Ladies, take a moment to think about your childhood and think about how other women characterize their own childhood.

I was a tomboy

I wasn’t girly

I did boy things

Almost all of my friends were boys

I never played with Barbies

I DID play with Barbie but I cut her hair and made her do boy things
What is this? Why is this?
Is being a girl a shitty thing to be? Do girls need to be told that they should strive harder to be like boys because girly things are what, exactly? Stupid? Fake? Worthless? Embarrassing? That the whole point of equality is to get away from GIRL and go be like BOY?
Of course there is the semantics part of this whole thing (because semantics is FUN). If ALL the girls are being like boys and doing only boy things wouldn’t is stand to reason that these activities are not BOY things but KID things? We moved a lot when I was a kid, but mostly groups of kids were mostly mixed but sometimes we would group up, girls and boys and go do different things. Also, someone’s mom yelled at me because I told her son that I hated his guts.
As a side question: where the hell did everyone grow up that there were always the ‘streams’ that the kids would go play in and catch tadpoles and get muddy and… whatever… whatever… the creek? We had a creek and pond nearby but it was so polluted, we never went in there. It’s always the stream and the tadpoles and learning and just like boys.
But that’s neither here nor there.
Why do we do this? Why do we find so much shame in pink? Is playing princess so much worse than playing war? What are today’s little girls hearing from us? That the only way to learn and explore is not with a dress but jeans? That there are no learning opportunities, no real fun, no real way to be a person until they put away the tiara and pull out the baseball hat? Why would you tell someone that?