In praise of (sort of) girly girls

Whenever I read something new about girls and "princess play" or the gendering of toys in general, I keeping coming back to this quote from Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demon's:

On my street there were a lot of girls, but girlish girls were few. Mostly we were tomboys.

That's my experience in a nutshell, and it seems to match that of loads of other women . Were we all tomboys, or do we just remember ourselves as tomboys? As much as I'm loathe to admit it, I'd put my bets on the latter.

To my credit, my childhood happened long before the advent of the whole Disney princess phenomenon. I didn't have princess aspirations; I never thought it was really an option. I wanted to be a rock star, or a talk show host (this was during the Phil Donahue/Sally Jesse Raphael era), or the completely unrealistic, a dinosaur. On "career" day I said I wanted to be a vet mostly because my best friend said the same thing. When we played dress-up, the aforementioned friend and I dressed up as hippies. I had Barbies and Hot Wheels, but the dolls definitely outnumbered the cars. The brunt of my childhood play was neither girlish or tomboyish, but had you walked into my ten-year-old bedroom, you'd absolutely think "girl's room".

As much as it pleases me to see the little girl in the video linked above rallying against the gender essentialism of the toy isle (whether she was coached or not), we shouldn't shame girls for liking Barbies, and pink and all things princess-y. Our shame ourselves for that matter.