Your experiences of/discomfort with the idea of growing up to be a woman?

[RobinsAreTerritorialFuckers]

When you realised you would grow up to be a woman, what did you feel? What did you think it meant?

Did you ever dress, behave, or try to act, more like a 'boy' - and when?

Do you see the same behaviours in your children, or do you think it's easier now for them?

Did you ever think your body would change - or did you try to change it?

Lots of questions, but what I'm interested in is how we see gender as children, and how that affects us. For example, I was a tomboy growing up. I wanted to be taken for a boy, and always wanted to beat my older brother at everything. In my teens, though, I was both very keen on 'girly' things, and terrified about my body. I used to wrap fabric around my developing breasts and I was quite excited when I heard that if I ate little enough, my periods would stop.

My DP, OTOH, confused her mum no end by putting up masses of pictures of sexy, muscly men on her bedroom walls - she is not remotely straight, but she assumed that, at some stage, she would end up with a body like that.

I wonder if talking about these experiences and feelings - which I suspect aren't unusual - would be interesting in terms of thinking about gender roles?

I liked stories about famous historical women like Eleanor of Aquitaine and Elizabeth 1. I loved Jean Plaidy. I read all her books when I was 9 or 10.

I remember my first teacher asking all the class shag we wanted to be when we grew up.
She showed us a book and each of us had 3 choices.
The boys choices were a firefighter a train driver or an astronaught.
The girls choices were;
A schoolteacher, a nurse or a hairdresser.
I said I didn't want to be any of those 3 and wondered shy the hell o couldn't be an astronaught.

I remember being outraged after reading endless Peter and Jane books and thinking why the hell doesn't Jane ever do anything interesting.
I had endless unwanted sexual comments and encounters from the age of around 11/12

It made me sick and I hated it.
I do feel it is far more unacceptable for men to openly sexualise young girls now.

I had 90s 00s children and I didn't find it too difficult to raise girls however I do get where you are coming from because 1 was called a tomboy she wasn't a tomboy she was a girl who liked lego and stuff I think because me and dh didnt buy into gendered things she found it easy to be who she was with us ?

I felt vvv conflicted growing up, like I knew I wasn't a girly girl but I also didn't want to be a boy. I just want to be but womanhood wasn't really on my radar cause I was also infanticised for way longer than I should have been, still treated like a child and given cuddly toys well into my teens so when I started puberty and experimenting with being a bit more grown up, that also cause both inner conflict and conflict within the family. In the end I basically just rebelled.

However, I used to read a lot of Sweet Valley and remember both hating the characters and being jealous that they seemed to just fit in and have an easy life, like the issues they had were non-issues and if I could be more like them then I wouldn't have any problems either.

I was really sheltered growing up so didn't come across gender theory til late 20s so spend quite a lot of time being resentful of all the fucked up gendered things pushed on me as a kid which I think is why I'm still uncomfortable with being a woman sometimes because sometimes my expressuons dont feel like they are organic or from 'me'.

I was quite happy to be changing into a woman. I did have a friend who refused to take the free pack of sanitary towels we were given in the first year of secondary school saying she didn't need them. We all said she would one day, but she wasn't having it. She became anorexic in later years and I always wondered if it was something to do with that fear of growing up.