About a two and a half years ago I started becoming interested in feminism when a guy in one of my classes couldn't read feminist literature without discomfort. He felt attacked, couldn't take it seriously, and thought that it had no relevance. He couldn't get past his prejudices long enough to see what these books were commenting on.
After that encounter, I started gearing my literary studies toward feminism and women writers, and the further I read into the field (strictly literature, mind you. I leave the theory to the intense folk) the more I realized that, as much as I disagreed with him, my classmate had a point. Not that I think he was being attacked by the feminist movement, or that he shouldn't have taken feminism seriously (or more importantly - been a feminist), but that the role of men in relation to feminism can often be incredibly problematic.
So a year later I got Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again by Norah Vincent on a whim. A year and a half after that (also known as last week) I actually read it, with fascinating results. The book itself is pretty much what it says on the tin. For a year and a half the lesbian, feminist, and philosopher extraordinaire Norah Vincent lives her public life as a straight man and decides that it's a lot less fun than she had thought it would be.
I admit that this book surprised me, mostly because I was expecting something different. I had thought that I would be encountering a sociological study of some sort. What I ended up with was far closer to a memoir than anything (pseudo - shut it science geeks, the social sciences are cool) scientific.
Throughout the course of 300 pages, Vincent details her life as "Ned," a vaguely feminine and small guy trying to live his life the way other dudes do, and for the most part succeeding. Ned makes friends, goes on dates, gets a job, goes to strip clubs, lives in a monastery (the only conceivable plan Vincent could come up with for living in an all-male environment), and goes to a men's therapy group, and all the while Vincent adds her observations to the experiences, commenting on the (mostly) heterosexual male life. She remarks on the easy nature of male friendship, about how Ned is able to make buddies without having the accompanying drama inherent in a lot of female relationships, but also little of the intimacy. She talks about how difficult dating is for a guy, and how at one point she found herself hating women because they made it so damn impossible to ask them out. She explains how different she felt as Ned when he was wearing a suit, how much more confident, and how others treated him with more respect when he was wearing it. She describes the pressure to be masculine, and the intense male vigilance against any habits verging on homosexual in other men.
Granted, I had heard most of these things from my male friends and family members, in various forms, in the past. But Vincent is very good at drawing the distinctions between the male and female experience, noting their similarities and differences, and then expanding on why those differences might exist.
My favorite example Vincent gives is of interviewing for jobs as Ned. As a woman, the cockier Vincent got the less likely she would be to actually get a position, regardless of how qualified she was. Universally, interviewers found it disrespectful and 'unbecoming'. In contrast, the more Ned bragged the happier interviewers became. Female bosses found it charming, while male bosses thought it showed confidence. As Ned, Vincent got every job she applied for by boasting as much as humanly possible. That being said, Vincent never would have put on the cocky mask to begin with without wearing Ned's suit. People expected more from Ned in his suit, and as such Vincent felt he could get away with more. And he could in a way that women would never be able to. The entire book is full of those small revelations that I think both women and men would find interesting, if only so we could get a new perspective about how many of our shared experiences don't really have too much in common at the end of the day.
Which is highlighted by the fact that Vincent felt so foreign in so many of the situations Ned finds himself in. That discomfort speaks greatly to how alien the world of men is to women, but also how impossible it would be for anyone who was not an interloper in that world to explain those differences. (Meaning that trans men wouldn't necessarily be able to communicate such experiences in the same way, since they would have always, on some level, belonged in the world of men.)
I do take issue with some of Vincent's conclusions and/or omissions (like her 'analysis' on strip clubs, simply because I think she missed a great deal of the male experience of such venues because she found the places so abhorrent, for which I can't blame her - sorry gang, but I think they're gross and sad), but those are mostly differences in opinion rather than any flaw with her insights into the subject matter. An insight, I might add, that is particularly impressive because Vincent frequently turns it against herself, examining her own own actions as both an author and Ned and putting them to as much scrutiny as she does for any of the other men (or women) she encounters throughout her year cross-dressing.
In the end, I don't buy the 'men are from Mars, women are from Venus' myth, but I do think that men and women are socialized very differently from one another, and that the effects of these distinct socialization methods has led to very real divergences in how men and women relate to the world and each other. Which isn't to say that I think 'society' is the only thing (aside from the obvious) that makes the genders different from one another, but it is the only thing that can explain the inherent problems in patriarchy and how they've been able to persist for so long.
One of the most significant of these problems, and the one that is addressed in Self-Made Man far better than I've seen anywhere else, is the effect patriarchy has had on men. Too often feminism doesn't grant men a language to talk about the male experience in anything other than 'oppressor' terms, which is silly at best and patriarchal in of itself (oh yeah - I went there) at worst. The really frustrating thing being that, on the rare occasions when feminism does leave room and language for guys to speak as individuals seeking liberation from patriarchy, men won't talk about it anyway. Because straight guys, as a rule, don't talk about feelings of social victimization anywhere but in the most private of settings.
Maybe victimization is the wrong term there, but men don't have it as easy as I'm prone to thinking they do, which was underscored by some of Vincent's final comments in her book. She says, with utmost frankness and sincerity, that she didn't like being Ned. She lost too much female privilege in the process. Maybe not the societal and systematic privilege men have, but she missed out on the personal freedoms that women take for granted. Showy hand gestures, the power to reject advances without having to make any herself, expressive tone of voice, truly intimate friendships with the same gender, dramatic movement, the encouragement to have and share feelings. Men don't get any of those, and what's more, they aren't permitted to complain about it, least they be considered weak or gay.
Ultimately, I don't know if Self-Made Man told me anything I didn't already suspect, on some level. But Norah Vincent's insights when combined with her powerful personal experiment were able to take these abstract suspicions and make them very tangible in a way that was harder to manage before reading her book.
Funnily enough, it took a self confessed feminist dyke to tell me what it's like to be a dude.
Cool.
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