I had one or two close friends in high school, and most of my social life was on the internet. (Though part of that was the lingering conviction that most of my female peers were too stupid to live, and there were names for girls who were ‘friends’ with boys.)

My parents were kind of hands-off in that department; Mom grew up with three brothers, so wasn’t terribly girly herself and was okay with having tomboyish daughters, Dad didn’t really care what we looked like or how we did gender. He thought teaching us stuff like cooking was more important. And of course there was the instructive example of his mother: Grandmother was raised as a boy until she was five, and is still not very fond of women, in general.

I rejected femininity too ferociously – today I think Little Me might identify as asexual or transgender, though who knows, because I was adamant that I wasn’t a girl, girl = bad, but I didn’t feel especially boy-y either – I didn’t have many female friends. I was okay with that as a child because I thought girls were catty/useless/makeup-obsessed/boring and boys were cool, which, in hindsight, breaks my heart a little. I hated media-created girliness, not girls. But I didn’t know. The only way I (and my mother) knew how to defend me against Shitty Commercial Girl Stuff was for me to abandon all pretense of girlness, and with that, girls.

Striving to show that it’s okay to be different is a better way, I think, but, really, it sounds like Lauca is cool with difference. It’ll be the friend that must learn to love a girl that isn’t “girly”. It seems like this rejection is pretty common, but I do wonder, because I know the girls I knew only wanted me to be with them, and help/protect me, and I abandoned them utterly for something that wasn’t their fault, really. And I didn’t tell them “come on, let’s climb trees together!” I said “I climb trees because I am a tomboy, you don’t because you are a useless girly girl”.

Anyway, it all worked out in the end and one of the best by-products was that I am really close to my brother, because I spent a lot of my free time with him and his friends.

Looking back I can see how patriarchy had done a number on all of us. I deprived myself of meaningful relationships with other young women until my 20s because I was suspicious and judgmental of other young women, who were just doing their best to navigate their own way through the pressure to perform.