Self-Made Man Read online

  Praise for Self-Made Man

  “A thoughtful, entertaining piece of first-person investigative journalism. Though there’s plenty of humor in Self-Made Man, Vincent—like her spiritual forbear John Howard Griffin…—treats her self-imposed assignment seriously, not as a stunt…. Self-Made Man transcends its premise altogether, offering not an undercover woman’s take on male experience, but simply a fascinating, fly-on-the wall look at various unglamorous male milieus that are well off the radar of most journalists and book authors…. So rich and so audacious…[I was] hooked from page 1.”

  —David Kamp, The New York Times Book Review

  “[Norah Vincent is] the new Steinem.”

  — William Safire, The New York Times

  “Vincent’s account of how she ‘became’ a man is undeniably fascinating.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book World

  “Moving and often illuminating…Self-Made Man is an exhilarating book.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates, The Times Literary Supplement

  “Eye-opening…While the side effects of Vincent’s experiment are fascinating, it is her field reporting from Planet Guy that holds the most novelty. Self-Made Man will make many women think twice about coveting male ‘privilege’ and make any man feel grateful that his gender burden is better understood.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Empathetic, explosive insights.”

  —New York Post

  “This isn’t a we-are-the-world book in which Vincent rejoices in our common humanity. It’s too subtle for that, too smart and too honest.”

  —Time

  “If there’s a more interesting book on the market today, we don’t know what it is.”

  —Austin American-Statesman

  “Vincent can be a candid and brave writer, always eager to avoid political cant and hackneyed thinking, and this male reader kept turning the pages eagerly. Vincent has glimpsed some things about manhood that hardly any women get to see…. Vincent’s moments of sharpest perception—into the intricacies of male camaraderie, or the dreary, mutually hostile gamesman-ship of heterosexual dating—feel unfakable, and if she were making it all up the material would probably be both more explosive and less ambiguous…Her bowling chapter (“Friendship”) is a mini-masterpiece of sympathetic reporting, and there’s no question that it took enormous courage for this New York lesbian intellectual to walk into a highly competitive bowling league somewhere in the American heartland, one of the most male of all male sanctums.”

  —Salon

  “The details of her transformation are fascinating…Compulsively readable.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “This thoroughly accessible and well-wrought tale of her year and a half as Ned Vincent is fascinating in its conception, stylish in its execution, and a rollicking good read…. It is impossible not to like Vincent, to empathize with her struggles, and root for her success…. She pulls it off with passion, gusto, honesty, and a healthy sprinkling of colorful words to flesh out her characters…. Vincent’s fascinating experiment makes for a positively delicious read…. Brava, Miss Vincent. Atta boy, Ned.”

  —The American Enterprise

  “Captivating…Will forever change the way you see men—and perhaps yourself.”

  —Marie Claire

  “Sane and compassionate…It is this confidence and compassion, even more than her derring-do, that make Ms. Vincent such a good secret agent in the gender wars.”

  —The New York Sun

  “It says a lot that it took a woman to provide such a sharp and entertaining analysis of what it’s like to be a man in the post-feminist world.”

  —Mother Jones

  “Self-Made Man was a book begging to be written.”

  —The Portland Mercury

  “Remarkable…Vincent’s experiment could help us fight fewer battles in the war between the sexes.”

  —SF Weekly

  “Lucid, engaging, and remarkably insightful…It’s a must-read for anyone curious about the masks thrust upon us by gender roles, sexual identity and the surprisingly false conceptions we all have about what makes a man—well, a man.”

  —Willamette Week

  “Entertaining.”

  —Charleston Post and Courier

  “A fascinating, truly weird account of a female journalist who dresses in drag for eighteen months in order to feel men’s pain…One of the curiouser books of late—sure to attract attention.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “A spellbinding, eye-opening personal narrative…With intelligence and sensitivity, Vincent relates her experiences and surprising discoveries about the secrets and rites of male society and the daily fears and desires of individual men.”

  —Library Journal

  “Awfully fun to read…For fans of Nickel and Dimed-style immersion reporting, this book is a sure bet.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Funny, compelling, and human.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Not many women could get away with successfully impersonating a man over a long period, but then, not many men have the balls Norah Vincent has…. This is an addictive, enthralling read: each chapter is progressively more fascinating as Ned becomes more ensconced in his new life.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  “Masterful. It’s one of the few books about men that has actually made me feel sorry for them.”

  —Lionel Shriver, The Guardian (London)

  “This eloquently constructed book makes for fascinating reading, as much for the chronicle of her own journey as for her insights into the male condition.”

  —Metro (UK)

  “Fascinating.”

  —Sunday Express (UK)

  “An extraordinary human document, rich in empathy and insight. Readers expecting a light read about a diverting stunt will find themselves taking a riveting and richly illuminating journey into some of their own deepest truths. You start out peeping into a window and end up staring into a mirror.”

  —Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept

  “A fascinating, original and often hilarious long day’s journey into the world of men. Posing as a man and infiltrating the female-free places males congregate, Norah Vincent finds the male precincts to be a lot better—and a lot worse—than most women ever imagine.”

  —Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism? and The War Against Boys

  “This gripping book got me through a delayed transatlantic flight beside a shrieking baby. Could I say more? It was high-risk stuff, Norah Vincent’s undercover research into what men are like when they’re in the places where men are men. The reader’s heart beats fast at the chances she took. In adventure writing like this it is the quality of the adventurer that matters. Norah Vincent’s perceptiveness, and above all her large sympathies, make her the perfect guide.”

  —Nuala O’Faolain, author of Are You Somebody? and The Story of Chicago May

  Praise for Norah Vincent

  “Norah Vincent is a true freethinker and independent journalist in the European manner, challenging prevailing assumptions in academe, politics, and media. Her work has always had a bold skepticism and energy. She is a model of pragmatic, enlightened feminism.”

  —Camille Paglia

  Self-Made Man

  One Woman’s Year Disguised as a Man

  Norah Vincent

  Penguin Books

  To my beloved wife, Lisa McNulty,

  who saves my life on a daily basis

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Tor
onto,

  Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2006

  Published in Penguin Books 2007

  Copyright © Norah Vincent, 2006

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 1-4295-2028-0

  CIP data available

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Contents

  1. Getting Started

  2. Friendship

  3. Sex

  4. Love

  5. Life

  6. Work

  7. Self

  8. Journey’s End

  Acknowledgments

  But this my masculine usurped attire…

  Conceal me what I am, and be my aid

  For such disguise as haply shall become

  The form of my intent…

  Disguise, I see, thou art a wickedness

  Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.

  —Twelfth Night

  Were it not better,

  Because that I am more than common tall,

  That I did suit me all points like a man?

  Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will,

  We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside,

  As many other mannish cowards have

  That do outface it with their semblances.

  —As You Like It

  1

  Getting Started

  Seven years ago, I had my first tutorial in becoming a man.

  The idea for this book came to me then, when I went out for the first time in drag. I was living in the East Village at the time, undergoing a significantly delayed adolescence, drinking and drugging a little too much, and indulging in all the sidewalk freak show opportunities that New York City has to offer.

  Back then I was hanging around a lot with a drag king whom I had met through friends. She used to like to dress up and have me take pictures of her in costume. One night she dared me to dress up with her and go out on the town. I’d always wanted to try passing as a man in public, just to see if I could do it, so I agreed enthusiastically.

  She had developed her own technique for creating a beard whereby you cut half-inch chunks of hair from unobtrusive parts of your own head, snipped them into smaller pieces and then more or less glopped them onto your face with spirit gum. Using a small, round freestanding mirror on her desk, she showed me how to do it in the dim, greenish light of her cramped studio apartment. It wasn’t at all precise and it wouldn’t have passed muster in daylight, but it was sufficient for the stage, and it would work well enough for our purposes in dark bars at night. I made myself a goatee and mustache, and a pair of exaggerated sideburns. I put on a baseball cap, loose-fitting jeans and a flannel shirt. In the full-length mirror I looked like a frat boy—sort of.

  She did her thing—which was more willowy and faint, more like a young hippie guy who couldn’t really grow much of a beard—and we went out like that for a few hours.

  We passed, as far as I could tell, but I was too afraid to really interact with anyone, except to give one guy brief directions on the street. He thanked me as “dude” and walked on.

  Mostly, though, we just walked through the Village scanning people’s faces to see if anyone took a second or third look. But no one did. And that, oddly enough, was the thing that struck me the most about that evening. It was the only thing of real note that happened. But it was significant.

  I had lived in that neighborhood for years, walking its streets, where men lurk outside of bodegas, on stoops and in doorways much of the day. As a woman, you couldn’t walk down those streets invisibly. You were an object of desire or at least semiprurient interest to the men who waited there, even if you weren’t pretty—that, or you were just another pussy to be put in its place. Either way, their eyes followed you all the way up and down the street, never wavering, asserting their dominance as a matter of course. If you were female and you lived there, you got used to being stared down because it happened every day and there wasn’t anything you could do about it.

  But that night in drag, we walked by those same stoops and doorways and bodegas. We walked by those same groups of men. Only this time they didn’t stare. On the contrary, when they met my eyes they looked away immediately and concertedly and never looked back. It was astounding, the difference, the respect they showed me by not looking at me, by purposely not staring.

  That was it. That was what had annoyed me so much about meeting their gaze as a woman, not the desire, if that was ever there, but the disrespect, the entitlement. It was rude, and it was meant to be rude, and seeing those guys looking away deferentially when they thought I was male, I could validate in retrospect the true hostility of their former stares.

  But that wasn’t quite all there was to it. There was something more than respect being communicated in their averted gaze, something subtler, less direct. It was more like a disinclination to show disrespect. For them, to look away was to decline a challenge, to adhere to a code of behavior that kept the peace among human males in certain spheres just as surely as it kept the peace and the pecking order among male animals. To look another male in the eye and hold his gaze is to invite conflict, either that or a homosexual encounter. To look away is to accept the status quo, to leave each man to his tiny sphere of influence, the small buffer of pride and poise that surrounds and keeps him.

  I surmised all of this the night it happened, but in the weeks and months that followed I asked most of the men I knew whether I was right, and they agreed, adding usually that it wasn’t something they thought about anymore, if they ever had. It was just something you learned or absorbed as a boy, and by the time you were a man, you did it without thinking.

  After the incident had blown over, I started thinking that if after being in drag for only a few hours I had learned such an important secret about the way males and females communicate with each other, and about the unspoken codes of male experience, then couldn’t I potentially observe much more about the social differences between the sexes if I passed as a man for a much longer period of time? It seemed true, but I wasn’t intrepid enough yet to do something that extreme. Besides, it seemed impossible, both psychologically and practically, to pull it off. So I filed the information away in my mind for a few more years and got on with other things.

  Then, in the winter of 2003, while watching a reality television show on the A&E network, the idea came back t
o me. In the show, two male and two female contestants set out to transform themselves into the opposite sex—not with hormones or surgeries, but purely by costume and design. The women cut their hair. The men had theirs extended. Both took voice and movement lessons to learn how to speak and behave more like the sex they were trying to become. All chose new wardrobes and names for their alter egos. Though the point of the exercise was to see who could pass in the real world most effectively, the bulk of the program focused on the transformations themselves. Neither of the men really passed, and only one of the women stayed the course. She did manage to pass fairly well, though only for a short time and in carefully controlled circumstances.

  As in most reality television shows, especially the American ones, nobody involved was particularly introspective about the effect their experiences had had on them or the people around them. It was clear that the producers didn’t have much interest in the deeper sociological implications of passing as the opposite sex. It was all just another version of an extreme makeover. Once the stunt was accomplished—or not—the show was over.

  But for me, watching the show brought my former experience in drag to the forefront of my mind again and made me realize that passing in costume in the daylight could be possible with the right help. I knew that writing a book about passing in the world as a man would give me the chance to survey some of the unexplored territory that the show had left out, and that I had barely broached in my brief foray in drag years before.

  I was determined to give the idea a try.

  But first things first. Before I could build this man I was to become, I had to think of an identity for him. I needed a name. The name had to be something familiar, something I might respond to when called. Failing to answer to my name would surely give me away as an impostor. For convenience I wanted something that started with the letter N. That narrowed the options considerably, and most of them were unappealing. There was no way, for example, that I was going to be known as Norman or Norm. Nick, when paired with Norah, seemed a little too clever by half, and Neil or Nate just didn’t suit me.