The fainting couch: Norah Vincent, Self-made man (Viking 2006)
Vincent, Norah. 2006. Self-Made Man. Penguin Books.
There is a story my father used to tell me when I was young, about a female author who never wrote a scene in which only men appeared, “because she didn’t know how men spoke when they were alone.” When a reporter called her on this one time, pointing to a conversation between two men without any female participants in one of her novels, the author pointed out that a young woman had fainted earlier in the scene and was still lying on the couch.
I’ve not been able to find out who that author was — ChatGPT initially thought it was Ivy Compton-Burnett, but couldn’t find me a reliable reference. But she came to mind again as I was reading Self-made Man by Norah Vincent.
Vincent’s book is a work of immersive journalism—in the tradition of Black Like Me—by a former Village Voice journalist. It tells the story of roughly eighteen months during which Norah, a white lesbian writer, went “undercover” as Ned, a somewhat effeminate man, in a number of male-only or male-dominant organisations and subcultures: a bowling league, several what Vincent calls “Red Bull” direct-sales companies, a monastery, dating bars, and a men’s movement support group and retreat (of the 1990s Iron John version, rather than today’s more overtly misogynist semi-incels).
The origins of the book stem from a time Vincent agreed to go out with a drag-king friend on the streets of New York, while dressed as a man—an experience she found revelatory in how differently she was treated by men she had encountered all her adult life:
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 through 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 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.
But that night in drag, we walked by those same stoops and doorways and bodegas. We walked 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. Seeing those guys look away deferentially when they thought I was male let me validate, in retrospect, the true hostility of their former stares.
But that wasn’t quite all. There was something more than respect being communicated in their averted gaze, something subtler and less direct. It was more like a disinclination to show disrespect—a code of behaviour that kept the peace among men. To look another man in the eye and hold his gaze is to invite conflict (or, as she puts it, a homosexual encounter). To look away is to accept the status quo, to leave each man to his small sphere of pride and poise.
I quote this passage at length because it is a remarkably clear prompt for what follows—and, in retrospect, an explanation for what goes wrong in the rest of the book. The key insight here—that deeply ingrained gendered codes govern everyday interaction in ways we rarely get to test directly—is intuitively familiar but difficult to prove. Most of us, I suspect, are pretty sure our experiences would be different if we were of a different gender, but most of us can’t be sure because we never test the premise. When Vincent walked down that familiar street in drag, she was able to isolate the variable and see how the other half (meant more or less literally in this case) experienced the world.
The problem with this book is that Vincent largely abandons the experimental logic. Instead of continuing to examine how situations she is familiar with change as she switched from female-coded to male-, Vincent in practice ends up investigating what we might call Ivy’s problem: how do men behave when (they think) there are no women around?
This is a related, but really quite different question. And in investigating it, Vincent abandons what made her initial experience so notable: the fact that everything else about the situation was familiar to her. Instead of walking streets and doing things she knows, she goes to things that are unfamiliar to her, both for reasons of gender but also class: a working-class men’s bowling league, a monastery, strip-clubs, high-turnover direct sales outfits, and the men’s support group.
The unfortunate thing is that these are situations that Vincent doesn’t know as a woman either: in her circle, bowling is done ironically and her only connection to monks is a catholic upbringing; she goes in for direct sales, because it is the only place where her resume will not create a red-flag, since she can’t easily fake or regender a resume in the fields she knows better such as journalism, and she admits that she finds the whole business of self-help and twelve-step clubs foreign and off-putting.
The result is that the “foreignness” of her experiences, while framed in terms of gender, are also very much about education, gender, belief, generation, and opportunity. Only when she tries dating as a man is she in an area (broadly speaking) that she has some previous experience with — both as a woman subject to pickup lines herself and, as a self-described “butch” lesbian, herself an active pursuer of women as objects of sexual desire.
In fact, it is the exceptions to these “all male” spaces that prove the rule that more is going on here than simply a gender change. Several of the spaces — in addition to the dating bars, these include the “Red Bull” companies and, of course, strip clubs — have women present in them. But Vincent herself has no connection to those women’s experiences: to the way the strippers are understood as a collection of body-parts rather than human beings, or to the women “salesmen” in the hardsell companies who both “don’t see gender” and use (and are used for) their sexuality to make sales targets. In these, the women seem as foreign to Vincent as the men in ways that the women she dates while in male dress do not.
This is not to say that the book is not without value — just that its original idea was even more interesting: it is if John Howard Griffin, the author of Black Like Me, had used his immersion to focus on how black communities work rather than what it was like to be the subject of white dominance in the broader shared society. Vincent offers perceptive observations—speaking as someone socialised female, albeit as a self-described “tomboy” and masculine-presenting lesbian—about how men develop and enforce codes governing emotional expression throughout the entire book; but she is always speaking as an outsider.
In fact, her most valuable contribution probably comes from the evident distaste and suprise she feels for the things she does discover in these (to her) hidden worlds, particularly as she follows male socialisation around friendship and the expression of feelings:
As a guy you get about a three-note emotional range. That’s it, at least as far as the outside world is concerned. Women get octaves—chromatic scales of tears and joys and anxieties and despairs and erotic flamboyance. But guys get little more than bravado and rage. Forget doubt. Forget hurt.
The result is a kind of appropriation rather than explanation: we hear what an outsider thinks a community does when they are alone, despite the fact that, as she constantly discovers, she is profoundly unfamiliar with the codes she is interacting with. What we don’t get is her expertise as a woman: as somebody who has experienced the male gaze (her original point) and then noticed it vanish when she started dressing as a man. It is more a safari of the wild and unfamiliar world of men than an investigation of what changes when you stop being coded as female:
…standing in the pit of the male psyche was no better. There I saw men at their worst, too. I saw how degraded and awful a relentless, humiliating sex drive could make you … how bitter and often puerile men could be in the company of other men…. It made me think that many men are far worse than most women know, but then also far better.
