Arts
Books:
Spy "Man"
Books:
Spy "Man"
by E. Lynn Lemont
Self-Made
Man |
Norah
Vincent changed her clothes, added facial hair, walked a different walk
and talked a different talk to investigate what men were "really"
like when they thought themselves alone among their xy peers.
By her own account,
she did a credible job of passing as a man, since she was not detected,
although some people thought her male alter ego ("Ned:) was gay.
In somewhat pretentiously titled chapters Vincent tells how Ned joined
a men's bowling league ("Friendship"); trolled strip bars with
another man and on his own ("Sex"); tried picking up women in
a straight bar and at a local ice cream parlor, and dated women contacted
via a personals website ("Love"); spent time in a Catholic monastery
("Life"); joined the macho-cult ranks of door-to-door salesmen
("Work"); and participated in a Robert Bly-based men's group,
including a woodsy-lodge retreat with its members ("Self").
In nearly every venue, Ned "came
out" as a woman by the end, in large part to assuage her own guilt
at lying to these well-meaning and mostly accepting folks, but also to
gauge their reactions to the masquerade. If there is still a war between
the sexes, Norah Vincent could be seen as going undercover as a spy with
a conscience, although it could be debated whether true conscience might
have left the deceived with their illusions rather than letting them know,
to their humiliation, just how thoroughly they had been duped.
And "duped"
is the right word here. Vincent set out to see whether she could pass
by lying and visual deception, a different matter than when a transman
is working on getting his outer reality to conform to his inner one. There
may be some correspondences of experience, but the intention – of
a transman to become himself, and of Vincent to play a role in furtherance
of a book – is totally different.
No question, Self-Made Man
is a provocative book. Parts of it are absorbing, lyrical, and acutely
and concisely observed in discussing what being part of a male social
reality felt like to a woman passing as a man. One of Norah's early observations,
during a one-night stand in male drag on a dare by a drag king friend,
is that men look each other in the eye only when they plan to either fuck
or fight. She expresses it more delicately ("To look another male
in the eye and hold his gaze is to invite conflict, either that or a homosexual
encounter."), but fight or fuck is what it comes down to.
Which is part of the annoyance
provoked by Ned/Norah's narrative. Vincent is very clear that her experience
is not about being either a transvestite or a closet transsexual. She
never did "T" (testosterone), so there was no hormonal drive
to deal with. She issues another disclaimer in her introductory chapter:
"Nothing I say here will have any value except as one person's observations
about her own experience. What follows is just my view of things, myopic
and certainly inapplicable to anything so grand as a pronouncement on
gender in American society." But she can't, apparently, help herself
when it comes to making pronouncements.
A simple handshake with a man is "bonding"
rather than competitive, while women's handshakes are "fake and cold,
full of limp gentility." Sex solidarity "is something feminism
tried to teach us," but "bra-burning hadn't changed all that
much," while men "just seemed to know" that "brotherhood
was powerful." In the bowling league, Ned's teammates wanted to "fix
[his] ineptitude," unlike female athletes, who would "be secretly
happy about it and try to abet it under the table."
To be fair, those pronouncements
come early in the book, and as the narrative goes on Vincent makes fewer
of them.
But other parts of the book
are troubling, too. In a strip club, there's little sympathy for the "mercenary"
women who make their money in five-minute lap dances, and much more for
the poor victimized men who must buy such ersatz sex or go the five-fingered
route in the bathroom. The upshot, Vincent says, is that "nobody
was more or less victimized than anyone else. The girls got money. The
men got an approximation of sex and flirtation.... everyone was equally
debased by the experience." But I note that suddenly the women are
"girls" and the guys are always "men."
Likewise in dating scenarios,
Vincent examines in detail and with great sympathy the rejection men feel
every time a woman refuses a man’s pick-up line, while barely acknowledging
women's realities of rape and violence from male dates.
According to Vincent, "to men,
in the mind, women have a lot of power, not only to arouse, but to give
worth, self-worth, meaning, initiation, sustenance, everything.... I began
to wonder whether the most extreme men resort to violence with women because
they think that's all they have, their one pathetic advantage..."
As a lesbian, Vincent ends up
generalizing about two more-or-less alien cultures: straight women and
straight men.
Most fascinating to me was Ned's
sojourn in a monastery. The social dynamics among the brothers were keenly
observed and similar to those of other groups I'm familiar with. The same
holds true, for the most part, for Ned's participation in and observation
of the men's group.
Perhaps most telling, Norah Vincent
had a mental breakdown after sustaining her male identity "on and
off" for 18 months. Her inclusion of that fact in her story evokes
respect.
Despite my objections, I've recommended
Self-Made Man to friends. The journey is worth the time it takes
to read. At her best, Vincent challenges assumptions about gender in ways
that get under your skin.
E. Lynn Lemont reads and writes in Franklin County.