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Tomboyism usually describes an extended childhood period of female masculinity. If we are to believe general accounts of childhood behavior, some degree of tomboy behavior is quite common for girls and does not give rise to parental fears. Because comparable cross-identification behaviors in boys do often give rise to quite hysterical responses, we tend to believe that female gender deviance is much more tolerated than male gender deviance. I am not sure that tolerance in such matters can be measured, nor that responses to childhood gender behaviors necessarily tells us anything concrete about the permitted parameters of adult male and female gender deviance. Tomboyism tends to be associated with a “natural” desire for the greater freedoms and mobilities enjoyed by boys. Very often it is read as a sign of independence and self-motivation. It may even be encouraged to the extent that it remains comfortably linked to a stable sense of a girl identity. Tomboyism is punished, however, when it appears to be the sign of extreme male identification (taking a boy’s name or refusing to wear girl clothing of any type) and when it threatens to extend beyond childhood and into adolescence. Teenage tomboyism presents a problem and tends to be subject to the most severe efforts to reorient. We could say that tomboyism is tolerated as long as the child remains prepubescent; as soon as puberty begins, however, the full force of gender conformity descends on the girl. Gender conformity is pressed onto all girls, not just tomboys, and this is where it becomes hard to uphold the notion that male femininity presents a greater threat to social and familial stability than female masculinity. Female adolescence represents the crisis of coming of age as a girl in a male-dominated society. If adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage (much celebrated in Western literature in the form of the bildungsroman), and an ascension to some version (however attenuated) of social power, for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression. It is in the context of female adolescence that the tomboy instincts of millions of girls are remodeled into compliant forms of femininity. That any girls do emerge at the end of adolescence as masculine women is quite amazing. The growing visibility and indeed respectability of lesbian communities to some degree facilitate the emergence of masculine young women. But even a cursory survey of popular cinema confirms, the image of the tomboy can be tolerated only within a narrative of blossoming womanhood: within such a narrative, tomboyism represents a resistance to adulthood itself rather than to adult femininity. Tomboy identities are conveyed as benign forms of childhood identification as long as they evince acceptable degrees of femininity, appropriate female aspiration, and as long as they promise to result in marriage and motherhood.