Following in the tradition of John Howard Griffin (
Black Like Me) and Barbara Ehrenreich (
Nickel and Dimed), Norah Vincent absorbed a cultural experience and reported back on what she observed incognito. For more than a year and a half she ventured into the world as Ned, with an ever-present five oA'clock shadow, a crew cut, wire-rim glasses, and her own size 111/2 shoesA-a perfect disguise that enabled her to observe the world of men as an insider. The result is a sympathetic, shrewd, and thrilling tour de force of immersion journalism thatA's destined to challenge preconceptions and attract enormous attention.
With her buddies on the bowling league she enjoyed the rough and rewarding embrace of male camaraderie undetectable to an outsider. A stint in a high-octane sales job taught her the gut- wrenching pressures endured by men who would do anything to succeed. She frequented sex clubs, dated women hungry for love but bitter about men, and infiltrated all-male communities as hermetically sealed as a menA's therapy group, and even a monastery. Narrated in her utterly captivating prose style and with exquisite insight, humor, empathy, nuance, and at great personal cost, Norah uses her intimate firsthand experience to explore the many remarkable mysteries of gender identity as well as who men are apart from and in relation to women. Far from becoming bitter or outraged, Vincent ended her journey astoundedA-and exhaustedA-by the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity. Having gone where no woman (who wasnA't an aspiring or actual transsexual) has gone for any significant length of time, let alone eighteen months, Norah VincentA's surprising account is an enthralling reading experience and a revelatory piece of anecdotally based gender analysis that is sure to spark fierce and fascinating conversation.
Praise for Norah Vincent:
A"Norah Vincent is a true freethinker and independent journalist in the European manner, challenging prevailing assumptions in academe, politics, and media. Her work has always had a bold skepticism and energy. She is a model of pragmatic, enlightened feminism.A"
A-Camille Paglia
The author recounts her eighteen-month undercover stint as a man, a time during which she worked a sales job, joined a bowling league, frequented sex clubs, dated, and encountered firsthand the rigid codes and rituals of masculinity.
Self-Made Man
One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again
By Norah Vincent
Viking Adult
ISBN: 0-670-03466-5
Chapter One
Seven years ago, I had my first tutorial in becoming a man.
The idea for this book came to me then, when I went out for the first time in
drag. I was living in the East Village at the time, undergoing a significantly
delayed adolescence, drinking and drugging a little too much, and indulging in
all the sidewalk freak show opportunities that New York City has to offer.
Back then I was hanging around a lot with a drag king whom I had met through
friends. She used to like to dress up and have me take pictures of her in
costume. One night she dared me to dress up with her and go out on the town. I'd
always wanted to try passing as a man in public, just to see if I could do it,
so I agreed enthusiastically.
She had developed her own technique for creating a beard whereby you cut half
inch chunks of hair from unobtrusive parts of your own head, cut them into
smaller pieces, and then more or less glopped them onto your face with spirit
gum. Using a small round freestanding mirror on her desk, she showed me how to
do it in the dim, greenish light of her cramped studio apartment. It wasn't at
all precise and it wouldn't have passed muster in the daylight, but it was good
enough for the stage, and it would work well enough for our purposes in dark
bars at night. I made myself a goatee and mustache, and a pair of baroque
sideburns. I put on a baseball cap, loose-fitting jeans and a flannel shirt. In
the full-length mirror I looked like a frat boy-sort of.
She did her thing-which was more willowy and soft, more like a young hippie guy
who couldn't really grow much of a beard-and we went out like that for a few
hours.
We passed, as far as I could tell, but I was too afraid to really interact with
anyone, except to give one guy brief directions on the street. He thanked me as
"dude" and walked on.
Mostly though we just walked the streets of the Village scanning people's faces
to see if anyone took a second or third look. But no one did. And that, oddly
enough, was the thing that struck me the most about that evening. It was the
only thing of real note that happened. But it was significant.
I had lived in that neighborhood for years, walking its streets where men lurk
outside of bodegas, on stoops and in doorways much of the day. As a woman, you
couldn't walk down those streets invisibly. You were an object of desire or at
least semiprurient interest to the men who waited there, even if you weren't
pretty-that, or you were just another piece of pussy to be put in its place.
Either way, their eyes followed you all the way up and down the street, never
wavering, asserting their dominance as a matter of course. If you were female
and you lived there, you got used to being stared down, because it happened
every day and there wasn't anything you could do about it.
But that night in drag, we walked by those same stoops and doorways and bodegas.
We walked right by those same groups of men. Only this time they didn't stare.
On the contrary, when they met my eyes they looked away immediately and
concertedly and never looked back. It was astounding, the difference, the
respect they showed me by not looking at me, by purposely not staring.
That was it. That was what had annoyed me so much about meeting their gaze as a
woman, not the desire, if that was ever there, but the disrespect, the
entitlement. It was rude, and it was meant to be rude, and seeing those guys
looking away deferentially when they thought I was male, I could validate in
retrospect the true hostility of their former stares.
But that wasn't quite all there was to it. There was something more than plain
respect being communicated in their averted gaze, something subtler, less
direct. It was more like a disinclination to show disrespect. For them, to look
away was to decline a challenge, to adhere to a code of behavior that kept the
peace among human males in certain spheres just as surely as it kept the peace
and the pecking order among male animals. To look another male in the eye and
hold his gaze is to invite conflict, either that or a homosexual encounter. To
look away is to accept the status quo, to leave each man to his tiny sphere of
influence, the small buffer of pride and poise that surrounds and keeps him.
I surmised all of this the night it happened, but in the weeks and months that
followed I asked most of the men I knew whether I was right, and they agreed,
adding usually that it wasn't something they thought about anymore, if they ever
had. It was just something you learned or absorbed as a boy, and by the time you
were a man, you did it without thinking.
After the whole incident had blown over, I started thinking that if in such a
short time in drag I had learned such an important secret about the way males
and females communicate with each other, and about the unspoken codes of male
experience, then couldn't I potentially observe much more about the social
differences between the sexes if I passed as a man for a much longer period of
time? It seemed true, but I wasn't intrepid enough yet to do something that
extreme. Besides it seemed impossible, both psychologically and practically, to
pull it off. So I filed the information away in my mind for a few more years and
got on with other things.
Then, in the winter of 2003, while watching a reality television show on the A&
E network, the idea came back to me. In the show, two male and two female
contestants set out to transform themselves into the opposite sex-not with
hormones or surgeries, but purely by costume and design. The women cut their
hair. The men had theirs extended. Both took voice and movement lessons to try
to learn how to speak and behave more like the sex they were trying to become.
All chose new wardrobes, personas and names for their alter egos. The bulk of
the program focused on the outward transformations, though the point at the end
was to see who could pass in the real world most effectively. Neither of the men
really passed, and only one of the women stayed the course. She did manage to
pass fairly well, though only for a short time and in carefully controlled
circumstances.
But, as in most reality television programs, especially the American ones,
nobody involved was particularly introspective about the effect their
experiences had had on them or the people around them. It was clear that the
producers didn't have much interest in the deeper sociologic implications of
passing as the opposite sex. It was all just another version of an extreme
make-over. Once the stunt was accomplished-or not-the show was over.
But for me, watching the show brought my former experience in drag to the
forefront of my mind again and made me realize that passing in costume in the
daylight could be possible with the right help. I knew that writing a book about
passing in the world as a man would give me the chance to explore some of the
unexplored territory that the show had left out, and that I had barely broached
in my brief foray in drag years before.
I was determined to give the idea a try.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Self-Made Man
by Norah Vincent Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Former Los Angeles Times columnist Vincent went undercover as a man-and reports back that it's a tough job. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Vincent, formerly a Los Angeles Times syndicated columnist, has written a spellbinding, eyeopening personal narrative of 18 months spent "passing" as a man. She assumed the identity of "Ned," hiding her body within male clothing. Ned joined a men's bowling league, accompanied male acquaintances to strip joints, dated women, worked in a high-pressure male-dominated sales job, and participated in a ritual-laden men's sensitivity group. Late in the experiment, Ned moved to a monastery to experience a male environment without women. With intelligence and sensitivity, Vincent relates her experiences and surprising discoveries about the secrets and rites of male society and the daily fears and desires of individual men. She analyzes the dating scene from the male perspective, emphasizing the need for males to be able to deal with rejection 90 percent of the time and describing the toll this takes on the male ego. She highlights over and over again the communication disconnect between men and women and how their preconceived notions affect how they act toward one another. One of the big surprises of Vincent's account is that, after she revealed her identity to the men she had fraternized with and the women she had "dated," the people readily accepted her. An often humorous, incisive, and fascinating account that validates the conclusions of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus; for most public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/05.]--Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib.
[Page 140]. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
The disguise that former Los Angeles Times op-ed columnist Vincent employed to trick dozens of people into believing her a man was carefully thought out: a new, shorter haircut; a pair of rectangular eyeglasses; a fake five o'clock shadow; a prosthetic penis; some preppy clothes. It was more than she needed. "[A]s I became more confident in my disguise... the props I had used... became less and less important, until sometimes I didn't need them at all," Vincent writes. Gender marking, she found, is more about attitude than appearance. Vincent's account of the year and a half she spent posing as a man is peppered with such predictable observations. To readers of gender studies literature, none of them will be especially illuminating, but Vincent's descriptions of how she learned, and tested, such chestnuts firsthand make them awfully fun to read. As "Ned," Vincent joined an all-male bowling league, dated women, worked for a door-to-door sales force, spent three weeks in a monastery, hung out in strip clubs and, most dangerous of all, went on a Robert Bly-style men's retreat. She creates rich portraits of the men she met in these places and the ways they behaved--as a lesbian, she's particularly good at separating the issues of sexuality from those of gender. But the most fascinating part of the story lies within Vincent herself--and the way that censoring her emotions to pass as a man provoked a psychological breakdown. For fans of Nickel and Dimed -style immersion reporting, this book is a sure bet. (Jan. 23)
[Page 56]. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
