"i am not a pretty girl" -ani
just because dichotomy is such a cool word.

i've always had this weird sense of duality when it comes to the idea of femininity. i wrote my sociology midterm about this, beginning with, "The development of the social self is beset on all sides by the insuppressible clamoring of the world."
from birth, we are inundated with the expectations of society, by the ideas that other people have of who and what you are, and who and what you can or should be. through the media, parents, teachers, the world at large, we learn what it means to be a person - male versus female, black versus white versus asian versus mexican versus all the subtleties of ethnic culture, gay versus straight versus bi versus all the subtleties of sexuality.

as a child, the label was "tomboy." as i've grown up, it tends more towards "intimidating," "confusing," and "strange."
which is okay.
at a very young age, i began what was to become a long-running tradition of surrounding myself with male friends. i rode bikes with them, climbed trees with them, made mud pies with them. i did all the things that little boys do, to paraphrase dar. i just did them all in pink frilly dresses.
in kindergarten, my two favorite things in the world were pink frilly dresses, and dirt.
that's still a fairly accurate synopsis of my personality - just the pink frilly dresses have evolved into leather pants, dangly earrings and high heels, and the dirt has come to include kickboxing, swearing and charcoal.

i can roll out of bed, into clothes and out the door in five minutes, and i can spend six hours getting ready.
i've questioned my sexuality, been mistaken for a boy, been told i was the "perfect woman." each on several occasions.
i go through stages where i don't cry, ever, at all, followed by stages of intense emotional vulnerability.
for all of my life, i've felt like i'm dancing on the line between what society defines as masculine and feminine, somewhere between what i'm told i should be, what i think i should be, and what i am.
i've never wanted to be the flutter-eyed simpering soap-opera maiden. there was always this feeling that what the media declared "woman" was less than the whole truth - a feeling that i think was rooted deeply in the role my mother played as a strong and independent person. it never seemed to me that she had to sacrifice any of what she was to her marriage or my dad.

it took a long, long time before existing outside the bounds of traditional femininity was recieved as anything approaching good.
though i suppose nobody really enjoys middle school anyway.