Janice Fiamengo discusses the 2006 book Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised As A Man by journalist Norah Vincent. Intended as a kind of exposé of male privilege, her investigations turned into something rather different than she originally intended:
Many men are lonely. Many don’t like the work they do. Many are unhappily married. They struggle with an at-times overwhelming sex drive. Their encounters with women, romantic or otherwise, often involve rejection and contradictory tests of their masculinity. They are the objects of blame and bigotry in their societies, yet are expected to remain stoic and put women’s needs first.
It’s a strange world in which the above observations — by a woman — are seen as outstanding insights, but it’s the one we’re in.
In 2006, American journalist Norah Vincent published Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Year Disguised As A Man, an under-cover adventure in which the author, a mannish lesbian with big feet, spent close to 18 months periodically disguised as a man named Ned, notching up about 150 episodes in drag.
With breasts flattened, fake stubble on her chin, and a stuffed jock strap in her pants, having hired a tutor to teach her how to pitch her voice low and move like a man, she set out to “infiltrate exclusive all-male environments and if possible learn their secrets” (p. 18). She joined a bowling league, went on dates, did sales calls, spent some weeks at a monastery, and attended a Robert Bly-influenced men’s wilderness retreat.
Expecting to learn something about male power, she found instead “the hidden pain of masculinity and my own sex’s symbiotic role in it” (p. 254). The planned exposé became a feminist mea culpa.
The book got a lot of attention when it was published, and many men expressed gratitude and appreciation for the empathy and insight in Vincent’s work.
Reading the many accolades, I felt sadness, tenderness, and amazement. Wasn’t this a bit much? Was it really so remarkable that a woman could develop sympathy for the opposite sex?
Most men are so unaccustomed to any empathy from a woman, even when it’s mixed with patronizing descriptions and questionable conclusions, that they respond as if to heroism. The woman who cares, even within circumscribed limits, is catapulted into the company of the saints.
Imagine the reaction if a man had masqueraded as a woman for a year or more, and then pretended to understand women (even sympathetically) using a shop-worn ideological framework? Imagine a white person putting on blackface in order to become an expert, even a well-intentioned one, on the need for black self-improvement? There would be howls of outrage and indignant rebuttals, especially by members of the impersonated group.
Not in Vincent’s case. So rare is a woman’s attempt to understand male experiences that she doesn’t need to be consistently sympathetic or accurate.
Even when someone goes beyond temporary male drag, there is a palpable surprise that mens’ lives are not a well-watered garden of male privilege:
Today, of course, there is still always a reason to look away from men’s pain. Feminist-inclined men and women routinely “bathe in male tears“. They claim that discussing men’s issues is misogynistic, and ask “Can White Men Finally Stop Complaining?” No wonder it seems that the only time men can be heard is when women speak for them.
Notably, women who “transition” to male through hormone treatments and surgery are often shocked by the indifference and unkindness they encounter in public, where men are not eager to help and women expect deference. Zander Keig wrote as a trans man in “Crossing the Divide” of a pronounced sense of aloneness: “No one, outside of family and close friends, is paying any attention to my well-being”.
