Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  But that’s the quantum paradox of sexuality right there. Because just as soon as I say that, just as soon as I say that three of the women I dated and revealed myself to, three heterosexual women, wanted to or did sleep with me once they knew that I was a woman, I remember that one of those three women, Anna, didn’t sleep with me because I didn’t weigh two hundred pounds.

  She struggled to plumb that conundrum as hard as anyone. We went back and forth on it trying to understand the nature of the attraction we both felt, an attraction that was physical, but physical because it had first been mental.

  Anna was by far the best date I had as Ned. Given what I’ve described thus far, that may not sound like the choicest of compliments, but I mean it as one. She was a joy, and proof that real chemistry could exist between two people from the instant they met. Of course, she was also proof that chemistry was just that, particles mixing and sparking a buzz on the brain, but it wasn’t a good predictor of fit or anything else, for that matter, beyond itself. It had nothing whatsoever to do with what two people would want from each other or what would work logistically when the high wore off. You could be entirely unaware of who or what you were to each other, or even, in our case, whether you were man or woman, gay or straight, and it could still be there between you, plain and undeniable. But momentous as it sometimes felt, maybe in the end it didn’t mean anything at all.

  We met for dinner at a cheap Chinese place I knew. All these dates were breaking me financially, and based on past experience, I was hoping it would be a short evening. But the minute Anna sat down I was so immediately at ease with her that I wished I’d taken her to a place where the prices weren’t even on the menu—the kind of place where blind daters who click get slowly soused on top-shelf martinis until they’re canoodling on their bar stools and feeding each other oysters by the end of the evening.

  By the end of the evening we were canoodling at the bar at a place down the street. I asked her if I could touch her hand. She nodded and smiled drowsily, faintly pityingly, faintly nurturingly—the way she might have looked at a lot of imploring men—placing her hand on the bar palm up between us. And there it was. The thing sought. The simple favor granted, and a mountainous relief contained in it.

  I held it and kissed her fingers. That was all. Nothing serious. We talked mostly, and thereafter we wrote a lot of e-mails back and forth, until I finally told her the truth. And then nothing changed and everything changed. I met her again later as myself, and the thing between us was still there, but she was a little afraid of it by then, uncomfortable with it in anything but the mind, for reasons I both understood and respected. That was the beauty of the experiment. It was different for everyone.

  The third straight girl who still wanted to keep seeing Ned (even after she knew that he was a woman) was the only girl I succeeded in picking up in public.

  Sally worked behind the counter in an ice-cream parlor. I was there buying ice cream and while she was scooping my cookies ’n’ cream, I told her that I really liked her glasses. It was true, the kind of thing I would have said as myself, but also the kind of thing that would be taken much more to heart by a straight woman when I said it as Ned.

  She was affable and direct. She responded to Ned’s compliment with flirtatious thanks and a story about how she’d picked her frames out of the bargain basket at the optician. I gave her my phone number on a napkin and asked her to call—probably not the manly thing to do, but I thought it was the polite thing to do. My feminine empathy knew how awkward it could be to refuse someone your number, yet how much more awkward it could be to give it to him and then have to play phone dodge for the next two weeks until he either dropped the chase or turned stalker.

  She called the next day. Her voice on the phone was tentative. She’d never done this before, she said. No one had ever just asked her out on the spot. She was floating on the attention. She would be mad later, I thought, and she’d have every right to be.

  Sally and I went out three times together. Three chatty dates on which we talked about nothing much at all. There wasn’t much to say. She was thirty-five and still living at home. Still working in the ice-cream shop she’d worked in as a teenager. She’d been engaged, but had broken it off a year prior, or he had, or they’d let it atrophy until someone moved out, it was hard to tell. She hadn’t been on a date since, but she wasn’t bitter, or not so as you could tell.

  She coasted over things and smiled and laughed at Ned’s jokes. She didn’t intimidate him. She knew enough not to. There were always girls like that. I’d known them all my life. The ones who didn’t challenge a boy, or later, even a man, because he was really still a boy, and the slightest sign of backbone would chase him away. In high school that’s what I learned as a girl. Make light. Hide your intelligence.

  But having felt so small and intimidated with women as Ned, and that despite being a grown woman, Sally’s coquettishness was a mercy to me, a small kindness and a comfort, even if it was mostly an act.

  Sally liked Ned, it seemed. She flirted, not just with her laughter and attentiveness, but with her hands. She touched me often on the arm or the shoulder as we spoke. Midconversation, she reached across the table to straighten the rumpled collar on my jacket, and we kept right on talking as if it hadn’t happened.

  At the end of the third date I revealed myself. At first she was stunned. Still smiling and sort of laughing, wheels not turning visibly. Then she said she’d known something was off, but she hadn’t been able to put her finger on it.

  “Maybe some part of me knew,” she said. “I don’t know. You made so much eye contact. You listened so well. You weren’t hairy. I’m not sure.”

  She said she wasn’t angry, but she didn’t say much of anything else. But then hours later she wrote an e-mail to say that she was, actually, “kind of” angry. She wanted to know if I’d only asked her out in order to do research for the book. I tried to soften this, but it was true. I asked her to come by my place the next day to talk. I wasn’t dressed as Ned.

  She showed up with a bottle of wine. She sat on the couch sipping it, not saying anything. I asked her what she wanted. She looked at me, seemingly undeterred by the change in my appearance.

  “I guess to keep seeing you,” she said.

  This surprised me.

  “But you’re not a lesbian, are you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never really been that fond of penises.”

  I tried to get her to talk more about this, but she wouldn’t, except to say that she could never tell her family about any of this, at least not the lesbian part. She’d be too ashamed, she said, to ever tell anyone she might be gay.

  “Maybe you’re not,” I said. “And if you are, you won’t always feel this way.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” she said, and got up to go.

  We agreed to meet again, but we never got it together. I stopped by the shop to see her once a few weeks later, and she seemed embarrassed. She said she was seeing a guy and it was going well. I was happy for her. The last time I saw her there, while getting a cone with friends, she pretended not to see me. I wasn’t surprised. She’d come around past that nice pretense to letting me know how she felt, if only by giving me the silent treatment. She had her angers aplenty, but like me and so many of the women I knew, she seemed to have trouble showing them, choosing instead to suppress them and pretend that everything was fine, to make things run smoothly while she boiled underneath.

  Still, feminism had cracked that curse in some of us, giving us the right to be mad and the temperament to say it, and I met those women, too.

  My worst date by far was with a woman I met for coffee in New York. We’d had very little correspondence beforehand, just meager getting-to-know-you kind of stuff. Like many of the others, it was hard to pin her down for a date, but finally she agreed. She was an attractive woman, a graduate student who had done her undergraduate work at an Ivy League school and had spent time thereafter at the Sorbonne. You
could tell she was used to talking down to people, assuming they hadn’t read the things she had. She was one of those polyglot Eurosnobs who’d lived in various countries around the world, and now considered herself to be above the cretinous American company she was at present obliged to keep.

  She had lived in the Middle East as a child, so I started the conversation on what I thought was a topical note, asking about her thoughts on the veiling of women. I imagined, I said, that having lived in both worlds, she might have some interesting insights on the matter. She leaped on the word “interesting”: “I don’t know what you mean by interesting. Westerners don’t understand the first thing about it. They think it’s oppressive and backward, but what’s really backward is the fact that in the year 2003 Congress can pass a law outlawing late-term abortions.”

  Here it was, the abortion test. This had come up on other dates. Several women went out of their way, it seemed, to stake out their ground on it, presumably as a means of testing my feminist credentials.

  One woman mentioned it in passing on a date while talking about someone she knew who was against abortion.

  “That’s interesting,” I interjected. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard anyone be honest about the prolife position and call it what it is.”

  She nodded, but a few minutes later, when she had cause to mention the prolife position again, she made a point of using the popular propagandistic term “antichoice” instead. The lines were drawn.

  I didn’t take the bait then, and I didn’t take it with the Eurosnob either, preferring not to get into a political argument. Besides, I didn’t want to interrupt this woman’s hostility trajectory. I wanted to see how far it went. I wanted to see if, as with Sasha, I could find out what was behind it, get her to talk about the dynamic that was surfacing between us and why it was there. I was, after all, doing research, and if I was going to take abuse, I wanted to search it for what it could teach me.

  This she didn’t like any more than she had liked my use of the benign qualifier “interesting.” She began critiquing my conversational style as too meta. Apparently I didn’t ask the right questions. I was far too serious, something she had found to be true of other men she’d dated. She had said that she was interested in Italo Calvino, so I mentioned the concept of lightness as he defined it, asking if this was what she was looking for in people. To this she responded with what for her was probably enthusiasm, agreeing that yes, that was the quality she was looking for exactly.

  Here is Calvino’s partial definition:

  To cut off Medusa’s head without being turned to stone, Perseus supports himself on the very lightest of things, the winds and the clouds, and fixes his gaze upon what can be revealed only by indirect vision, an image caught in a mirror. I am immediately tempted to see this myth as an allegory on the poet’s relationship to the world, a lesson in the method to follow when writing.

  This, as it happens, is a perfect description of how our date made me feel. I may not have been quite Persean enough to suit her, but she definitely turned me to stone.

  In passing, much later in the conversation, I mentioned the difference in our ages. She was thirty, I thirty-five. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than she railed: “Oh, please. You’re not going to try to tell me that a man’s thirty-five is equal to a woman’s thirty-five. It’s more akin to a woman’s twenty-three.”

  At that point I was, for the one and only time in my dating career as Ned, sorely tempted to strip naked and shout “Look, honey, I’m a chick, too, and a dyke to boot, so drop the Shulamith Firestone routine. I outgrew that when I was twenty-three, and if you ever hope to land a man who isn’t already a castrato, you’d better start practicing a little more of that Calvino you’re preaching.”

  But I just fell silent and shrugged. I deserved some abuse, even if Ned didn’t. I never had a second date with the Eurosnob. Better just to fish somewhere else.

  So I did. And that was when I met Anna for dinner.

  For me, Ned’s encounter with Anna, and the crux of my dating time as Ned, was all about that moment at the bar. The moment Anna gave Ned her hand, and the way that she treated him when she did it, with such conscious, poised magnanimity, granting access with the best possible grace. No woman I met as Ned had managed it nearly so well. It was a lot to manage.

  And if you have never been sexually attracted to women, you will never quite understand the monumental power of female sexuality, except by proxy or in theory, nor will you quite know the immense advantage it gives us over men. As a lesbian, I knew something of this. But it is different between two women, more an engagement of equals, an exchange of something shared. As a man, I learned much more, and I learned it, I think, from an unexpectedly disadvantaged point of view.

  The women’s movement was in part about redressing feelings of powerlessness—physical powerlessness, institutional powerlessness—and the fear and rage that came of it. Rape is still a statistic women live by. And as we make our way in the world, we slink around corners, we maneuver our sexuality with salty care, loosing just enough to be desired, but not too much to be unsafe, and all the while we envy the seeming inviolability of males and dread its implacable underpinnings. We think we’re working from the underside up. But if Ned’s experience is anything to go by, that’s not how it seems to the boys.

  Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which, I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked. I saw my own sex from the other side, and I disliked women irrationally for a while because of it. I disliked their 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 successes unbearably humiliating. Typical male power feels by comparison like a blunt instrument, its salvos and field strategies laughably remedial next to the damage a woman can do with a single cutting word: no.

  Sex is most powerful in the mind, and to men, in the mind, women have a lot of power, not only to arouse, but to give worth, self-worth, meaning, initiation, sustenance, everything. Seeing this more clearly through my experience, I began to wonder whether the most extreme men resort to violence with women because they think that’s all they have, their one pathetic advantage over all she seems to hold above them. I make no excuses for this. There are none. But as a man I felt vaguely attuned to this mind-set or its possibility. I did not inhabit it, but I thought I saw how rejection might get twisted beyond recognition in the mind of a discarded male where misogyny and ultimately rape may be a vicious attempt to take what cannot be taken because it has not been bestowed. Sometimes women seem so superior when you see them through the eyes of an ordinary man that now, looking back on that feeling as a female, the very idea of ramming your dick into a woman to avenge yourself, or claim her, suddenly seems as absurdly out of scale and ineffectual as a pygmy poking his finger at the moon.

  In the sex clubs I visited and in the dating I did, I inhabited an outlook imposed on me from the outside by culture, by other women and other men, and I glimpsed this deeply disturbing connection between violence and sex and women and self-worth, the hallmarks of male powerlessness, the helpless, worshipful lust and the murderous ire that may come from the same lack, the same lackey status that can turn on an instant. Want me, it all seems to say. Love me. Desire me. Choose me. I need you. You ignore me. You disdain me. You destroy me. I hate you.

  Having seen it, I am more afraid than ever of male minds, and oddly I feel more powerless than ever walking in the world among them, even though I know this isn’t fair. Men are not at all the same, and Ned, like every man and no man, was not all men and never could be. Yet it seems true to say that we women have far more power than we know, and because of it, even with our fears, our parries and our wits about us, we are in even more danger than we know or dare contemplate.

  But there were other reasons that my time dating as Ned made me angry with women. Of cours
e, I fell into the same trap they did. When I was Ned, women became a subspecies to blame, just as, for these women, men had become the adversary in the wrong. I did what they did and saw how almost inescapable it was when you were opposites, even though, of course, I wasn’t. The brain drops data into categories, but I was in both categories at once. I was angry because I wanted them to behave more reasonably. I was angry because I wanted myself to conclude more reasonably. Dating these women as a woman in disguise was like looking at a dozen different versions of yourself and faulting every one for its specific female faults, and knowing them to be yours as well. Wearing the costume of a man, I could slip the noose for a second and say, “That’s not me,” that’s Women, capital W. Feminists, capital F.

  I disliked these women and women in general because they—we—fall prey, as we must, to self-interest and chauvinism. I became a misogynist for a time because I expected better of women, because in the beginning I expected nothing of men. Anything they did was gravy because like a lot of women, deep down I didn’t think men were capable of much. In that regard, I was every bit as bad as my dates.

  Ned could feel good about himself and his buddies because he was simple and nothing much was expected of him. Now, like his bowling buddies, he could do nothing but lift on his good deeds, which sometimes amounted to little more than warm handshakes and the merest pinch of self-awareness for which he could pat himself soundly on the back. But women were supposed to fly already. And I held it harshly against them that they were as small and shitty and shortsighted as everybody else, including me. Ned saw that, and then I saw Ned seeing it, and then I saw myself. I guess that was the fascination of Ned. He was a mirror and a window and a prism all at the same time.

  But the truth was that for all the anger I felt flowing in my direction, anger directed at the abstraction called men, I was most surprised to find nestled inside the confines of female heterosexuality a deep love and genuine attraction for real men. Not for women in men’s bodies, as the prejudicial me had thought. Not even just for the metrosexual, though he has his audience, but for brawny, hairy, smelly, stalwart, manly men; bald men, men with bellies, men who can fix things and, yes, men who like sports and pound away in the bedroom. Men whom women loved for being men with all the qualities that testosterone and the patriarchy had given them, and whom I have come to appreciate for those very same qualities, however infuriating at times I still find them.