Self-Made Man
Posted on July 16, 2010
Filed Under May I Interject?, Thought |
My friend Matt (McKinney) recently gave me a book to read called “Self-Made Man” by Norah Vincent. He had read it in a gender studies class, and he suggested to me based on my fascination with masculinity under the feminist movement.
The premise: Norah becomes Ned. What I mean is, for over a year, Norah dressed as a man in different scenarios women are always curious about–strip clubs, monasteries, bowling leagues. In real life, Vincent is a lesbian, so to begin, her opinion of men is nothing extraordinary. By the end of the novel, she comes to a lot of conclusions about men–mostly positive. This happened to me, too (surprise!).
I bookmarked some passages that resounded with me personally.
From the chapter “Love:”
“If the most disgruntled women I met and dated as Ned had ever been attuned to men’s signals, by the time I met them, they were long past receiving outside information of any kind. Moreover, if the way they discussed their pasts and the way they approached me was anything to go by, they seemed incapable of seeing any new man as an individual. Worse still, they seemed to transform each new man, benign or otherwise, into the malignancy they were expecting him to be. They tended to see a wolf in every man they met, and so they made every man they met into a wolf–even when that man was a woman.” - p. 107
From the chapter “Work:”
“If they don’t know what sex you are, they literally don’t know how to treat you. They don’t know which code to opt for, which language to speak, which specific words and gestures to use, how close they can come to you physically, whether or not they should smile and how….So prevalent was this gender-coded behavior that I came to ask myself whether it isn’t almost impossible for any of us to treat each other gender neutrally as it is to conceptualize language without grammar.” -p. 224
From the chapter “Self:”
“But for these men, living in their man’s box wasn’t a particularly good fit either, and learning this in spades may have been Ned’s best lesson in the toxicity of gender roles. Those roles had proved to be ungainly, suffocating, torpor-inducing or even nearly fatal to a lot more people than I’d thought, and for the simple reason that, man or woman, they didn’t let you be yourself. Sooner or later that conflict would show, even if you weren’t trying to cross the boundaries of sex.
Manhood is a leaden mythology riding on the shoulders of every man.” -p. 271
“I don’t really know what it’s like to be a man. I never could. But I know approximately. I know some of what it is like to be treated as one. And that, in the end, was what this experiment was all about. Not being but being received.
I know that a lot of my discomfort came precisely from being a woman all along, remaining one even in my disguise. But I also know that another respectable portion of my distress came, as it did to the men I met in group and elsewhere, from the way the world greeted me in that disguise, a disguise that was almost as much of a put-on for my men friends as it was for me. That, maybe, was the last twist of my adventure. I passed in a man’s world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball….Only then did I know that my disguise was the one thing I had in common with every guy in the room.”
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It’s like the real life Left Hand of Darkness.