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One of the Boys
aka: One Of The Guys

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Elaine: You know what? I don't have one female friend left.
Kramer: Oh, no, of course you don't. You're a man's woman. You hate other women, and they hate you.
Seinfeld, "The Pool Guy"

Girls usually spend time with other girls, in cliques, or 'sisterhoods'. Then, there are those who prefer to pal around with guys instead. Traditional schoolgirl pastimes, such as playing with dolls and tea time, are eschewed in favor of things like baseball or roughhousing on the schoolyard. She might be rude and use crude or less-refined slang like a boy. She spits, bleeds, and doesn't care much if she's chipped a nail or two.

They may be introduced in a way that shows she's "in" with the guys. This can entail anything from simply hanging out with them, to engaging in some sort of contest (e.g., gaming or drinking), or she might be their mechanic. The point being, she doesn't need or expect any special treatment.

That said, chances are good that they'll be subjected to a She Cleans Up Nicely plot, at some point, to bring forth their "true beauty". But unlike other girls, they'll consider themselves a victim, as being forced to get "dolled up" is humiliating. In some cases, it isn't even necessary. Not only does it run the risk of changing the group dynamic, it may cause one of the guys to develop a romantic interest in her — which can make things… awkward, for her. Or possibly she'll attract interest from some other quarters...

A Girliness Upgradenote  is often seen as an improvement for them. The guys she hangs with often find the development of feminine traits in their 'bestie' a plus, as they'll now have an approachable girl they share a lot in common with. But it can just as easily backfire on her when her friends start to take an interest in girls, only to completely overlook her. Instead, they'll come to her for advice on how to approach other girls; leaving her as the 'odd man out'. Or, if one of 'em doesn't have a date, they might ask her to act as an emergency stand-in, for appearances' sake — just to help out a pal of course, it doesn't mean anything.note 

The Lad-ette can be thought of as a subtrope combined with She Is All Grown Up, though she's just as likely to find herself having to remind her guy friends that 'she's a girl too' — in a self-conscious attempt to defy the downsides of this trope.

Compare (and often overlaps with) Tomboy, Girl Next Door and Short Tank. In anime and manga works, they're likely to be a Bokukko, especially if they've been Raised by Dudes. Not to be confused with You Go, Girl!, where a girl participates in masculine activities just to prove she can do it. Contrasts with Girly Girl and Proper Lady. See One of the Girls for the Spear Counterpart.

Not to be confused with One of the Kids.


Example subpages:

Other examples

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    Comic Books 
  • Depending on the Writer, Betty from Archie Comics. This trait is most obvious in the 2015 reboot. Her mechanic skills are emphasized and she's quite tomboyish, in stark contrast to the womanly Veronica. Betty's friend Sheila even complains that Betty can't be "one of the guys" anymore and should dress feminine for her birthday party.
  • Kunskapens Korridorer: Mia seems to rather hang out with boys than with other girls. And she also knows how to repair cars!
  • Ms. Tree: Young Michael Tree was a total tomboy and largely kept at it at least straight through high school who had no trouble attracting boys' interest as much for her beauty as for her toughness.
  • Robin (1993): Callie Evans is a sarcastic tomboyish basketball player who is even more rough and tumble than most of the guys she hangs out with since all of them but Tim are rather non-active geeks who'd prefer tabletop or video games to sports. She does have some friends who are girls, mainly from the basketball team, but she doesn't spend nearly as much time with them as she does Ives, Hudson, Hudman, and Tim.
  • Wonder Girl Donna Troy in Teen Titans, though it's Depending on the Writer.

    Comic Strips 

    Fan Works 
  • In the crossover story The Bridge, Mothra is the only female out of the initial quartet of benign kaiju; Anguirus, Rodan, and Godzilla all being male. There are plenty of female kaiju and considering the other franchise it crossover with, there are plenty of other female characters in-story; she's just the only one of the core kaiju group.
  • In Child of the Storm, Carol is a classic version of this, being her school's top football (the version that the rest of the world recognises as football) player, a top athlete, with a spiky, abrasive personality. The latter largely comes from the fact that, unlike most examples, she's not indistinguishable from the guys. Instead, she's an Amazonian Beauty and Younger than She Looks, leading to a lot of unwanted attention.
  • In the Discworld fic Strandpiel, by A.A. Pessimal, Famke Smith-Rhodes-Stibbons, aged about eleven, uses force of personality and a national trait for cheerfully applied violence to get accepted into a fifteen-a-side team where she more than holds her own. The governing council of fifteen-a-side then has to write a law that previously was not considered necessary, that the Great Game is men only and mixed-sex teams are strictly not permitted.
  • Everybody's Gotta Leave Sometime: During her goodbye to Charlie Brown, Peppermint Patty admits she could never be like his beloved Little Red-Haired Girl because she can't not be a loud, sport-loving tomboy.
  • Maia from The Night Unfurls used to be like this, for she was recruited by the all-male mercenary group that is the Black Dogs, and fought alongside Vault and their merc comrades a long while ago. The Black Dogs' betrayal hits her hard.
  • This is a minor plot point in the final chapter of Red Jewel Diaries when Vice accidentally has a curse placed on him by NanoFate shippers that causes him to uncontrollably grope every woman he sees. Alto is the only one that doesn't set him off because he never really viewed her as a girl to begin with.
  • Unbreakable Red Silken Thread: When trying to help Cameron with his extreme shyness around girls, Cody points out that he has no problems with Jo, only for Cameron to counter by pointing out Jo is more of a guy than her boyfriend half the time.

    Music 
  • David Bowie plays with this trope in his song "Rebel Rebel", which is about an extravagant drag queen who the narrator sees as One Of The Boys.
  • Jenny Lewis' "Just One of the Guys" provides a wry commentary on how this is actually really hard if not actually impossible because women's biological clocks are ticking.
  • Katy Perry's "One of the Boys", played straight with Chickification being a good thing. Balanced out when she snubs the guy she originally chickified for - who is totally oblivious to her crush since he thought of their relationship as Like Brother and Sister.
  • Kesha's stage persona and lyrics are more or less this, at least according to her entry...
  • Patti Smith was this for real as a child and carried these traits into her adult life. She writes about it in a prose poem, "female/feel male".

    Professional Wrestling 
  • Jacqueline Moore was for most of her career, regardless of alignment or territory, unless it was an all-female promotion such as the LPWA. That was until she was put in the man-hating PMS in the WWF with Terri Runnels, Ryan Shamrock, and their sex slave Meat (Because this was the "Attitude Era" when the WWF lost all sense of good taste). After PMS ended though, she went right back into this trope with the chain-smoking, card-playing, heavy-drinking Acolyte Protection Agency. They didn't even try to strip her in poker (The Kat was fair game though, much to her annoyance)
  • Jazz in ECW, as it had no female division but she was a good enough wrestler to be an asset to the wrestling stables beyond catfights or distractions.
  • Daizee Haze cited this trope as her reason not to date any wrestler, except for maybe Matt Sydal. This was of course invitation for dozens of unwanted suitors.
  • Lexi Lane sets aside two days of the week for training with "the boys" for at least three hours, though she has mixed feelings about how they usually beat her up.
  • After Susan Morton beat Josie for the Tennessee State Women's title recognized by CWA, USWO, and Special Events at the April 2006 Mule Days event, the male baby faces of USWO poured out of the locker room and paraded her around the ring on their shoulders.
  • Delmi Exo was announced as this for her match with Faye Jackson at WWR From The Pinnacle To The Pit, March 25, 2018.
  • Lita had this dynamic for most of her career. She usually dressed in long loose masculine pants and sneakers, and when she wore T-shirts or crop tops they usually had rather unfeminine imagery like skull-and-crossbone motifs. She was also more than willing to throw down with male wrestlers, joining the Hardy Boyz as the third member of Team Extreme. She even went so far as to compete in the second Tables, Ladders and Chairs match at Wrestlemania X-Seven, helping the Boyz when every competing tag team got an 11th-Hour Ranger to help them.

    Theatre 

    Video Games 
  • Advanced V.G. has several examples among its cast of fighting waitresses:
  • Despite what the name would tell you, Broforce actually features six female members, all of which are the same Eaglelander, trigger-happy, terrorist killers as the male bros. They are Ellen Ripbro, Cherry Broling, The Brode, Tank Bro, Xebro and Broffy.
  • Jak and Daxter gives us Keira: resident Wrench Wench and childhood friend of the protagonists.
  • Mass Effect:
    • The female Shepard is typically one of these. In the Citadel DLC, Vega and Cortez have no problem involving a female Shepard in a ritual that is traditionally very male-centric, specifically having a beer and watching the big biotiball game, and there's none of the awkwardness that would probably be taking place if the sole reason she was invited was to get access to that big-screen TV.
    • In the third game, a Citadel sub-plot at the local nightclub shows us a lady talking to one of the guys on her squad, wanting to hang out with the rest of the guys while they're on leave. The guy tries (first by beating around the bush, then coming right out with it) to explain the other guys would be uncomfortable with letting their hair down around her, but she just bulldozes over his excuses in a decidedly crude, "I'm one of you guys" manner until he gives in.
  • Persona:
    • Chie Satonaka from Persona 4 seems to get along with the guys just fine (thanks to being close friends with Kou and Daisuke from the different sports teams, and is the first girl to join in on the Midnight Channel mystery), and has a lot of masculine interests. However, this causes a bit of a complex for her. As far as she's aware, no one is ever romantically interested with her or treats her like a girl, which eventually leads to deeply envying her best friend Yukiko for a while until she meets her Enemy Without, forcing her to acknowledge that part of herself.
    • Yukari Takeba and Ann Takamaki fulfill the same role as Chie in that they're the first female party members that join their games' respective parties, and while both aren't as tomboyish as Chie (they share a love for cute and girly things and are very fashionable with their clothing), their dynamic with the P3 Protagonist and Junpei / Joker and Ryuji is helped by how well they play off the guys. They can throw as much snark towards them which the guys pay back in kind, and have a few boyish interests: Yukari sinks a lot of time into sports and athletic pursuits, while Ann is a Gamer Chick in her spare time.
  • Skies of Arcadia: Aika was raised among air pirates and has served aboard the Albatross for as long as her best friend, Vyse. So when he eventually gets a ship of his own, Aika is the first to join his crew as his First Officer and as ship's navigator. However, Vyse still respects her privacy as a lady.
  • Elh Melizée from Solatorobo. While she doesn't seem to have any truly "boyish" interests (and even knows a bit about flowers, but only because they grew in her home village, of course), she wears boys' clothing, uses male pronouns, and appears male enough that Red and Chocolat mistake her for a guy at first sight - even a guard at an all-boys magic school that she sneaks into notes that, upon close inspection, "he couldn't possibly be a girl". Red flips out when he learns she's a girl, but even after that, he continues to treat her pretty much the same as he did when he thought she was a guy (aside from the Ship Tease, anyway).
  • If Seong Han-myeong had his way in the Soul Series, his daughter, Seong Mi-na, would be wed and he'd swear her groom into the family as his son, so they could inherit his dojo. Except she's rebellious and has has an adventurous streak, preferring to travel the continent in search of Soul Edge. By Soulcalibur II, he'd given up on trying to marry her off and decided to just let her be.
  • A rare Gender Inversion in South Park: The Stick of Truth. Upon completing all of the girls' quests, the male main character, "The New Kid", is granted the title of "Honorary Girl" by them, and is given free access to their clubhouse as well as an invitation to their next slumber party. Possibly played straight in the sequel South Park: The Fractured but Whole, if the player chooses to make their character a girl. If they do, the explanation given for the change is that the New Kid was a girl all along in the first game. Nobody realized her gender (with the exception of Wendy and Mr. Mackey) while her parents lied about her identity to protect her from the government. And given the New Kid's skill set, she probably would fit in more with the boys than with the girls anyway.
  • Makoto of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike is such an extreme example that gamers couldn't tell whether she was a feminine-looking boy or a boyish-looking girl when they first saw her. Which was muddled further by the fact that she was muscular, hard-hitting, and tomboyish in personality. It actually took her dizzy animation to clear things up. Additionally, her name is arguably the most common unigender Japanese name.
  • Pathologic 2 has Lara- also nicknamed "Gravel", by the three boys she grew up with in their rural Russian town. Her character arc is traditionally masculine, struggling with whether she should avenge her father, who she had a strong bond with.
    Artemy: We used to call her Gravel, because she always had an edge on us.

    Visual Novels 
  • Subverted by Chihiro Fujisaki in Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. She appears to prefer the company of boys... until it's revealed that the reason for this is that he is... well... a he.
  • Mion in Higurashi: When They Cry. Talks about herself as an old man, openly perverted, boyish, no obvious girly interests... but is ultimately a deconstruction of this trope; she actually does have them and is upset to realize that Keiichi more or less really does see her as a guy. It's a problem when the guy you obviously like barely even recognizes your gender.
  • Rin from Little Busters!, a tsundere tomboy who is part of a group of Childhood Friends consisting of her and four boys, one of whom is her older brother. And indeed, her first appearance in the game is of her beating the crap out of Masato for hurting a poor kitty.

    Web Animation 
  • Camp Camp: Nikki is a borderline feral tomboy, who is the most likely to roughhouse and be covered in dirt at any given time. Trying to point out she's a girl to Max and Neil, who had turned to the Flower Scouts for a female perspective, nets her an "Ehhhh..." with a wiggly hand motion.

    Webcomics 
  • White is not only the most competent battling Pokemon Trainer in Black Adventures and fond of power tools, she's Zekrom's chosen partner, after it refused both Black and N for not being manly enough.
  • The Protagonist of Archipelago, Credenza, for a good while is the only girl in the group and absolutely fine with that. She has no problems befriending other girls, though.
    Credenza (while being subjected to She Cleans Up Nicely): I admit, I'm not much for dressing up, but after hanging out with men for so long...
    • But Tusura, the one female member of Paollo's guard, counts even more (though She Cleans Up Nicely for the party in the epilogue). Indeed, in the sequel, she and her Martial Arts Staff do more kicking ass than four sixths of the group, at least.
  • Eerie Cuties: Brooke's been noted for being tomboyish several times - from Ace pointing out that she's never worn a skirt (except as part of her school uniform), to besting Ash in a sparring match. But it hasn't stopped guys from hitting on her, she's even been dating Ace on-again/off-again.
  • Hazel in Girls with Slingshots is definitely one of the boys; she hangs out with the guys during the bachelor party and has been repeatedly mentioned as actually being "the guy" in her relationship.
  • Nina in Lavender Tea she's often seen hanging out with the guys. Like to arm wrestle and challenge her rival Damian in activities. Due to her reckless behavior, she gets scolded by her father and teachers.
  • Jodie from Loserz is seen by the two boys she hangs out with as one of them and has never been established as having romantic feelings toward either of them. Lampshaded here.
  • Haley Starshine from The Order of the Stick, of the rather crude and loud variety, at least compared to Roy and Elan.
  • Millie from Ozy and Millie ends up in this niche, but not from any effort on her part. She's not the typical jock version of a tomboy but still hangs out with boys, doesn't do anything too girly, and objects to being that. Then turned on its head when Stefan asks Ozy if he knew any girls to ask about dating advice. Millie objects, standing right there. Stefan then asks her if SHE knows any girls to ask. "Why doesn't anyone notice I'm a girl?" indeed.
  • Wren from Radio Silence: Wren is the only member of the band who's female, and her rough and tumble attitude with them, especially Colbie, points to this trait.
  • In Tales of the Questor, Kestrel is the only female student who continues to study as an Artifactor for more than a week. Understandably, but no less frustratingly to her, her classmates turn their affections elsewhere. When she got mistaken for a boy, she lost her temper and gave him Marshmallow Hell.
  • Sun Jing from Their Story often plays basketball with her male friends, and seems to spend most of her free time with them in general. She also has a preference for masculine clothing and wears a tie with her school uniform rather than the standard girl's bow.
  • Vampire Cheerleaders: Suki is the rowdy, foulmouthed, member of the team and is easily recognized by the dark Boyish Short Hair. She's also the one who's most eager for sex. By vol.4, she's even become Friends with Benefits with Leonard.

    Web Original 
  • CollegeHumor: In "The Six Girls You'll Date in College", there's 'The Friend', who is basically the same character as the Audience Surrogate but female, so making the move to a relationship just becomes weird.
  • DSBT InsaniT: Portica honestly gets along more with the male members of the cast. Her tough and straightforward attitude causes friction with some of the female characters, sometimes good and sometimes bad, like Kayla and Killdra.
  • Hector's World has Ming the clam who hangs out with a group of male sea creatures.
  • In Noob, the webseries and comic make Golgotha more of a Tomboy with a Girly Streak. Omega Zell seems to categorise people as "male" (to whom he talks normally as long as he doesn't consider them of lower intelligence), "female" (that he quite vocally considers being systematically inferior to him) and "Golgotha" (treated almost as well as male despite technically being female). Best cases are shown in the comic:
    • During a tournament, he keeps telling his male guildmates that he'll be very embarrassed if any of them loses to a female player, but a chill is quite obviously running up his spine when his own opponent turns out to be Golgotha.
    • When he arrives at the fluxball training, he remarks that none of his female guildmates have arrived yet, only to have Arthéon point out that Golgotha (who's the guild's Honorary True Companion) is actually present.
  • Satirized with this Onion article: Sexually Frustrated Woman Just One Of The Guys.
  • While she frequently gets into fights, Angel gets along decently well with most of the male SMPLive members outside of this and seems to generally enjoy their company and shenanigans.


Alternative Title(s): One Of The Guys

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