The fainting couch: Norah Vincent, Self-made man (Viking 2006)
Vincent, Norah. 2006. Self-Made Man. Penguin Books.
Norah Vincent’s Self-Made Man is a work of immersive journalism—in the tradition of Black Like Me_—by a former _Village Voice journalist. The book recounts roughly eighteen months during which Vincent, a white lesbian writer, went “undercover” as a man, infiltrating a range of male-only or male-dominant organisations and subcultures: a bowling league, several what she called “Red Bull” direct-sales organisations, a monastery, dating bars, and the men’s movement (the 1990s Iron John version, rather than today’s more overtly misogynist bro/incel clubs).
The origins of the book stem from a time Vincent agreed with a drag-king friend to dress as a man and walk the streets of her own neighbourhood—an experience she found revelatory in how differently she was treated by men she had encountered all her adult life:
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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. You are pretty sure your experiences would be different if you were a different gender, but you can’t be sure. By changing only her presentation while remaining in a familiar environment, Vincent isolates a variable in a way that is otherwise extremely difficult to do.
Unfortunately, in the larger project of Self-Made Man, Vincent largely abandons this experimental logic. Instead of continuing to examine how the situations change when she is read as male rather than female, she in practice investigates a related but different question: how do men behave when they believe there are no women present. Thus the focus shifts to environments that are not merely male-dominant but male-exclusive: a men’s bowling league, a monastery, strip clubs, a men’s movement group, and several hard-sell direct-sales organisations. The partial exception is a set of dating experiments, in which she attempts to pick up women while presenting as her alter ego, Ned.
In fact, this list contains some exceptions that prove the rule: while strip clubs (by definition) have women present, Vincent quite convincingly shows that the women are not seen as women but rather as a collection of body parts — one of the things she does that makes the strippers uneasy (and she believes threatens to reveal that she is only dressing as a man) is look at the women’s faces; likewise, in the hard-sell companies she works for, the few women who work there as women are expected to behave in largely male-coded ways — while they use sex to sell (and indeed are almost pimped by their male colleagues — they exist in a very phallic environment. Even in the men’s bowling league, her teammates make a distinction between their wives and girlfriends (women around whom they carefully modify their behaviour) and others (strippers, etc.) whom they more-or-less consume as sex objects.
So even though it strays from its original premise, the experiment is not without value. 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. She summarises this constraint in striking terms:
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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.
What she doesn’t acknowledge, however, is how extreme the majority of these situations are. It is hard to imagine spaces more aggressively male-exclusive than a monastery or a men’s rights group; and strip clubs and the Glengarry Glen Ross world of hard-sell sales reward—indeed require—a stylised, performative form of masculinity that borders on cosplay. These are not neutral samples of “male life,” but environments that actively select for and amplify particular traits.
What the book never quite does, however, is follow through on its most promising initial insight: take a known experience and change a single variable. Walk down the same street as a man and as a woman; ride the transit or go to a restaurant “each” way; deal with government officials, mechanics, contractors, professors, etc.
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 she constantly discovers she is 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 an anthropology of men than a discussion of what changes when you stop being coded as female:
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…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.
