I’ve been reading a totally fascinating book this past week. I get the New York Times on-line version and skim the paper every day. A week or two ago, in anticipation of the holiday giving/spending season, they had the top 100 books of the year. A couple piqued my interest, including Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back Again, by Norah Vincent. 
Norah Vincent has apparently been quite the successful writer (syndicated opinion column, with the LA Times, Washinton Post, Village Voice…basically big leagues). She is about 5’10” tall, wears a men’s size 11 shoe (both of which helped her in this “under-cover” endeavor), and a lesbian as well, and wondered what it would be like to “pass” as a man, and see what it is like to be a man in our society. The result is FASCINATING.
This book is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, and some of what she experienced both makes you uncomfortable, and really grateful that most men aren’t like that. I also wondered if some of her observations of what it means to be a woman in our society and what it means to be a man are sharpened by the fact that she is lesbian … that in a sense she sees both sides more clearly as someone who is often on all sorts of “outsides.”
Norah decided from the beginning that she needed a convincing “drag”, and clearly succeeded… my 13 year old son didn’t believe me at first when I told him the woman and the man on the cover of the book were one and the same person… Norah’s male alter-ego is “Ned,” and Ned took on a life of his own during the 18 months she researched this book. As she became more confident as a man, the un-knowing saw her less as a gay guy, and just as a guy…
Here is one passage from near the end of the book that I found interesting (pages 254 and following). Ned meets a man that outwardly is the gorgeous hunk that we all think “has it made.”
” Here he was, the outwardly powerful masculine ideal, an outcast in his own life, excruciatingly insecure in his position, compelled to make a brave show if it on the outside, forbidden to show weakness, yet plagued by it nonetheless.
” Thinking back on it, I wondered now how much I and every other girl in school had invested in worshipping guys like him from a distance, and how much sustaining our admiration, acting the part, had cost them. I suppose Corey symbolized a lot of what I thought I was going to find in manhood or had envied in it, so much of what I and the culture at large had projected onto it: privilege, confidence, power. And learning the truth about this polse, both firsthand as Ned, and secondhand through Corey’s and these other guys’ confession, learning the truth about the burden of holding up that illusion of impregnability, taught me an unforgettable lesson about the hidden pain of masculinity and my own sex’s symbiotic role in it.
“We needed men not to be needy, and so they weren’t. But, of course, ultimately we did need and want them to be needy, to express their feelings and be vulnerable. And they needed that too. They needed permission to be weak, and even to fail sometimes. But somewhere in there the signals usually got crossed or lost altogether, which often left both men and women feeling unfulfilled, resentful and alone.”
I am close to the end of the book…maybe 30 pages. During the course of her research, Ned visited strip joints, an all-male bowling league, lived at a monastery, (and in all these instances eventually revealed herself / confessed that she was a woman, not wanting to deceive…and the whole guilt trip thing created by the necessity of deceit to pull off the research with the culpability Norah felt at lying to people about her true self is a fascinating sub-text), worked in door-to-door sales, and infiltrated a men’s consiousness raising group. Norah was studied woman’s studies and feminist “stuff” in college, and it shows, but so does her willingness to have her eyes opened.
Anyway, I’m not sure that the experiences Norah had as Ned are typical for most men in the US (and to get that, she would have had to masquerade as a man for a much longer time than she did, with all the ensuing repercussions on her own psyche), but the experiences she did have of typical “macho” or all-male hangouts are fascinating. Most fascinating of all may be her exploration of who she is. But her observations on gender roles and society are compelling anyway…..
Shakespeare, it turns out, was right. To thine own self be true.
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For eons I have been wanting to make this lovely totebag, which is Joan Hawley’s pattern. Joan is the brains and good writing (and everything else) behind Lazy Girl Designs (website here, blog here). I made the Mt. Fuji and Cherry Blossoms panels in September or October, but life and a zillion other things got in the way. I’d been promising myself I would get to finish the bag when all the other “chores” were done. Well, except for the trim for the chair (which is still pending…grumble at the design store!), it is done. So is the Christmas shopping, the winter flannel jammie pants, the gift wrapping, and a few dozen other things. So this past week I FINISHED the bag!
