter where they fall on the tomboy spectrum.
Makeup is a weird anomoly for me since I adore fashion in general. Partly, one of my formative experiences with all of this was going on a long canoe trip when I was about 15 with a bunch of women much older than me, women who did the whole makeup and wax and shave thing, and seeing how they transformed over 2 weeks. I did NOT want to be suspeptible to that kind of Jekyll and Hydeness, I wanted to look more or less the same at the beginning and end of 2 weeks in the wilderness with no amenities.
Some more thoughts -
I have often thought that girls imprint on their mothers, or whoever else makes a big impression, re some girly ways, such as graceful hand movements, considered vocalization, way of walking..
This is unlikely to be true across the board, or is it? but is something I keep noticing. In particular, I'll use the example of my friend Bonnie. Bonnie is one of a kind... I am talking of her speaking manner, her lively interests, her curiosity, her energy, but more to the point, her whole 'affect'. Eventually, I met her mother. Instantly I saw the (first?) Bonnie, and nearly choked not to laugh. Also of interest relative to this whole discussion, Bonnie hiked by herself up all sorts of mountains early, jogged almost before jogging, and so on.
On the definitions of tomboy, hmmm, on the lesser one, the whore business, maybe there is some component of past sexual adventure, so called promiscuity, shared among some of us - but if there is and if that is related to a certain practicality/curiosity, I wouldn't begin to know.
Two further mumblings - I've never felt 'alien' to being a woman, I've just thought some folks ways of being one are sort of narrow.
On clothes, since I got going on my second round of thrift shop shopping (my mother would die first, and of course she has.. but hadn't before my first round of thrift shopping back around 1970.) One day in what must have been the early eighties I was giving away clothes and household objects, and on the way to pick up my receipt stopped to look at the front shop - and because I had relatively few clothes for financial reasons and busyness reasons, I was sucked in to what turns out to be my alltime favorite thrift store, the Salvation Army in Santa Monica. Look at the great sweater for $1.50!, now guessing the price at the time.
Over time, I began to like the array of possibilities at different thrift stores - you can get fabulous clothes for relatively little at the Discovery Shop in, eh, lower Beverly Hills, that's where I got my Armani jacket. You can find clothes in lots of styles and periods, not be constrained by what is in the department store of the hour. You can mix and match... and I've gone wackers. Just yesterday I wore a colorfully printed blouse under a madras plaid cotton jacket (it was 59 degrees here) with, of course, my jeans, with no shame at all, let 'em stare, I like they way they look. I admit I didn't wear that to work.
So now I still look a little odd, next to my female peers... even though the clothes are sometimes, occasionally, somewhat more femme in their way.
I've been a thrift shop afficionado forever -- did a lot of my teenage fashion experimentation via thrift shops -- and L.A. had the absolute most prime pickings of anyplace I've ever been. The things that are donated there! Good grief. And the vintage... oooh... (drool, miss that).
I definitely consider fashion, the interesting kind anyway, to be about putting things together with an eye, about personal taste rather than just aping.
Well, at the time the word was formed, women who did not conform rigidly to the restrictive norms of the day were seen as unnatural and bad. "Unnatural" was a really bad thing to be - it meant to be violating the proper order of god and the universe - remember the "unnatural" things that happen as Macbeth rises to power - like horses eating each other in the stables etc. The only current use of the word that has the same power is for fundy homophobes who speak of "unnatural acts".
Weren't a long trip to whore.
I caught some more frogs today. I also peed in the woods.
now that's my kinda woman
Well, we can't all be your kind of woman!
littlek wrote:Well, we can't all be your kind of woman!
, the rolling eyes probably gave the wrong impression, i was not being sarcastic, as i have stated elsewhere in this thread, i like "tomboy" girls
