I Dress Like A Boy

As I write this, I’m watching Dolly Parton making her Glastonbury debut. My most lucid comment from the running commentary in my head is “her tits are fucking massive”. I want her tits. If you know me, you will know that I do not do girl things. And I most certainly do not want tits. I spent my teenage years strapping them down in something called a minimiser that was made by M&S. I think it might be the greatest thing ever created. I tried the whole bandage thing, like Christina Ricci in Now and Then. But in the summer a thin layer of bandages can get sweaty. And you need more than one roll if you want to see results.

As Ricci said, “No matter what I do they just keep getting bigger.” So I turned, like many other women before me, to the minimiser. Because what is the point of having breasts if not to squash them down into nonexistence? My favourite tits have always been the Russ Meyer tits – the fleshy bust that comes with his biography, the aptly titled A Clean Breast. Detachable breasts are best.

Detachable breasts do not cause shirts to gape open at inappropriate moments. Detachable breasts allow you to wear shirts that aren’t the size of a tent as anything else, quite simply, won’t button up. Detachable breasts do not make non-form-fitting fabric hang from your chest like a giant tablecloth. You could smuggle drugs in that space between your body and shirt and nobody would be any the wiser. I have never understood why people insist on hiding things in body cavities when all they really need is a pair of detachable breasts. Are airport security really going to attempt to grope you while you wait in line for your bag to go through the x-ray machine?

The reason for this breast tirade is not because I’m averse to them in any way. I do not mind them on other people, nor do I have any weird body dysmorphic issues, and nor did anything weird involving breasts happen to me as a child. The reason is I dress like a boy. And when you dress like a boy, the worst thing that can happen to you is breasts. The moment you hit 13 your life changes and you realise that you will never be able to wear a shirt in the same way again. You also realise that you will never be able to leave the house without a bra. Ever.

Maybe it’s because I was supposed to be a boy. For the five months my mother was pregnant, she was pregnant for nine, but didn’t realise for four, I was supposed to be a boy. From the moment I was born until about the age of one everyone assumed I was a boy. Up until I was three months old I didn’t even have a name. My mother’s favourite colour was blue. Blue was all she dressed me in. If you look at pictures of me as a baby, I look like a boy. Except for the one where I’m not dressed in blue. The one in which I am the spitting image of Pope John Paul II in a yellow dress. I look like a cross-dressing pope.

So, this is what I wear on a daily basis, a version of which I have worn on a daily basis from about the age of five. Apart from when I wore a school uniform. At my schools girls didn’t have the trousers option. But then the uniform, as with all good things, ended. And so, you have to make up your own. So this is mine. A navy jumper or T-shirt. Sometimes black. Rarely grey. It’s mainly navy. Always. Unless it’s the summer, and then I’ll wear a blue shirt. A navy coat. Nothing fancy, just a classic men’s overcoat. Jeans. In blue. I don’t think I’ve ever owned a jean in any other colour, except when I was 10 and coloured Benetton jeans were the thing. Converse, sometimes Nike, or a chelsea boot. I do buy shoes. Shoes other than trainers, with heels, that I wear sometimes, when there is a taxi involved, but mainly to wash dishes. I tell myself that it’s to practise walking in them, which it is. I can now successfully walk from my wardrobe to the kitchen and back again. And then they come off. I agree with Fran Lebowitz when she says, “If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?”

On that note, even if people do want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater as well? Sweaters are inanimate objects; they should be seen and not heard. It’s not that I’m not interested in clothes, I am very interested in clothes. I like clothes. I just don’t like wearing “clothes”. I like how men dress. I read about how men dress. Books on men’s dress. I don’t think I’ve retained any of what I’ve read, but I read it anyway. Which is why I agree with Lebowitz. I do not believe in God but I believe in cashmere. Lebowitz, in my opinion, may be the best-dressed man of our time. There are those who will claim it’s Diane Keaton. But it’s not. It’s Lebowitz. A friend once sent me a picture of Lebowitz that she had captioned “Eerily similar”, which though flattering, was a big stretch. The person I most resemble is my dad. It seems that not only have I inherited his face, with less stubble, but also his dress sense. There’s a picture, I think from my graduation, where we’re dressed in matching striped shirts, jeans and Nikes. As a friend once told me, if it wasn’t for the hair, it would be hard to tell us apart. And as Rachel once said in Friends, I spent so much time avoiding becoming my mother, I didn’t realised I’d turned into my father. Which, to be honest, isn’t the worst thing that could happen to a girl.

The thing about boy clothes is that boy clothes are more fun. You can have fun in boy clothes. You can do things in boy clothes. All the best girls wear boy clothes. Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, Darlene in Roseanne, Peppermint Patty in Peanuts. They wore clothes that let them do things and, as a result, got to hang with the boys, which as someone who once owned at least 20 Barbies knows, is infinitely more fun than playing house with other girls. You climb trees, jump off them into lakes, find bugs and try to burn them with a magnifying glass and a ray of light. You get to play in dirt because nobody worries about you ruining your clothes. And you learn to kick ass. Girls in boy clothes kick ass. I’ve always thought that The Bad Seed’s little Rhoda, the budding serial killer, should have been dressed in dungarees, not a pretty dress. Her love of arson only spoke of a tomboy at heart. Maybe if she had been dressed in dungarees she wouldn’t have tried to drown the perfect-penmanship champion so she could steal his medal, which wouldn’t have led to her having to burn anyone who uncovered her faux pas. All she had ever wanted was her talent for penmanship to be recognised. And if it had, maybe she wouldn’t have taken the burning of bugs to the next level.

The thing about womanhood, to quote Lebowitz again, is that, “being a woman is of special interest only to aspiring male transsexuals. To actual women, it is simply a good excuse not to play football”. And unlike aspiring male transsexuals, you don’t get to choose if you are one or not. It’s just something that happens to you. And then you get all the crap that goes with it. I mean, yes, sometimes I see clothes I like, but then I wonder whether I could possibly wear them. Never in a million years. Because it’s just too much like hard work. Because being a woman is hard enough as it is without having to worry about what to wear. And I also just referred to my breasts as a shelf. And a mid-afternoon snack tray. Things get caught in there. Until you have them, you have no idea.

By Natalie Dembinska