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[–]madtofu 12 insightful - 1 fun12 insightful - 0 fun13 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I've thought about this a lot. I had the same experience of being sort of horrified by menstruation and pubic hair and being unhappy when it happened to me. I had a sense that I was too young for that, that I wasn't ready for womanhood. (Of course I wasn't - I was 10. It wasn't about gender. Puberty is gross and scary for everyone.) I was also a tomboy and really pissed off that I couldn't play baseball and that people kept trying to get me to wear hot, scratchy dresses.

If I'd been born in 2000 instead of the 70s, there's no telling what might've happened to me. For the life of me, I don't understand why the progress stopped and we're moving backwards and enforcing gender norms so hard now that any kid who plays with toy cars is a boy and any kid who plays with dolls is a girl. That is some 1950s bullshit.