It's a Girl/ Boy Thing.

Earlier on, I was in two minds as to whether being 'girly' is a good thing or a bad thing. Then I realised that there's a third mind: It's neither a good nor a bad thing. It's just a thing.

I was playing this Through the Keyhole -ish game with my mother, the aim being for her to speculate my gender and age based on my bedroom. Showing no regard to my various Arsenal monuments, she immediately went over to my bookshelf and said, "Girl. Student." This is based entirely on the fact that I own both the Twilight series and the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology, among other similar dorky books on the English Language and awful chick lit specially reserved for a certain time of the month (the chick lit, that is; reading about English idioms doesn't tend to get my serotonin levels soaring). The student part is wrong, of course: I graduated a year ago, but because of the aforementioned dorkiness, I've kept all my books for ease of reference. And yes, I do still refer to them: a couple of weeks ago I did some reading up on commas. *Cucumber impersonation.*

Anyway, I'm getting off the point. What was my point? Where is my point?

Oh, it's over there. I'll go fetch it.

Got it.

So. My point was this: why does 'one' automatically defend themselves when accused of being 'girly'? If you're a dude, OK, maybe you want to be a dude, and having a hoo-ha, generally, implies that you are without a ding-dong. So I get that. (Just about. A hoo-ha is so much tidier and more discreet than a ding-dong.) But what's with all the negative girl connotations?

You throw like a girl.

I was screaming like a girl.

Stop being such a girl.

What's wrong with the following?:

You throw like a penguin.

I was screaming like one of the Bee-Gees.

Stop being such a scaredy-cat.

These are much better, in my opinion. The same point is made, only here we are replacing the attack on girls with attacks on penguins, cats and the Bee-Gees - and quite frankly, it's about time that the Bee-Gees took some responsibility for all those bloody awful haircuts.

But it's not just the apparent lack of aim, the pitch or the bravery of girls which is the issue here; it's everything else. Why is it considered silly to like the colour pink? Why is it a bad thing to have a (large) number of Beanie Babies lined up on top of your wardrobe? (Guilty). Why is it that all the behaviours associated with women - or girls - is laughed at or ridiculed? And why do we, as women, feel that we have to defend the things that we like, or worse: pretend that we don't actually like them - as if they are somehow inferior to men's things: cars, beer, football and a drawer full of screwdrivers and dead batteries?

All this occurred to me as I was looking around my bedroom at all the little things that give away clues about its occupier, and it was only until I remembered my mum's words - Girl. Student. - that I realised you can never make judgements about people based on one, two or even a handful of things; she looked at a few books and made an incorrect assumption that I'm a student. If she'd looked at my Arsenal posters she might have thought I was a boy; if she'd looked at my DVDs on the Vietnam War she might have thought I was a pensioner; if she'd looked at my yoga mat she might have thought that I was something more than the lazy bugger that I actually am.

The reality is that no one is one thing.

I'm a girly-girl: I like the occasional trashy book, I wear a bit of makeup and my room is painted purple.

I'm a tomboy: I like football, I can't walk in heels and nail polish scares me.

I'm mature beyond my years: I have books on English grammar and my own filing system.

I act my shoe size, rather than my age: I have books on people and places with rude names, and I think lying about somewhere is a well-used whoopee cushion.

I am a mish-mash of all kinds of things. We all are. And none of those things, be it girl, boy, old or young, are in any way superior or inferior to any of the others.