Self-Made Man

by Norah Vincent

  I curtailed everything: my laugh, my word choice, my gestures, my expressions. Spontaneity went out the window, replaced by terseness, dissimulation and control. I hardened and denied to the point almost of ossification.

  I couldn’t be myself, and after a while, this really got me down. I spent so much time worrying about being found out, even after I knew that nobody would question the drag, that I began to feel as stiff and scripted as a sandwich board. And it wasn’t being found out as a woman that I was really worried about. It was being found out as less than a real man, and I suspect that this is something a lot of men endure their whole lives, this constant scrutiny and self-scrutiny.

  Somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it’s other men, other women, even children. And everybody is always on the lookout for your weakness or your inadequacy, as if it’s some kind of plague they’re terrified of catching, or, more importantly, of other men catching. If you don’t make the right move, put your eyes in the right place at any given moment, in the eyes of the culture at large that threatens the whole structure. Consequently, somebody has always got to be there kicking you under the table, redirecting, making or keeping you a real man.

  And that, I learned very quickly, is the straitjacket of the male role, and one that is no less constrictive than its feminine counterpart. You’re not allowed to be a complete human being. Instead you get to be a coached jumble of stoic poses. You get to be what’s expected of you.

  The worst of this scrutiny came from being perceived as an effeminate guy. Other guys, it turned out, were hypervigilant about the rules of manhood, and they were disconcerted, sometimes deeply so, by my failure to observe those rules. They could be obtuse as hell about all kinds of other signals, especially emotional ones, but boy were they attuned to the masculinity quotient. So much so that it really does justify the term homophobia—and I’ve certainly never been a fan of that word. But it felt to me as if most men were genuinely afraid, almost desperately afraid sometimes of the spectral fag in their midst. It’s hard to explain it otherwise. Only fear could make them spy that much on another man’s signals, especially when so much else in masculine interaction goes unremarked.

  Of course, being seen as an effeminate man taught me a lot about the relativity of gender. I’d been considered a masculine woman all my life. That’s part of what made this project possible. But I figured that when I went out as a guy some imbalance would correct itself and I’d be just a regular Joe, well within the acceptable gender spectrum. But suddenly, as a man, people were seeing my femininity bursting out all over the place, and they did not receive it well. Not even the women really. They, too, wanted me to be more manly and buff, and sometimes they made their fag assumptions, too, even while they were dating me. Hence the phrase “my gay boyfriend.”

  Women were hard to please in this respect. They wanted me to be in control, baroquely big and strong both in spirit and in body, but also tender and vulnerable at the same time, subservient to their whims and bunny soft. They wanted someone to lean on and hold on to, to look up to and collapse beside, but someone who knew his reduced place in the postfeminist world nonetheless. They held their presumed moral and sexual superiority over me and at times tried to manipulate me with it.

  But 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 and how inhuman it could make your incessant thoughts about women become. I’ll never truly know what that drive feels like on the brain when testosterone is fueling it, but I saw how by turns brutish and powerless a man can feel in the company of women and how bitter and often puerile he can be in the company of men. I know how much baser that drive could become in the circle jerk, where the expectations of manhood again exert their noxious influence, egging you on to cover the need and insecurity with crudity or pretend potency.

  My buddies encouraged me to talk shit and I encouraged them to do the same. We let out all the hateful air in our balloons like mad monologists with a cogent form of Tourette’s. We said all the things we didn’t mean and did mean and couldn’t say in mixed company, and a kind of catharsis happened then much like it did in the men’s group meetings, but without the therapeutic self-consciousness. The company of your brothers can make you worse and better. Better because it lets you drain away some of the rage, but worse because it keeps you from talking about the pain underneath, because this ritual of male bonding itself is just another part of the manhood that’s kicking you.

  That’s how it was when I was being manly with men. The dialogue was ugly and as a woman in the middle of it I felt soiled and frightened just hearing it. I was shocked because at its worst it was so much worse than I thought it would be, so foreign and relentless were the obsessions with fucking and competing and hazing the weak guy. It was all there almost all the time and it made me think that many men are far worse than most women know, but then also far better, because I knew where so much of it was coming from and how hard it was to overcome. I knew they were tied in a thousand knots and tapping out their distress in stilted code.

  That is probably the part I hated the most. 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, and now after black bra feminism, we even get vitriol, too. We get to be bitches, at least some of the time, and people write proud books about it. But guys get little more than bravado and rage. Forget doubt. Forget hurt. They take punches. They take care of business. And their intestines liquefy under the stress.

  I know mine did.

  Yes, it’s true guys get good stuff, too. Sometimes they still get a special respect and deference and a license to brag. I found this in the workplace. I got the power to exaggerate, to believe in my “nine-inch dick” and my “180 IQ,” illusory or not. It didn’t matter. I had the spit to say “Try me” even when I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. I had at times the billy club confidence of pure stupid unwarranted self-belief that I have seen in more guys than I can count. I always used to wonder how they did it. Now I know. They did it because a tough front is all you have when there’s nothing behind it but the weakness that you’re not allowed to show. It’s the biggest gift you get, compensation for all the rest, as if the culture were telling you, “We’re going to cut out your heart, but we’ll give you legs and a VIP pass to make up for it.”

  Even when Ned was at his best, getting the full benefits of manhood, wearing a jacket and tie, strutting down office hallways, full of a sense of his own importance, even then I disliked his life. Even then the swagger was false, and not because I was a woman, but because the good feeling was coming from outside me. Even positive feedback was still feedback, still a cultural expectation purporting to make me who I was, to make me acceptable as a real man in a way that I had not been in the monastery.

  And that hurt personally. There was still someone telling me how to be, saying “Attaboy. Now you’ve got it.” There was still someone hanging over my shoulder taking notes, and even though hearing encouragement was always better than being demeaned as a fag, or a brute, or a failure, it was still insulting all the same, because it told me that just being me wasn’t enough.

  This was not just my complaint, not just a woman’s mismatch with a man’s part in the world, though that certainly heightened the contrast. It was the complaint of every guy in my men’s group, and a problem if not always a complaint for almost every guy I met, though some of them were too shut down to express, much less see, how much damage “manhood” was doing to them.

  In that sense my experience wasn’t unique. Being a guy was just like that much of the time, a series of unrealistic, limiting, infuriating and depressing expectations constantly coming over the wire, and you just a dummy trying to act on the instructions. White manhood in America isn’t the standard anymore by which women and all other min
orities are being measured and found wanting, or at least it doesn’t feel that way from the inside. It’s just another set of marching orders, another stereotype to inhabit.

  Learning this surprised me. At the beginning of the project I remember thinking that living as a man and having access to a man’s world would be like gaining admission to the big auditorium for the main event after having spent my life watching the proceedings from a video monitor on the lawn outside. I expected everything to be big and out in the open, the real deal live and three feet from my face, instead of seen through a glass darkly. To be sure, there was a time in America when this would have been so, when boardrooms and a thousand other places were for men only, and worming my way into them would have gotten me the royal treatment and given me the very feeling of exclusivity and enlargement that I was anticipating.

  But for me getting into the so called boys’ club in the early years of the new millennium felt much more like joining a subculture than a country club. Walking around in the world as a man and interacting with other men as one of them seemed in certain ways a lot like how it feels to interact with other gay people in the straight world. When certain men shook Ned’s hand and called him buddy it felt as if they were recognizing him as one of their own in much the same way that gay people, when we meet each other, often give each other some sign of inclusion that says: “You’re one of my people.”

  Being with the guys on bowling night as Ned was in a way like going to a gay bar as myself to be with my own kind. That is a lot of the reason why walking into that bowling alley for the first time on men’s league night was as jarring to me as walking into a gay bar would be to any one of my bowling buddies. I was in the wrong secret club, that is, until Jim, taking me for an insider, a regular guy, shook my hand for the first time and let me know without needing to say it that I was among friends, that there would be no judgments here, that—if I had a mind to—I could swear and fart and drink my beer and talk about strippers with as much impunity as I can be a raging queer in my local lesbian bar.

  Making this removed comforting contact with men and feeling the relief it gave me as my life as a man went on was not a sign of having joined the overclass, for whom superiority is assumed and bucking up unnecessary. It was more like joining a union. It was the counterpart to and the refuge from my excruciating dates, which were often alienating and grating enough to make me wonder whether getting men and women together amicably on a permanent basis wasn’t at times like brokering Middle East peace.

  I believe we are that different in agenda, in expression, in outlook, in nature, so much so that I can’t help almost believing, after having been Ned, that we live in parallel worlds, that there is at bottom really no such thing as that mystical unifying creature we call a human being, but only male human beings and female human beings, as separate as sects.

  In the end, the biggest surprise in Ned was how powerfully psychological he turned out to be. The key to his success was not in his clothing or his beard or anything else physical that I did to make him seem real. It was in my mental projection of him, a projection that became over time undetectable even to me. People didn’t see him with their eyes. They saw him in their mind’s eye. They saw what I wanted them to see, at least at first, while I still had control over the image. Then later they saw what they expected to see and what I had become without knowing it: the mind-set of Ned.

  I know this to be true because in several situations late in the bowling season, for example, or late in my stay at the monastery, I stopped wearing my beard, my glasses, and even at times my binding, yet no one questioned my disguise. No one stopped seeing Ned. They were just as surprised as everyone else when I finally told them the truth.

  Even in the thick of the project when I went out into the world as myself, during the off periods when I was writing or taking a break from full-time Ned, people almost invariably mistook me for a man even when I was wearing a tight white T-shirt without a bra. Yet after I had finished the project, detoxed from Ned for several months and reclaimed my mental femininity, people everywhere addressed me as “ma’am” even in the dead of winter when I was wearing a black watch cap and a man’s navy peacoat.

  Knowing as I do now that my gendered state of mind could have such a powerful effect on other people’s perceptions of me, it is no wonder that that state of mind warped my own perceptions as strongly as it did.

  But, of course, getting inside men’s heads and out of my own was what this project was all about. Part of the purpose of writing a book like this is to learn something about the infiltrated group and then ideally to put that knowledge to good use. Inevitably then I have to ask myself whether or not my experience as Ned has changed the way I see and interact with men.

  Unexpectedly, the answer to that question is both yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I have an inescapable empathy for men that could not help but come of living among them. I know in some sense how it feels to be on their end of things and to receive some of the blows and prejudices the world inflicts on them. I understand them better, of course, than I once did, and I like to think that in my more mindful moments I act on that understanding in helpful ways.

  Though such an occasion has not yet arisen since I ended the project, I hope that the next time I see a man in emotional distress I will curb my instinct to smother him with care, unless invited to do so. Instead I hope that I will remember my more intimate moments with Jim and perhaps draw on what I learned from Paul and the guys in the men’s group about the respectful space a man often needs around him when he is vulnerable or in tears. It may be possible now to interpret the silences of the men around me as something more than voids or standoffs, and to feel more comfortable being present and available to them without always needing our exchange to be explicit or neatly resolvable in my language.

  Often I am merely a witness, processing other people’s interactions with more sympathy and insight. But usually I am in no position to intervene. Recently, for example, I saw a man and a young boy sitting at a nearby table in a restaurant. It was a Saturday afternoon and you could tell that this was a father and son having one of their two days a month together per the rules of some barely contested custody agreement. You could also tell that the father was bored, and probably only dragging the kid around because the mother had insisted on it, wanting a day to herself. The father was ignoring the kid, even chatting aimlessly with someone on his cell phone for much of the meal, as if he was just killing time on a street corner waiting for a bus. The boy sat slumped in his seat staring at his eggs and into space with the defeated expression of someone who has grown accustomed to being discounted. Yet you could also see the pain and desperation in his eyes. You could see him registering the effect of yet another nonchalant rejection from the one person whose slightest encouragement would have meant the world. Here was the making and unmaking of yet another fatherless man, whose life and sense of himself would be forever altered by experiences like these. There was nothing I could do except catch the boy’s eye and smile apologetically, knowing, of course, that a woman’s compassion was useless at times like these.

  That same day I saw another father tossing a football back and forth with his young son in the park. On the completion of one pass the father ran after the boy and tackled him lightly on the grass. They both fell laughing to the ground, half wrestling, half embracing. It was the kind of scene I would have thought infuriatingly trite and manipulative in a commercial, but which now seemed newly touching, a passing moment in a boy’s life that could make all the difference.

  At times like these I see men’s lives in a new way, and this is invaluable. But as for the question of whether or not I interact with men differently on a daily basis after having lived as Ned, that is another matter altogether. I thought for certain that I would interact differently. Very differently. That I would not be able to help it. But much to my surprise, I have not found that to be so.

  Day-to-day I am very much the way I was: a woman again, living a
s I must, on my side of the divide between the sexes’ parallel worlds. Men are likewise now, as they were before, living on their side of that divide. They are mostly inaccessible to me now, and I think this remoteness has a lot to do with the pervasive psychological component of Ned that both made and broke the project. As Ned wore on I found it increasingly difficult and then impossible to keep my male and female personae intact simultaneously. I have said already that it was like trying to sustain two mutually exclusive ideas in my mind at the same time, and that this cognitive dissonance essentially shut down my brain. To bring myself back from that blackout I had to learn to be my gendered self again and to exclude or even unlearn Ned. I could not live in both worlds at once, so I chose the side to which habit and upbringing have accustomed me, and to which my brain in all likelihood predisposes me.

  I say I “chose,” but I use this word in only a limited sense, because I am not sure how much meaningful choice we can exercise in these matters. I think I chose to be Ned somewhat the way a gay person can choose to get married. I put on the trappings, adopted the behaviors and even hypnotized myself into the mentality. But by going through the motions of manhood I did not substantively change my bedrock gender identity any more than one can change one’s sexual preference by adopting a heterosexual lifestyle. Rather than choosing to become a woman again, it is probably truer to say that I reverted to form. I stopped faking it. I came back to myself, and in doing so I forfeited, as I had to, my insider status in the other camp.

  Of course, on some level what a woman wants and needs from manhood is bound to be far different from what a man does, and that must account for a fair amount of my trouble in my male role. But it does not account for all of it. If it did, there would be no men’s movement to speak of, or at least not one with the same agenda, an agenda that has not sought to redeem or exonerate the patriarchy, but in many ways to indict it further from the inside out. Something is genuinely out of joint in “manhood,” and though perhaps I saw that disjointedness more clearly or felt it more painfully because I was not born into it, there is no denying the very real dysfunction in many men’s lives. I saw too many men de-crying it or suffering visibly in silence under its influence to chalk it all up to my estrogened perspective.