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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Self-Made
Man by Norah Vincent |
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Rating: |
** |
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(Mildly Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Anthropologist In her new book, Self-Made
Man, lesbian journalist Norah Vincent disguises herself
as a man, embeds herself in various all-male settings and tries to understand
how men see themselves. She joined a bowling league, went on dates with
women, spent three weeks at a monastery, joined a door-to-door sales force,
and went on an all-male retreat, Robert Bly-style. While
she cut short her eighteen month immersion with a nervous breakdown, she came
away from the experience with insights and better feelings about the male of
the species. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 42-48: I tried to engage him further on the
question, but as I came to understand, you’d always know when a conversation
with Bob was over. He’d just revert to peering at you with condescending finality
through a cloud of cigarette smoke. A lot of the guys were like that. It
would take you years to get to know them on anything more than grunting
terms. They were walled-in tight. Yet even so, under the surface there
remained that distant male-on-male respect that I’d felt in the first handshakes
and I continued to feel every time some guy from another team would say “Hey,
man” to me when we met in the parking lot or passed on our way to or from the
soda machine. But there was one guy among the bowlers
who established an odd intimacy with me early on. It was so immediate, and so
physically affectionate, that I felt sure he could see through Ned. I never
learned his name. I don’t think he knew anything consciously. It wasn’t that
bald. But there was an unmistakable chemistry between us. Obviously, I’d spent my life as a woman
either flirting or butting heads or maneuvering somewhere on the sexual
spectrum with nearly every man I’d ever met, and I knew how it felt when an
older man took a shine to you as a woman. It was always the kind of guy who
was far too decent to be creepy, the avuncular type who had turned his sexual
response to you into a deep affection. He showed it by putting his arm
around you cleanly, without innuendo, or patting you gently on the shoulder
and smiling. This guy was like that, old enough to
have gained some kind of relief from his urges, and now he was free to just
like me for being a woman. Even if he didn’t quite know 1 was a woman, his
brain seemed somehow to have sniffed me out and responded accordingly. The
thing was, in this context, of all places, the way he treated me made me feel like a woman — a girl actually, very young and cared
for—and I wondered how that could have been possible if some part of him
hadn’t recognized me as such. It was unmistakable, and I never felt it with
any other man I came into contact with as a man. I felt something entirely different
coming from the other men who thought I was a young man. They took me under
their wings. Another older bowler had done this. Taking me aside between
rounds, he tried to teach me a few things to improve my game. This was male
mentor stuff all the way. He treated me like a son, guiding me with firm
encouragement and solid advice, an older man lending a younger man his
expertise. This was commonplace. During the course
of the bowling season, which lasted nine months, a lot of men from the other
teams tried to give me tips on my game. My own teammates were constantly
doing this, increasingly so as the season wore on. There was a tension in the
air that grew up around me as I failed to excel, a tension that I felt
keenly, but that seemed unrecognizable to the guys themselves. I had good
frames, sometimes even good whole games, but I still had a lot of bad ones,
too, and that frustrated us all. At about the five-month mark, Jim began
giving me pained looks when I came back to the table after a bad turn. I’d say, “Okay, I’m sorry. I know I
suck.” “Look, man,” he’d say, “I’ve told you
what I think you’re doing wrong, and you don’t
listen or you get pissed off.” “No, no,” I’d protest, “I’m really
trying to do what you’re saying. It just isn’t coming out right. What can I
do?” I threw like a girl and it bugged me as
much as it bugged them If I told them the truth at the end of the season I
didn’t want them to have the satisfaction of saying, “Oh,
that explains everything. You bowl like a girl because you are a girl.” But their motivation seemed comically
atavistic, as if it was just painful to watch a fellow male fail repeatedly
at something as adaptive as throwing a boulder. Time was,
the tribe’s survival depended on it. This just seemed mandatory to them in
some absurdly primal way. As men they felt compelled to fix my
ineptitude rather than be secretly happy about it and try to abet it under the
table, which is what a lot of female athletes of my acquaintance would have
done. I remember this from playing sports with and against women all my life.
No fellow female athlete ever tried to help me with my game or give me tips.
It was every woman for herself. It wasn’t enough
that you were successful. You wanted to see your sister fail. Girls can be a lot nastier than boys
when it comes to someone who stands in the way of what they want. They know
where to hit where it’ll hurt the most, and their aim is laser precise. One
summer when I was a maladjusted teenager, I went to a tennis camp in As for posing, I looked like I’d been
raised by wolverines. The instructors used to videotape each
of us playing, so that they could go over the tapes with us and evaluate our
techniques. One day, my particular class of about twenty girls was standing
around the television watching the tape, and the instructor was
deconstructing my serve. He’d had a lot of negative things to say about most
of the other girls’ serves, but when it came to mine, he raved
unconditionally, playing my portion of the tape over and over again in slow
motion. At this, one of the prettiest girls in
the group, no doubt exasperated by the repetition, said, loudly enough for
everyone to hear: “Well, I’d rather look the way I do and serve the way I do
than serve the way she does and look the way she does.” Now that’s female competitiveness at
its finest. But with these guys and with other male
athletes I’ve known it was an entirely different conflict. Their coaching reminded
me of my Lather’s, whose approach to fatherhood had always been about giving
helpful, concrete advice. It was how he showed his affection for us. It was
all bound up in a desire to see us do well. These guys’ attentions were like that:
fatherly. And it really surprised me coming from members of opposing teams,
since this was, after all, a money league. But they seemed to have a competitive
stake in my doing well and in helping me to do well, as if beating a man who
wasn’t at his best wasn’t satisfying. They wanted you to be good and then they wanted to beat you on their
own merits. They didn’t want to win against a plodder or lose to him on a
handicap. But my game never got consistently
better. I’d have good frames now and then, but mostly I hovered around an
average of 102 and learned to swallow it. So did the guys. They knew I was
trying my best, and that was all that really mattered to them. As with
everything else a little odd or off about me, they accepted my clumsiness
with a shrug of the shoulders, as if to say: “That’s just how some guys are.
What are you gonna do?” I guess that’s what I respected about
those guys the most. I was a stranger, and a nerd, but they cut me all the
slack in the world, and they did it for no other reason that I could discern
than that I was a good-seeming guy who deserved a chance, something life and
circumstance had denied most of them. I could never have predicted it, but
part of me came to really enjoy those nights with the guys. Their company was
like an anchor at the beginning of the week, something I could look forward
to, an oasis where nothing would really be expected of me. Almost every
interaction would be entirely predictable, and the ones that weren’t were all
the more precious for being rare. When somebody opened up to me suddenly,
like when Jim confided how much he loved his wife and how much it hurt him
when the doctor told him that the best he could hope for was to see her alive
in a year, or when Bob smiled at me playfully after teasing me over a toss,
it touched me more deeply than my female friends’ dime-a-dozen intimacies
ever did. These were blooms in the desert, tender offerings made in the
middle of all that guy talk. I’d never made friends with guys like
that before. They had intimidated me too much, and the sexual tension that
always subsists in some form or another between men and women had usually
gotten in the way. But making friends with them as a man let me into their
world as a free agent and taught me to see and appreciate the beauty of male
friendships from the inside out. So much of what happens emotionally
between men isn’t spoken aloud, and so the outsider, especially the female
outsider who is used to emotional life being overt and spoken (often
over-spoken), tends to assume that what isn’t said isn’t there. But it is
there, and when you’re inside it, it’s as if you’re suddenly hearing sounds
that only dogs can hear. I remember one night when I plugged
into that subtext for the first time. A few lanes over, one of the guys was
having a particularly hot game. I’d been oblivious to what was happening, mourning
my own playing too much to watch anyone else. It was Jim’s turn, and I
noticed that he wasn’t bowling. Instead he was sitting down in one of the laneside chairs, just waiting. Usually this happened when
there was a problem with the lane: a stuck pin, or a mis-set
rack. But the pins were fine. I kept watching him, wondering why he wasn’t
stepping up to the line. Then I noticed that all the other
bowlers had sat down as well. Nobody was taking his turn. It was as if
somebody had blown a whistle, only nobody had. Nobody had said anything.
Everyone had just stopped and stepped back, like in a barracks when an
officer enters the room. Then I realized that there was one guy
stepping up to the lane. It was the guy who was having the great game. I
looked up at the board and saw that he’d had strikes in every frame, and now
he was on the tenth and final frame, in which you get three throws if you
strike or spare in the first two. He’d have to throw three strikes in a row
on this one to earn a perfect score, and somehow everyone in that halt had
felt the moment of grace descend and had bowed out accordingly. Everyone, of
course, except me. It was a beautiful moment, totally
still and reverent, a bunch of guys instinctively paying their respects to
the superior athleticism of another guy. That guy stepped up to the line and
threw his three strikes, one after the other, each one met by mounting
applause, then silence and stillness again, then on the final strike, an eruption,
and every single guy in that room, including me, surrounded that player and
moved in to shake his hand or pat him on the back. It was almost mystical,
that telepathic intimacy and the communal joy that succeeded it, crystalline
in its perfection. The moment said everything all at once about how tacitly
attuned men are to each other, and how much of this women miss when they look
from the outside in. After it was over, and all the
congratulations had died down, Jim and Bob and Allen and I all looked at each
other and said things like “Man, that was incredible,” or “Wow, that was something.”
We couldn’t express it in words, but we knew what we’d just shared. The role of an anthropologist is to be
both participant and observer when studying another culture or tribe. Vincent
may not have trained in those skills, so the research quality of her
fieldwork may not meet scientific standards. The fact that she ultimately revealed
to most of the men she got to know well during her disguise period proves her
ability to value the importance of relationships. Self-Made
Man is an unusual book, and while it doesn’t reveal new information about
gender differences, it highlights those difference
through well-written anecdotes. Steve Hopkins,
March 23, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the April 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Self-Made
Man.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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