advice

Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back Again, by Norah Vincent

Review by DAVID KAMP

Don’t judge this book by its cover. It features two photographs of the author, Norah Vincent. In the first, she’s a brassy, attractive woman with short, upswept hair and a confident smirk on her face. In the second, she’s done up in man drag, with poindexter eyeglasses, a day’s worth of stubble and a necktie. There’s your premise in a nutshell: assertive, opinionated Vincent, best known as a contrarian columnist for The Los Angeles Times, goes undercover as a man to learn how the fellas think and act when them pesky broads ain’t around. Flip the book open, and the first thing you come to is its dedication: “To my beloved wife, Lisa McNulty, who saves my life on a daily basis.” Yes, ladies and gents, the author is a self-proclaimed “dyke.”

But “Self-Made Man” turns out not to be what it threatens to be, a men-are-scum diatribe destined for best-seller status in the more militant alternative bookstores of Berkeley and Ann Arbor. Rather, it’s a thoughtful, diligent, entertaining piece of first-person investigative journalism. Though there’s plenty of humor in “Self-Made Man,” Vincent – like her spiritual forebear John Howard Griffin, the white journalist who colored his skin and lived as a black man in the South for his 1961 book “Black Like Me” – treats her self-imposed assignment seriously, not as a stunt.

All that said, it was a stunt that led to Vincent’s undertaking her journey into Testostoland. One night a few years ago, she explains in the first chapter, a “drag king” friend of hers dared her to dress as a man and go for a walk in New York’s East Village. Vincent pasted on some false facial hair, threw on some loose jeans and a baseball cap, and spent a few hours wandering the neighborhood. With the help of the evening darkness, which concealed the shoddiness of her disguise, Vincent didn’t get found out, though she admits she barely interacted with anyone. But the very fact that no one paid her any mind was a small revelation. Vincent had lived in the East Village for years. “As a woman,” she writes, “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.” But in her makeshift man drag, she found that the same stoop-sitters and bodega loiterers didn’t stare at her. “On the contrary,” she says, “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.” If this halfhearted attempt at gender switching could provide such insight, imagine what a year-plus immersion in manhood might yield.

(more…)

gender, identity, sex

Tagged as: humor, media, r, sex, Technorati, tes, The Marketplace