The Man With No Penis
Self Made Man: One Woman's Journey into Manhood and Back Again by Norah Vincent. 351 pp. Viking, $24.95.
Whether the rest of this sentence is an oxymoron or not, former Press staff writer Norah Vincent has written an authentic first-person narrative of life lived as a second person, a man to boot. But make no mistake. While Augusten Burroughs, James Frey and shameless others slather words over exotically marginal lives, Vincent is no confessional memoirist. What is learned about her personal life-she's a lesbian, she's a journalist, she bowls like a girl-makes for a scanty sketch, yet intimate territory is explored. Vincent spent 18 months in imperceptible drag. She successfully immersed herself in the life and mind of an American male, and the result, surprisingly enough, is less a novelty act than a deep and frequently brilliant study of sex and gender.
"Ned," her undercover vehicle into strip clubs, a bowling league, two sales jobs, a monastery, and abstract places like across the table on a heterosexual date, is a product of both circumstance and strategy. The look was a team effort. Professionals taught Vincent the art of the fake beard and cut her hair into a flat top. A Julliard voice coach helped her "lean back and pronounce with terse authority," and a supporting cast of friends stepped in as wingmen and style coaches. Two sports bras, six months of weight training and square glasses took care of the rest.
The end product, judging by the jacket photo, was a cross between Elvis Costello and the Karate Kid. The end man, on the other hand, judging by Vincent's telling of him, was a willowy writer who ultimately cracked up under the weight of his lies and the "leaden mythology riding on the shoulders of every man." Indeed, this story ends in an insane asylum-a real one, with the real Norah Vincent:
"As I lived snippets of male life, one part of my brain was duly taking notes and making observations, intellectualizing the raw experiences of Ned's experience, but another part of my brain, the subconscious part, was taking blows to the head."
In all cases, the masculine status quo wielded the weapon. Any man who has lived past high school will recognize the injuries: a three-note emotional range, bland style, clipped speech and toothy displays of prowess. As Vincent has it, the average man suffers in silence, forever clamped in self-policed, culture-prescribed manliness. "And that, I quickly learned, is the straightjacket of the male role? You are not allowed to be a complete human being. Instead you get to be a coached jumble of stoic poses."
Reading this and knowing that Vincent left a job as a syndicated political columnist with the Los Angeles Times to write a truly thoughtful book, one imagines New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd somewhere rolling her eyes and pouring another Shirley Temple. Dowd's recent book, Are Men Necessary?, is by contrast an unoriginal rehash of secondary sources, punditry and primetime television.
To be fair, Vincent herself rehashes much of the known world on her way to more pristine pastures. She could have rented any season of "Friends" to discover that men lie about visiting strip clubs and are uncomfortable talking about their feelings. She's also prone to sentimentalizing the working man, as in this mawkish turn: "Beer and cigarettes were their medicine, their primrose path to an early grave, which was the best, aside from sex and a few good times with the guys, that they could hope for in life." And sometimes she mistakes the exception for the rule. But Vincent's prose is so painless that little thorns are forgiven. Plus, she comes clean to several subjects about the book. Imagine living with someone for half a year and then telling her your penis is a strap-on. The drama is real.
Most provocatively, Vincent rehabilitates the modern "men's movement" and pits it against feminism. If straight men are as culturally repressed and hurting as Vincent argues, it's in everyone's best interest to start the healing. That means accepting "not only that men are-here is the dreaded word-victims of the patriarchy, too, but that women have been co-determiners in the system," at times as active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role. The intricacies are too many to untangle here, but suffice to say the argument is eloquent and compelling. Vincent writes like a psychotherapist peering through her client's stoic veneer and angry demurrals to discern the stark outlines of real feelings, most often the opposite of those intended. If men are still "in power," then the tyrants weep. If Vincent is correct, it's everybody's fault.