I’ve long believed that as much as it can be painful to be a woman, I wouldn’t want to be a man. Men are allowed less freedom of expression than women. It’s more difficult for them to live sexuality and gender as fluid constructs. And men’s clothes are really boring.
Last week, I read Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back Again by Norah Vincent. For a year and a half, Vincent adopted the identity of “Ned” and dressed and lived as a man. (”Twelfth Night,” anyone)? She visited strip clubs, bowling leagues, boardrooms, and even a monastery to find out what it’s like to be a man. She learned a lot about attitudes towards women, bravado, and sharing emotions. Her conclusion? Being a man is hard, as is being a woman. We’ve got to cut each other some slack.
Those are the crib notes. For those of you still interested, here are some choice passages:
“Men get married, but their sexuality doesn’t then magically disappear amid the bliss of family life. Hence the preponderance of married men loping off in shame and secret to the strip club.
Sometimes even respectable men with respectable lives have primal ugly stuff bracketed somewhere in their minds, kept in its place apart from the purported love that goes with the responsibilities of fatherhood and husbanding… It was only society’s prevailing myth, or perhaps female wish fulfillment, that had pretended otherwise. As a result…sometimes it was too hard to successfully resolve the conflict between baseline male sexuality and the civilized role of a man.”
“It was just the way of things in the wild when you were male. You were the eager athlete, the brightly colored bird doing the dance, and she was the German judge begrudging you the nod.”
“At first the three women looked us over like inferior produce in the supermarket. Then they smiled weakly. They were well brought up. They knew enough to cover quickly with the kind of anemic politesse that we all use on bores at cocktail parties.”
“[Women] think of ourselves as emotional masters of the universe. In our world, feelings reign. We have them. We understand them. We cater to them. Men, we think, don’t on all counts. But as I learned among my friends in the bowling league and elsewhere, this is absolutely untrue and absurd. Of course men have a whole range of emtions, just as women do - it’s just that many of them are often silent or underground, invisible to most women’s eyes and ears.”
“Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time, they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colors and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned… If women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men are equally trapped by this warrior/minstrel complex. What’s more, while a man is expected to be modern, that is, to support feminism in all its particulars, to see and treat women as equals in every respect, he is on the other hand often still expected to be traditional at the same time, to treat a lady like a lady, to lead the way and pick up the check.”
“I was curious to see what would happen to her supposed attraction to Ned when she learned that he was a woman… Many would and have argued that that is all love ever is, an attachment to something illusory. Lacan wrote that love is giving something you don’t possess to someone who doesn’t exist. Perhaps Ned was an object lesson in that principle…”
“Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me of all things, into a momentary misogynist… I disliked [women's] superiority, their accusatory smiles, their entitlement to choose or dash me with a fingertip, an execution so lazy, so effortless, it made the defeats and even the sucesses unbearably humiliating.”
“There was a residual sexism in [salesmanship] for women, a benign twist on being thought useless in the world of work for so many centuries. If we did it people would say, ‘pretty good for a girl,’ and if we failed we were still commended for trying. But a guy, he was a useless clod if he couldn’t perform, and he said to himself at least as harshly as anyone else did.”
“People will literally stand paralyzed for a moment, sometimes in mild, sometimes in utter panic when they don’t know what sex you are. You can see the confusion registering, or with polite people, being suppressed, and then you can see the adjustment being made either for male or female or for an extremely uncomfortable and robotic neutral ground between the two. 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. In this we are no different than dogs - with the notable exception, of course, that no dog has ever been mistaken about anyone’s sex.”
“Being the second sex imprisoned us, but it came with one sizable benefit. We didn’t have to carry the world on our shoulders. The feeling is officially mutual. Women thought they held the world up and made it go, and for that service deserved a vacation. Men, it turns out, think the same thing. And we’re both right.”
“Men’s liberation isn’t a platform you can run on, even if it is the last frontier of new age rehabiliation: the oppressor as oppressed.”
“Men’s healing is in women’s interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are - here is the dreaded word - victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will be the hardest part to swallow) that women have been codeterminers in the system, at times as invested and active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role.”
“Maybe it will happen. Slowly, fitfully, tentatively. I hope it does. Men haven’t had their movement yet. Not really. Not intimately. And they’re due for it, as are the women who live with, fight with, take care of and love them.”
she looks better as a man