Defective girl?

A good (male) friend of mine recently observed that I am not like most women. This has been mentioned many times throughout my life, so it didn’t really make much of an impact. I have always taken it as a compliment because for most of my life, I didn’t actually LIKE the female half of the species. I liked being a girl and I love being a woman, but I have never really understood other ovary endowed people.

More and more often, however, I have started to wonder exactly what it is people mean when they tell me I am not like other women. Am I unfeminine? What does that even mean? Do I act like I have a pair of gonads hidden under my pinstriped skirt? Do I lack the requisite ability to play head games? Perhaps I am not enough of a social butterfly. Maybe my pout isn’t sexy enough.

I have to admit, the concept of femininity is probably lost on me. The first things to pop into my head are pink and ruffles – ugh. I have never really been a fan of the color pink. It brings to mind sticky super sweet candies and vapid anorexic blonds shedding angora everywhere. And ruffles – oh man, don’t get me started. I think ruffles were designed as a survival of the fittest test for girls. Whoever isn’t suffocated by them lives to play with their Barbies another day.

So what does it really mean to be feminine? Is it only pastel and ruffly things? What does that mean for someone like me who is more attracted to simple lines and graphic colors? I think Audrey Hepburn was one of the most feminine women in the world, yet when you look at what she wore, you would see there was rarely a ruffle or pink anything in sight. Even Givenchy designed beautiful but simple clothes for her. Watch the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s sometime – she owned the idea of the little black cocktail dress.

What about the gonad thing? Basic biology will tell you that gonads are just ovaries that fell out and made a boy. Well, maybe it isn’t quite that simple. But you get the idea. Mine are still in place as far as I can tell. But I will admit to being the type of woman who isn’t afraid to play with the boys. I like to stand up for myself and know that I can hold my own, even when I am the only woman in a room full of competitive, testosterone laden males. I like that the life I have built for myself is one that is solid and simple and all MINE. I don’t mind sharing it with people that I love and respect, but I don’t need them to do anything for me. I will admit to one area where a nice strong male is a help – I hate not being able to get the lid off a kosher pickle jar. My hands are too small to get a good grip and it is highly annoying.

As for head games, I was truly traumatized by those nasty things when I was a child. Maybe it was just the inevitable inbred cliquishness that occurs while growing up in a very small town, but the girls I was raised with were downright MEAN. Cruella de Ville could take lessons from them. These harpies could befriend you one minute and then publicly humiliate you the next. Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t always the victim. I did learn how to avoid the banshee coalition and sometimes even manage to get a little revenge. What the mean girls did for me was give me the ability to cut through the bullshit of every day life and just say what I mean or don’t say anything at all. If that is a non-girly trait, then hooray.

Most of the women I know like to get together for girls’ night type things. They want to go out and be around and among people. They are social. I am different. I wouldn’t say that I am anti-social, it is more that I sort of hang back. I like people. I like to be around people. I just don’t always want to interact with them. I am perfectly happy and comfortable being at a party in the corner with a nice drink, watching the action unfold before me. It is like being on the set of a Mexican novella, minus the cameras, copious tears (hopefully) and hysterical women screaming ‘porque?!’ at the top of their lungs. Well, usually none of that happens.

As for adult women with pouty lips being sexy, I have to disagree. When I was a child, my mother warned me that if I pouted too much a rooster would sit on my lip and peck on my nose. Logic would dictate that cannot possibly happen, but why tempt fate?

I guess after all of this reflection I have to agree that I am not like other women. Or what I THINK other women are like. The truth is, I don’t really know what they are like – everything I have mentioned could be seen as unflattering stereotypes. I don’t like being stereotyped, so where do I get off doing this to a faceless group of people I admittedly don’t know?

Throughout most of my life, I have always identified more with the male half of humanity. It started in first grade when I played Superman every day at recess with Galen Lang and hasn’t stopped since. I love everything about them (the toilet seat issue can be annoying at 2am when I am half awake and in danger of falling in) and they seem infinitely easier to decode. Men can be messy, too preoccupied with the latest gadget or car, stinky farters, and chew like cows with a major wad of cud. They can also be straight shooters when it comes to what they think – I WANT to know if my butt looks too big in those jeans. I like that with most of my guy friends, what I see really is what I get. I don’t want to sit around talking about how I feel all the time and neither do they. Men are somehow less complicated than women. Not boring, just not aggravating.

However. Yet even so. BUT. The older I get, the more I meet women that I truly like and admire. They are real people – not just a gender, bra size, or shade of toenail polish. These are women of varying levels of education who think about things beyond that cute pair of shoes in the window at Paolo’s. They have opinions on culture, food, politics as well as the best manufacturer of luxury lingerie, what type of jeans looks best with their figure, and whose salon provides a better mani/pedi. These women are well rounded in more ways than one and they are INTERESTING. I actually want to talk with them. I want to go out with them on a girls’ night and I know I will have fun, that I will have something to contribute.

So what is the difference between these women and the demon girls I grew up with? The obvious answer is time – they have had time to experience the world and become strong enough to escape the pack, to become themselves. But I also believe that I myself have changed. I have a serious Peter Pan complex – I don’t really want to grow up because I have always thought that adults lose the ability to just enjoy life. They spend too much time worrying about mortgages, car payments, 401Ks, etc. It is as if they feel that they are somehow failures if they take an afternoon to act like a child – even jumping on the bed is a foreign concept. Maybe in my quest to keep my Calvin & Hobbes lifestyle, in my refusal to grow up, I have continued to act more like a 14 year old boy rather than a woman. But perhaps my ability to connect with other women and form true friendships with them means I am finally maturing myself.

I still feel that the idea that I am not like other women is a compliment. I like to be myself – the truth is that I have never really identified myself as a gender. I am a person. I happen to have mammary glands and a happy hoohoo, and maybe you don’t, but so what? Is being a woman something that is so easily quantified by clothing choices, social activities, and blatant sex appeal? Man, I really hope not. I am enjoying the idea that just like in the Army, I can be all I can be without having to conform to odd ideas that I have never understood. My fingers (and toes) are crossed in the superstitious hope that I have figured this whole girl thing out – finally.