You'll Grow Out of It

Everyone is charmed by a little tomboy. A scrappy little girl in overalls with a ponytail and scraped knees, who loves soccer and baseball and comic books and dirt. But what are we charmed by? It’s not just that she’s cute. It’s that she so innocently thinks she’s going to stay this way forever. But we all know she won’t. And why is that?

Because as much as we like a tomboy, nobody likes a tom man.

You might be wondering, “What is a tom man? I’ve never heard this term before.” You are correct. That is because I invented it. It is the only thing I have ever invented.

A tom man is what happens when a tomboy just never grows out of it.

For as far back as I can remember, the voice in my head has sounded like the voice of a man. You might think the next thing I’m going to tell you has something to do with being gay, or thinking I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body, but neither is the case. What I mean is that literally, walking around as a child, the little voice I’d hear narrating my own thoughts and experiences sounded like Daniel Stern in The Wonder Years. I think this is because the very idea of possessing an “inner voice” felt by definition like a male characteristic. In contrast, the tent poles of “femininity” as I observed them—high heels, eye makeup, Diet Coke, smiling, etc.—all seemed to be focused on the external. In any case, they felt completely foreign to me.

As a result, throughout my childhood, I felt like an outsider to being a straight girl, even though I WAS a straight girl.

My parents, perhaps noticing that my main recreational activity was counting the yellow cabs that went past our window, asked if I wanted to do ballet. I said absolutely not, as the idea of wearing a tutu repulsed me. I have a very early memory of viscerally hating, loathing, a girl in my preschool, simply because she wore earrings. The overt femininity of this act was somehow an irritant to me. Even though I was just four years old, I remember having the “What do you think, you’re bettah than me?” feeling that a fifty-year-old plumber from Brooklyn feels when he has to take a detour because Prince William is in town.

To punish her I would ram my Big Wheel into her Big Wheel until she cried.

My only nod to typical girl interests was that I loved horses and devoured every book in the Black Stallion series, and when I was finished with those books I would stare at the covers, taking in how beautiful horses were in general and the Black Stallion was in particular. Lots of people talk about the sexual undertones of girls’ interest in horses, but I know that for me, when I stared at those pictures, I didn’t have some secret desire to date the Black Stallion. I literally wanted to be a horse. A male horse.

But it’s still acceptable to be a tomboy through elementary school. And even into the beginning of junior high, a girl who dresses or acts more like a boy can be filed under “coltish,” the adjective for the next age category. But I was pushing it. I didn’t regularly brush my hair.1 I didn’t have any interest in makeup beyond the moment that I stole a pink frosted Wet n Wild lipstick in the fourth grade just because my friend Mara did.2 In the sixth grade, I was allowed for the first time to eat lunch outside the confines of the school, and with this newfound culinary freedom I chose to eat a single street-cart hot dog every single day.

Once I reached high school, however, my transformation from Pippi Longstocking–esque tomboy to are-you-a-lesbian-or-what tom man began in earnest. I was supposed to be entering into the full bloom of puberty, nibbling, like a delicate baby panda, at the first tiny bamboo shoots of womanhood. But I resisted. Even though I was interested in men, and wanted a boyfriend desperately, I didn’t relate to any of the activities women partake in to create the circumstances where a teenage boy might be coaxed into the role. I wore my dad’s old button-down cowboy shirts with enormous shapeless jeans and combat boots. I have a memory of walking home from school one afternoon when a homeless man hanging out on the corner of my block felt compelled to inquire whether I was “a man or a woman.”

I looked like a mess during college, too, although I did manage at one point to get a decent little bob haircut (for free on a training night from Vidal Sassoon). While the girls around me were starting to exercise, hunching over a StairMaster in that way that people did in the ’90s, sensing, as they should have, that now was the time to start laying a foundation upon which firm booties and high tits would remain forever tightly slung, I wasn’t aware that any such activity was necessary. And it didn’t ever occur to me to eat anything other than breaded chicken patties on Wonder Bread buns followed by a piece of cake. I’ve thought about it pretty hard, and I feel certain that I ate at least one of those chicken patties every single day for the full four years I was at school.

Somehow, in the midst of this, I did manage to wrangle up a boyfriend, but that didn’t stop me from being a tom man. Even though he was, in fact, an actual man, he suffered from the same late-bloomer syndrome I did, wherein neither of us knew how to be a presentable adult. So essentially we ended up enabling each other, like drug addicts, except the only thing we were addicted to was looking terrible. When we moved in together after college, into a tired junior one-bedroom, we put our mattress on the floor, sleeping together like a couple of Labradors, blinking away the dust bunnies that cold breezes would blow into our faces. Even when I started working in an office, sartorially I still looked more than a smidge like a rodeo clown. I remember buying a pair of wide-legged parachute-material pants in gunmetal gray, and wearing those with bright-orange Adidas sneakers and a button-down short-sleeved blouse I got on sale from Banana Republic for $29.99. All my shirts, throughout my entire twenties, cost $29.99.

And perhaps because my boyfriend was also desperately inexperienced, and thus had very few demands, I didn’t feel the need to participate in any of the seductive arts. I wore Hanes Her Way underwear every single day, no exceptions. Because they were the “bikini” kind I felt like pretty hot shit, but make no mistake, for me “her way” meant plain white cotton with a little bit of pubic hair sticking out the sides.

Once he and I broke up, I suddenly found myself single, with the predicament of having to get naked in front of new men. I felt lost, like a monkey born in captivity that, despite a researcher’s attempt to release it back into the wild, cowers in the corner of its cage, desperate for its safe old life.

I was still essentially feral, and beyond shaving my legs above the knee, I made few noticeable external changes. But for the first time, I started dating guys who gave me unsolicited feedback on my appearance.

I remember I was once resting my legs on a boyfriend’s lap as we lolled about on the couch. He looked down at my toenails and said, “So you never use nail polish, huh?” I stared down at my feet. My toenails were bare and, truth be told, the ends were a little ragged. They were the toenails of someone who had just scaled a cliff, except I hadn’t scaled anything (ever). I felt a pang of primal shame, the female grooming equivalent of Eve suddenly losing her innocence upon realizing that she was naked, like a total idiot.

Then there was the night I arrived at a bar to meet my old friend Kate. Kate is a guy’s gal, but she is not a tom man. She’s more of a Katharine Hepburn–style broad, a ball-busting pants wearer who is still very feminine. I was arriving straight from work, which meant I was carrying my huge maroon backpack, overflowing with papers and books and loose change and probably a CD Walkman. After giving her a hug, I lowered my backpack onto the floor. Kate stared at it for a moment, as if it were a puppy that had just shit on a white rug, and then leaned in toward me and put her hand on my knee.

“Jess, you know I love you,” she said, “but your backpack is hurting my feelings.”

I was taken aback. This wasn’t a boyfriend telling me that he thought my butt looked big in a skirt. This was a friend, an amiga, a woman with no investment in my appearance beyond platonic affection. And still, she felt it necessary to inform me that I had crossed a line.

At the time of the backpack incident, I was probably around thirty, and like my little-girl tomboy self I had nontraditional interests. I was doing stand-up comedy, which meant that I was hanging out in dive bars and telling jokes to strangers. I was proud that I had finally gathered up the guts to pursue this weird calling that I’d felt I had since I was a ten-year-old girl dressed as Groucho Marx for Halloween.

But dressing like Groucho for Halloween when you’re ten is different from dressing like Groucho as a consistent style choice when you’re thirty. I was single and living by myself in a dark sublet across from the BQE in Brooklyn and I wanted to get out of there. I was sick of dating funny but emotionally stunted guys. I wanted to find a Grown Man. It seemed only fair, I decided, that if that was what I wanted, then I should make some attempt to become a Grown Woman. But when I looked at what it would mean to become a woman—one of those standard grown-up ladies, like the ones from commercials for gum or soda or shampoo—it all seemed to involve shrinking rather than growing.