Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  Men were no different. They, too, assessed you for what, not who, you were, and spoke to you accordingly, by rote, like they were addressing a set of characteristics, not a person. It was as if people had five or ten scripts in their minds, each labeled for a type, and all of them geared toward one sex or the other. When they saw you, they’d choose whichever script fit you best, and work from it unconsciously. For guys there was the buddy bonding script, and the “Hey, you’re not gay, are you?” script, and not a whole lot else.

  In all my experience passing back and forth between male and female—often going out in public as both a man and a woman in one day—I rarely if ever interacted in any significant way with anyone (even store clerks) who didn’t treat me and the people around me in a gender-coded way, or freeze uncomfortably when they were uncertain whether I was a man or a woman.

  It was the freezing that always struck me most. People will literally stand paralyzed for a moment, sometimes in mild, sometimes in utter panic when they don’t know what sex you are. You can see the confusion registering, or with polite people, being suppressed, and then you can see the adjustment being made either for male or female or for an extremely uncomfortable and robotic neutral ground between the two. If they don’t know what sex you are, they literally don’t know how to treat you. They don’t know which code to opt for, which language to speak, which specific words and gestures to use, how close they can come to you physically, whether or not they should smile and how. In this we are no different than dogs—with the notable exception, of course, that no dog has ever been mistaken about anyone’s sex.

  So prevalent was this gender-coded behavior that I came to ask myself whether it isn’t almost as impossible for any of us to treat each other gender neutrally as it is to conceptualize language without grammar. Linguist Noam Chomsky is famous for positing that all languages share certain grammatical principles in common, and that children are born with a knowledge of those grammatical principles intact. This inborn knowledge, he argued, explains the success and speed with which children learn language. In Chomsky’s terms, then, the human brain is hard-wired to think grammatically, or, more generally, to slot information and stimuli into certain categories of thought. That is how it functions and how we, in turn, are able to think. In this sense, I wonder, could there be a preprogrammed and possibly inescapable grammar of gender burned on our brains? And is every encounter prescripted as a result?

  To my mind, the Red Bull environments were unmistakably sexed even in their more subtle incarnations at places like Borg.

  Diane did “see gender,” and she treated her employees like sexed beings, often flirting with the men as a means of exerting control, and bonding superficially with the women for the same reason. As in everyday life, not every interaction was loaded, and not every interaction was loaded in the same way. But there were gender-coded patterns of behavior happening most of the time, currents running underneath the words and gestures, and if you were looking for them, as I was, standing inside someone else’s suit, you couldn’t mistake their intent. They told you what you were and how to behave.

  With their mad-dash modus operandi and quasi-cultish environments, the Red Bull companies were hardly representative of average American office culture or corporate environments. For one thing, we were rarely in the office. For another, we lived mostly off the grid when it came to getting paid and paying taxes, and even reporting for work. Almost everything in these places was an exaggeration of what you’d find in large, respected, well-known and established companies of long standing—the kinds of places I worked in my early career before becoming a writer, and my only point of comparison. The Red Bull companies had a culture all their own, though that culture was always seeking to spread itself farther and wider, and was doing so, not only across the country but the world, promoting new young managers, opening new offices, and hiring more young minions to shout JUICE on every continent.

  Everything Red Bull was exaggerated. The trash talk, the pace, the motivational hype. But then I suppose that’s Glengarry Glen Ross for you, a foreshortened view to sharpen the focus. There I saw things rough, much the way I’d seen them in the strip clubs.

  Would I have seen them quite so unadulteratedly at a white-shoe law firm or a blue-chip company? I doubt it. For one thing, no one could blast the song “Other People’s Pussy” in the board-room at such places, or prostitute the female employees at power lunches as brazenly as we used Tiffany to sell coupons, and get away with it for long, even in jest.

  Yet somehow I don’t have a great deal of trouble imagining highly paid male professionals talking just as dirty as we did when they’re alone together in someone’s office, or whooping it up over cocktails after work, or, as some executives have been known to do, taking a long lunch at the titty bar. Nor do I have trouble imagining that in more insidious ways women are still objectified and used to gain strategic advantage in the upper echelons of white-collar America. Sexual harassment law has pushed a lot of blatant sexism and boys’ club culture under the table, but most of us don’t kid ourselves that it isn’t there. Nor would it be fair to assume that simply because, of necessity, I took jobs that didn’t require advanced degrees, working people of all income levels and educational backgrounds don’t bring sexually charged and gender-coded ideas and behaviors to the office. They must. They can hardly help it.

  And neither can “we,” always the supposed exceptions to the rule in our own eyes. We operate in most ways, but especially at work, within the lines that are drawn for us, and gender roles are no exception. Our expectations for ourselves as men and women are largely those of our parents or caregivers, who, as numerous psychological experiments have shown, are more than likely to have done things as crudely conditioning and silly as dressing us in blue and giving us trucks to play with if we were boys or, if we were girls, dressing us in pink and giving us dolls instead.

  Selling door-to-door as Ned helped me to live more of an average man’s life for a spell. I got to be one of the slick boys in sales, to see the target girls across the room, and myself in them. I got to feel the workplace pressures of manhood, and understand firsthand that they are still as tied as they ever were to male virility and, hence, self-esteem. I saw the women around me working by a different motivation—disproving still the ever-implied assumption of their inferiority, and deflecting persistent sexual objectification. I remembered having been motivated similarly myself.

  I saw the clashing styles of the male and female salespeople who tried to teach me to be a man. I grew a pair of balls for a while, and felt the high that well-wielded genitals can induce. And perhaps most important, for the one and only time in my life as Ned, I felt empowered as a man, though I attribute this feeling far more to the clothes I wore than to the circumstances in which I wore them. My jacket and tie had a surprisingly powerful effect both on me and on people’s perceptions of me.

  Thinking back on the experience and how absurd it is that a man’s attire can so thoroughly “make” him, I am reminded of a passage in the Jerzy Kosinski novel Cockpit, which I came across after completing my work experience as Ned. In the novel, the main character pulls a stunt very much like my own, and gets a similar reaction from the public. He has a military uniform custom made for him by a tailor, though he cobbles it together from various designs (using, for example, the lapels of a British uniform, the pockets of a Swedish uniform and the collar of a Brazilian uniform) so as to make it unrecognizable as any country’s actual uniform. Then he wears it in public wherever he goes for the next few weeks.

  When he returns, uniform-clad for the first time, to the hotel where he has been staying, the concierge is so blinded by the uniform that he doesn’t recognize the man himself until he gives his name. Thereafter the concierge insists on treating the man with exaggerated courtesy. These reactions persist with nearly everyone the man meets while in uniform. The parking attendant brings his car around without being asked, ignoring six other waiting customers in the process
. In restaurants with long lines, he is seated immediately. Airlines give him preferential seating on fully booked flights. And perhaps most outrageously, his word is taken as true without question, even when he goes out of his way to tell whopping lies.

  Kosinski writes: “Confronted with my camouflage, it is the witness who deceives himself, allowing his eyes to give my new character credibility and authenticity. I do not fool him; he either accepts or rejects my altered truth.”

  My experience was much the same, though not as grandiose. A suit, or a jacket and tie, is a uniform—quite literally in fact, since the first men’s suits were derived from military dress. My business attire gave me credibility, respectability, license. It was a disguise for my disguise and in it I, the impersonator, was invisible, though not by any means invulnerable.

  I soared briefly. Then I got dropped on my ass and didn’t get up. I was one of the quitters, I guess. Not a top guy.

  The only contact I had with anyone at Clutch after I left was with Ivan. We spoke briefly on the phone a few days later and he told me that the only thing the bosses had had to say about my disappearance was, “Yeah, well, he wasn’t that impressive.”

  7

  Self

  The poet and translator Robert Bly ignited the modern men’s movement in the United States in 1990 with the publication of his book Iron John. In it Bly identified what he saw as a crisis of identity in American manhood caused largely by the prevalence of broken relationships between fathers and sons, the disappearance of male initiation rituals and a dearth of male role models for young boys. Using myth and fairy tale as his guides, especially the Grimm brothers’ story “Iron John,” from which the book takes its title, Bly encouraged men to reconnect with the buried Wild Man inside them as a means of healing their bereft and wounded souls.

  Men, he argued, had gone through a painful evolution in recent decades, moving from one broken model to the next. First there was the fifties man who was supposed to “like football, be aggressive, stick up for the United States, never cry, and always provide.” But he was callous and brutal, isolated and dangerous. Then came the sixties man beset by guilt and horror over the Vietnam War and encouraged by the early feminist movement to get in touch with his feminine side. Bly praised this new gentle, thoughtful man for leaving behind the crusty stoicism of his father’s generation, but lamented his eventual deterioration into the seventies man, or what Bly called the soft man, a man without backbone or force, an unhappy man, more compassionate than the fifties man, but out of touch with vital, fierce parts of his masculinity.

  In Bly’s reading of the Grimm tale “Iron John,” passive, fearful men must have the courage to reclaim their essential manhood by literally dredging up this lost fierceness and vitality from inside them, just as the young men in the Grimm story dredge up hairy, muddy Iron John from the bottom of a swamp. Iron John, or the symbolic Wild Man, scary, unkempt and ugly as he may seem, is, said Bly, the key to men’s self-actualization and freedom, the way forward in men’s lives.

  Iron John became a national bestseller, and though Bly and others had been leading private men’s workshops throughout the 1980s, the book brought this work and its stated purpose to public consciousness. New men’s workshops and organizations have since sprung up across the country and the world.

  When I started this project I had heard of Bly and Iron John and the men’s movement, but I had no idea what men did or talked about at these secret meetings. Women aren’t allowed to attend them, and the men who attend are generally secretive about what goes on.

  Like the monastery, this was another shuttered male world that I thought might offer me valuable insights into male experience and men’s struggles to redefine themselves in the postfeminist age. But unlike the monks, the men who joined these groups were facing their problems, talking about them openly and pointedly examining their masculinity, both as they and the culture defined it. It was the perfect place to end Ned’s journey.

  I chose an intimate group of about twenty-five to thirty guys that met once a month. I had to travel about an hour and a half each way by car to get to the meetings, which were held in a rented rehearsal room in a community center. The room itself was the size of a small dance studio, bare except for a piano in the corner and mirrors on two of the walls. We sat in folding chairs arranged in a circle in the center of the room.

  There, just sitting and listening, I thought I was going to coast through the end of Ned’s odyssey in a cozy therapeutic setting. Little did I know that this last leg of the trek would push me to the breaking point.

  I went to my first meeting in mid-July, the worst time of year for Ned to try to pass at close quarters in a poorly air-conditioned, brightly lit room. I was dabbing my face constantly with a handkerchief to avoid beard slippage. Add to that the special notice I got for being the new guy, and you can imagine why I was sweating profusely from the moment I walked in. I had been hoping to sneak in and sit at the back unnoticed, but the group hadn’t seen a newcomer in some time, so Gabriel, one of the group’s longest-standing members, introduced me around the room.

  Gabriel was sweet. Heartbreaking, really. The minute you met him you could see that his sense of self was in pieces all over the floor, like a motorcycle someone had taken apart in a garage years before and hadn’t been able to put back together again. He was handsome in an earnest, outdoorsy sort of way, midforties but still dirty blond and trim in his jeans, long-sleeved T-shirts and Birkenstocks. He was harmless and well-meaning, but a little off-putting at first in his eagerness to bond with me as a brother. On my second visit he insisted on hugging me hello and good-bye.

  I’m not generally a big one for therapy groups, especially cultish ones that circulate mimeographed booklets full of toothless mantras and aphorisms, or airy poetry that’s supposed to sound deep but usually isn’t. This group was a classic of that genre, at least in its literature. It had its own mimeographed booklet, which one of the founding members had assembled, and it was full of quoted snippets from men’s-movement gurus like Bly, Joseph Campbell and Michael Meade, as well as a few scattered gems from Yeats, Eliot, Emerson and other dead poets of note. But to me, in this context, even the masters sounded flaccid and ill used.

  The rest of the booklet consisted mostly of questions that were supposed to function as loose guidelines for discussion on that meeting’s assigned theme, questions like: What are my unmet emotional needs? How much is my masculinity defined by other people or society’s expectations of me? Do I respect other men?

  There were seven themes or stages of growth in all, instead of the usual twelve that recur in addiction recovery meetings. Like a twelve-step group, we rotated through them from week to week. When we’d finished stage seven, we’d begin again the next time at stage one.

  Call me unevolved, but I didn’t want to hug anybody there just because it was part of the program. I don’t do “program.” I don’t like “program,” even though I know people who participate in them, and have changed their lives immensely for the better as a result. I wanted to hug people when I felt something for them, when I was ready. Besides, I saw myself as the enemy in this group and I thought it best to keep it that way.

  But hugging was central to the therapy there. Most men don’t tend to share much physical affection with their male friends, so here the guys made a point of hugging each other long and hard at every possible opportunity as a way of offsetting what the world had long deprived them of, and what they in turn had been socialized to disallow themselves.

  It wasn’t at all uncommon at the beginning and end of these meetings to see pairs of guys engaging in prolonged hugs. Sometimes they’d be crying, sometimes they’d just be shoring each other up with reassuring words.

  Even as someone who has seen and never been startled by the sight of a lot of gay men hugging each other long and tenderly in public, it took me a while to get used to seeing these straight men hugging this way. They were really holding each other, taking care, and this jus
t isn’t something you see very often in the outside world. Ned hadn’t seen it in his. And when you saw these guys doing it, it made you realize how badly they needed this surrogate brotherly/fatherly love, and how much they needed it to be expressed physically.

  These men had been making do all their lives with traditional nods of silent understanding. But that wasn’t enough anymore. The monks, or someone among them, perhaps influenced by the men’s movement, had been savvy enough to figure this out. But it’s not the kind of thing you can force, especially when you’re trying to reverse a lifetime’s worth of programming. These guys were here because they wanted to be, and though during my time with them there was always a part of me that remained uncomfortable with groupthink self-help, in this case I had to admire the effort. I knew enough men who could have used similar help, if only they could have opened a pinhole in their defenses. Who was I to scorn this medicine, even if its bywords weren’t to my liking?

  The meetings always started out the same way, the way that most AA and other twelve-step meetings begin, with one of the members reading from the designated portion of the booklet, then giving a five-to ten-minute speech to the group on the topic of the evening. Usually this was a fairly rambling affair, full of expressed discomfort with the whole endeavor. None of these guys was particularly eager to get up in front of a room full of other men and tell them how he felt. As one of the guys said, it was a feat for him to realize that he even had feelings. Learning to identify and express them, especially in the presence of other men, was asking a lot.

  It didn’t really matter what they said. It was a miracle that they were talking at all.

  To me this was amazing, the idea that a person could be incapable of expressing his emotions. Identifying and expressing my emotions had usually come fairly easily to me. It had never occurred to me that some people not only didn’t do it, but didn’t have the slightest notion how to do it. This, I now realize, is a highly privileged, largely feminine point of view, and one whose value and comparative rarity Ned has since made me appreciate. To my mind—and it was clear from what these guys were saying, to their minds as well—living your whole life without connecting to your emotions could be as detrimental to the spirit as starvation is to the body. And though hearing about this handicap came as something of a revelation to me when I heard these men talking about it so candidly, it shouldn’t have, since it was only a confirmation of what I’d found at the monastery and elsewhere in the world as Ned. A lot of men were chronically caught incommunicado.