Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  And on top of all this there was the guilt. It was gaining on me too. Despite the intimate encounter Paul and I had just had, all my initial fears about him resurfaced. They got worse, in fact. Now that we’d bonded in some way I thought it likely that he’d be much angrier about the lie if he ever found it out. He’d shown me affection and concern. He’d been especially pleased to learn that I was coming to the retreat. I thought I’d actually heard tenderness in his voice.

  I tempered some of these worries by taking a few precautions. I made sure that my girlfriend knew where I’d be and with whom. She knew Paul’s address and full name. I sent e-mails to friends giving them the same information. In case something awful happened, I figured the detectives would know where to start.

  The lodge was in a wooded area on a small lake. The leaves were in full color and from a distance the trees along the shoreline were like a quilt draped over the hills. When we arrived, the air was cool but humid, the day’s rain having turned to fog. The property was elevated and secluded enough to be out of cell phone range, but not more than a few miles from the nearest village. This assuaged some of my fears about what I’d do in an emergency, but it would still be a long run down the dirt road in my underwear if it came to that, and somehow I didn’t think the sight of tits and tighty whiteys would inspire much sympathy in the locals. Only one other structure shared the lakefront, and it was far enough away to be out of earshot.

  The main floor of our dwelling had a large communal dining room with five or six round tables, each of which seated six or seven. There was also one long rectangular table that could accommodate about fifteen or twenty. There was an industrial kitchen just off the dining room, worked by several amenable cooks for hire—food service was included in the price of the trip.

  Also on the main floor, leading off the dining room, was a large living room. Its main feature was an imposing floor-to-ceiling fieldstone fireplace in which a well-tended fire was always burning. On its mantel Paul had placed the group’s talismans, one of which was—lamentably enough—a large, crudely carved wooden penis. The rest of the room was filled with armchairs and sofas and a few folding metal chairs. Over the weekend, we conducted most of our talks and seminars in this room.

  The sleeping quarters were upstairs. Ten bedrooms in all, each of which could sleep four men in two sets of wooden bunk beds. As it happened, one of my bunk mates didn’t show, so I had only two roommates to deal with instead of three. Still, I can assure you that, given the way these guys snored and farted in their sleep, two roommates was quite enough. Through the walls, I could hear the guys in the next room roaring like wildebeest all night long.

  Thirty-three men in all attended the retreat. Make that thirty-two men and one woman. It was a full house.

  I had planned on sleeping in my clothes and not showering, leaving my beard untouched and making good cover of filth if need be. It was only going to be two days, and if I got covered in mud during that time, so much the better for disguise.

  I chose one of the bottom bunks, and I was able to disrobe there inside my sleeping bag. Once the lights had been turned out, I stripped down to my T-shirt and underwear, stashing my flannel shirt and jeans in the corner of my bunk, to be put on again in the same way at first light.

  The first night, we arrived in the early evening and had dinner. The festivities began thereafter with an initiation ritual. This involved all thirty-three of us standing together in the main dining room in as tight a mass as we could manage. Paul encouraged this by laying a rope around us on the floor and tightening its circumference as much as possible around our feet.

  When we were packed together, Paul stood in front of us and told us what to do. This was a given throughout the weekend. Paul told us what to do and we did it.

  The ritual we were about to undergo was called smudging, a Native American custom. It consisted of lighting a bowl full of incense—mostly sage from the smell of it—holding the bowl in front of each man and fanning him with the smoke, up and down his body, both front and back, with what looked to be a fully feathered and preserved eagle or hawk’s wing.

  The idea, as Paul explained, was for each man, one by one, when he felt moved to do so, to step outside the circle, walk over to the smudger, raise his arms and receive the smoke as it wafted around him.

  Per Paul’s instructions, some of the guys had suspended a tarp from the ceiling, draping it over each side of a rope so that it hung down in an A frame and formed a tunnel. After you had been smudged you were supposed to walk through the tunnel to what Paul had called an unknown beyond that awaited you in the next room.

  Paul went first, of course, because, as he explained somewhat archly, in the wild the alphas always get first dibs on the meat. He had an impish look in his eye, but he took this very seriously all the same. He stood in front of the smudger with his eyes closed. He had one hand over his heart and one hand over his prick, as if he were saying a priapic pledge of allegiance, which I guess in a way he was.

  I was one of the last to go through. When I stood in front of him, the smudger looked me in the eye and nodded gravely as he fanned me. I nodded back with my best square jaw and turned to enter the tunnel of unknowing. At the end of it I encountered two obstacles, which Paul had said represented the obstacles one faces along the way to masculine enlightenment. The first obstacle was a bench they had placed in the doorway. You had to step over it. The other was a low lintel, which you had to duck under in order to enter the next room. Ducking under had the effect of bringing you into the living room at half height.

  The action itself was pretty silly, but I understood its symbolism well enough. Coming into a room at half height put you in a disadvantaged posture, one that I could imagine inspired considerable discomfort among these guys, especially when other guys were present.

  Some part of them was always thinking in terms of conflict and defense, especially around each other. As a guy, you had to be at your full height and in possession of your faculties when in close proximity to other men. I had learned this, too, as Ned.

  It was complicated, because on one level everything was easy and brotherly, full of those inclusive hey-buddy handshakes I had felt early on in my term as Ned, and had felt here in the group as well. But all of this camaraderie depended on a strict observance of the rules. The boundaries were strong between men, and as I had learned at the monastery, you had to navigate them appropriately or risk a strong negative reaction. I could see why it was hard for these guys to let down their emotional defenses with each other.

  For me, as a woman with other women, the contact was always fluid. The company of other women doesn’t generally make women tense. We don’t have our guard up in the same way. We operate under different rules. Our territories, such as they are, are not hard and fast. We hug and touch and break the barriers of one another’s space in ways that men find startling among themselves. Our hugs may be superficial, and they may not always be sincere, but they are not threatening. We may also be competitive and undermining at times, but even at our worst, the most we are likely to do is hurt one another’s feelings. As a result, you don’t often hear women talk about being afraid of other women. But these guys talked about fear all the time, as if exposing yourself to another man was like putting yourself under his knife.

  When I emerged from under the low lintel, Paul was standing there in the light, close enough to touch, with his arms wide open for a hug. Again a symbolic act. You’d come up from below expecting a sucker punch, and instead, you’d get a long-lost father’s hug. I folded myself into Paul’s chest defensively, worried that he would feel my bra beneath my flannel shirt, or the stickiness of my beard.

  “Welcome, Ned,” he said, exhaling deeply and crushing me against him.

  Unexpectedly, I felt him soften in the embrace. It wasn’t a bear hug. He didn’t slap me on the back or grunt encouragement. He held me. Really held me, and unlike Gabriel’s early proselytizing hugs, which had felt faintly shallow and cloying, Pau
l’s hug was real and generous. Here was the guy I’d been demonizing, fearing, disliking, and he was taking me in as a son. My guilt ratcheted up a notch.

  Paul often played the father figure in the group, and he played it expertly. The guys looked up to him. A lot. But their respect had an edge to it, too. Earlier in the evening, while constructing the tunnel and obstacles, Paul had shouted encouragement to two of the younger guys.

  “Looks great,” he’d said.

  “Hey,” quipped one of them under his breath. “Praise from Caesar.”

  He’d meant it affectionately, but it was a jab, too. He was right on the nose. Caesar indeed. Little Caesar. The emperor in a shoebox bloated with his own importance. I’d thought of him that way, too, complete with the desire to betray him. But after our therapeutic talk in the previous week’s meeting, and now after this hug, I felt ashamed of my former judgments. Like everyone else here, Paul was full of wounds, and he didn’t share them easily.

  I had seen him earlier in the evening, sitting off by himself at one of the tables in the dining room, working up the next day’s lesson plan. He had been leafing through some books of poetry and inserting bookmarks in the places he wanted to read from later. Then at one point, very deliberately, he put the books down, stacked them in a small pile, crossed his arms around them, and rested his head on them. He sat like that for a while before I realized that he was crying.

  I had wanted to approach him then, to put my palm on the back of his neck and show him that someone was paying attention. But I still sensed a volatility in him that made me worry he might swing around and belt me, like a bear surprised at his meal. Besides, my move would have been feminine, or at least have come from a nurturing place, and that stuff got a complicated reception in these parts where mothers were birds of prey.

  Fanned out in the room behind Paul, all the other guys who had gone through the tunnel before me were standing in a semicircular receiving line, each waiting for a hug from me. I hugged them all in turn, bristling, just as many of them did, at the forced physical intimacy with a stranger, but mostly for fear of being found out.

  That was the end of the initiation ritual, and I have to admit that I found the whole thing a little ridiculous. I knew what they were trying to do and I respected the attempt. Bly’s preaching was full of paeans to rites and rituals, myth and symbolism. The loss of them was crucial, he’d claimed, to the breakdown of modern masculinity. But to my mind these insipid parlor games were no replacement. Either offer a genuine obstacle, a real trial that would test the limits of a person’s character and sense of self, or leave it alone. But don’t have them walk through a pup tent smelling like a cookout and expect them to find salvation at the other end.

  The next morning after breakfast, we all gathered in front of the fire in the living room and Paul handed out large pieces of sketch paper, one to each of us. He distributed crayons, pens and markers as well. Then he asked us all to draw a picture of our inner hero. This had been the advertised theme of the weekend: Are you a hero? And if so what kind?

  This had made me cringe when I’d first seen it written on the retreat literature. They can’t be serious, I’d thought. But, of course, I knew they were. Heroes and archetypes were straight out of Bly’s bible.

  “What does your hero look like?” Paul asked.

  To get us in the right frame of mind, he mentioned John Wayne, Batman, the Lone Ranger and Achilles as examples of archetypal heroes. Was our hero like them, he asked, or something different? What was his quest, his mission? What was his Achilles’ heel?

  Gabriel began scribbling furiously with a black crayon. He’d been coming to these retreats for years, so I guessed he was familiar with the procedure. His hero was right under the surface.

  Looking over his shoulder I could see that he’d taken the Batman thing to heart, though he appeared to have hit on some messianic theme as well and was drawing a big cross on Batman’s chest. Later, he would describe the character as Batman-Jesus.

  I, on the other hand, was blocked. My sheet was blank. The freakish Joan of Arc doll that I’d so loved in childhood sprang to mind, and I had to stifle a laugh. Somehow I didn’t think a cross-dressing peasant warrior woman would go over well in this crowd, or do much for my cover. So I drew an atomic bomb instead.

  When all the guys had finished sketching and scribbling notes on their drawings, Paul asked some of us to share, and while several of the sketches were as absurd as Gabriel’s, some of them were actually quite revealing and unexpectedly reflective of Ned’s experience.

  Before this retreat I hadn’t had an opportunity to find out how many of Ned’s feelings about his masculinity and his place in the world were real or imagined, a genuine part of masculine experience or just the product of my female eyes filtering that experience.

  A guy named Corey was the first to share his drawing. I had just met him the previous evening. I had never seen him at the regular bimonthly sessions. He said he didn’t go to those anymore, but he always made it to the retreats. They seemed to do something important for him. In a way he was the prototypical men’s movement guy. He was a real education in hidden male fragility. To look at him you’d think this guy had the world on a string, at least romantically. He carried himself like the accomplished athlete that he was, and he had a sculpted, perfect body whose every muscle was visible, practically even beneath his clothing. He reminded me of guys I’d seen in high school and college who always had legions of girls around them, all clamoring to be their next conquest. I used to look at guys like that and think: “What must it be like to be that guy, a god among men?”

  I got my answer.

  When we arrived at the lodge, we had all been assigned to subtherapy groups of four or five. In these we were expected to convene over the course of the weekend to explore more intimately the things we’d discussed in the workshops. Corey and I were in the same group, and we hit it off right away. There was a Ping-Pong table in a small room behind the living room fireplace, and we’d played a couple of games together. He was likable and easy, not the kind of guy you’d think was haunted by self-loathing and doubt. But he was.

  He shared his drawing eagerly. He’d called it “Solo Warrior,” and it was a picture of a guy who looked like a cross between Lancelot and Grizzly Adams. He was carrying a shield and a sword, and he’d been wandering in the forest for a very long time. He was out there, Corey explained, because he was an outcast, barred from entering the villages he came upon.

  “Why can’t he enter the villages?” asked Paul.

  “Because he’s not good enough yet,” said Corey. “He needs to perfect himself before he can join civilization.”

  “And what’s his Achilles’ heel?”

  Corey paused. “He’s needy. He should be able to live alone bravely without help, but he can’t. He wants love. He needs it.”

  “And it’s that very need that makes him too imperfect to enter the village?” asked Paul.

  “Yeah,” said Corey.

  Later, in our small group, Corey talked more about himself. Sharing intimate therapeutic time with him and the rest of these guys shattered for me another of the stereotypes I’d always harbored about men, the idea that they don’t talk about their relationships, especially not with each other. I’d always assumed that they weren’t nearly as concerned as women are with the minutiae of intimacy. But after listening to these guys I thought it was probably truer to say that most guys had simply never had the opportunity or license to explore the subject.

  In our group we spent the bulk of the time talking about their relationships past and present. All of them were in relationships, and all of them felt concerned about and insecure in them. Especially Corey. He had a beautiful girlfriend, he said, but it sounded as if he couldn’t enjoy his time with her because he was constantly afraid of losing her to another guy, specifically another guy who made more money, a guy of higher social status. Guys were always buzzing around her, he said, and this drove him crazy, partly
because she indulged their attentions.

  Here he was, the outwardly powerful masculine ideal, an outcast in his own life, excruciatingly insecure in his position, compelled to make a brave show of it on the outside, forbidden to show weakness, yet plagued by it nonetheless.

  Thinking back on it, I wondered now how much I and every other girl in school had invested in worshipping guys like him from a distance, and how much sustaining our admiration, acting the part, had cost them. I suppose Corey symbolized a lot of what I thought I was going to find in manhood or had envied in it, so much of what I and the culture at large had projected onto it: privilege, confidence, power. And learning the truth about this pose, both firsthand as Ned, and secondhand through Corey’s and these other guys’ confessions, learning the truth about the burden of holding up that illusion of impregnability, taught me an unforgettable lesson about the hidden pain of masculinity and my own sex’s symbiotic role in it.

  We needed men not to be needy, and so they weren’t. But, of course, ultimately we did need and want them to be needy, to express their feelings and be vulnerable. And they needed that, too. They needed permission to be weak, and even to fail sometimes. But somewhere in there the signals usually got crossed or lost altogether, which often left both men and women feeling unfulfilled, resentful and alone.

  Corey wasn’t the only physically imposing guy I met in the men’s group, and he wasn’t the only guy who had issues about it, not just issues about vulnerability, romantic or otherwise, but specifically about body image.

  Most of us who grew up on women’s studies knew intimately the struggles that we and most of our women friends had been through on this front: body as battleground. Mutilation, objectification, violation. These were key words in the feminist vocabulary, and still are, and that vocabulary was built on verifiable female experience. We saw ourselves in it because most of us had been on crash diets in our teens, obsessed about our noses, breast and ass sizes, our leg hair, our pubic hair and our menstrual flow. Many of us had known or been anorexics or bulimics. Most of us couldn’t think of a single female friend who hadn’t been through a war with her own body. The truth of the claim was obvious.