At the end of Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell’s immersion into the world of inter-war working-class poverty, he concludes: “One or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy.”
The final chapter of Norah Vincent’s book Self-Made Man reaches a similar conclusion about the male sex. After 18 months spent impersonating a man in a variety of overtly “male” environments, this intelligent, sensitive and often insightful woman concludes that, all in all, the lot of the modern man is not a particularly enviable one.
Having expected, by dint of her disguise, to gain access to a mythical male universe of power and privilege, she instead comes to believe that “getting into the so-called boys’ club in the early years of the new millennium [feels] more like joining a subculture than a country club”.
In cultural terms, this is too good a headline to miss. Boil it down to its tabloid conclusion — “Blokes have it tough, says leading lesbian thinker” — and it plays neatly to one of the more pressing concerns currently preoccupying the chattering classes: that men are somehow “the new women”, downtrodden and directionless, their traditional male attributes undervalued in a world dominated by confident, newly empowered females (read: pushy cows). The fact that the person saying these things is a New York dyke intellectual adds a neatly fashionable counter-intuitive twist. Cue a million radio phone-ins.
Vincent’s work has been compared to John Howard Griffin’s 1961 book Black Like Me, in which Griffin, who hailed from Dallas, Texas, shaved his head and underwent medical treatment to darken his skin before passing himself off as a black man in America’s segregated South. His resulting experiences, and the bleak portrait of a deeply racist society that they produced, helped to pave the way for the civil rights movement. Griffin’ s actions, at a time when to be black in America was to be “a tenth-class citizen”, were undertaken at no small personal risk to himself, and he endured death threats for the rest of his life.
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It is ridiculous to suggest that Vincent’s experiment is similarly audacious or groundbreaking — although like Griffin’s it took balls, albeit prosthetic ones. It is, however, true that along the way the author — and the reader — encounters some universal truths about the behaviour of men. But none of these are especially surprising. And all have to be considered within the context of a very private odyssey.
To be fair to Vincent, she deliberately avoids setting out her stall as a social commentator. She makes it clear from the beginning that her alter ego Ned was as much the outcome of an act of bravado as of any conscious desire to get inside the minds of men. Egged on by a drag king friend, she spent a night out in Greenwich Village dressed as a frat boy. The resulting thrill was not so much sexual (not that a sexual thrill is necessarily the basis for dressing up in drag) but one of power. As she and her friend walked the streets, the men she encountered did not stare at her like they normally did: “As a woman . . . you were an object of desire or at least semi-prurient interest . . . their eyes followed you all the way up and down the street, never wavering, asserting their dominance as a matter of course.”
But as a man, however unconvincingly slung together the disguise, “it was astounding, the difference, the respect they showed me by not looking at me, by purposely not staring”.
They say that power is addictive, and this first hit clearly got Vincent hooked. But her desire to take the thing further was as much to do with wanting to experience life as a man as with her own identity as “the kind of hard-core tomboy that makes you think there must be a gay gene”. As a result, Vincent’s conclusion (“I am fortunate, proud, free and glad in every way to be a woman”) was inevitable from the start. Partly because of her sexual predisposition (she’s a settled, confident lesbian; men are not really integral to her happiness), but also because of her choice of the men she mixed with.
Here’s the list: a blue-collar bowling team; the punters in a lap-dancing club; a monastery; a door-to-door sales company; a men’s self-help group. The female equivalent would be a knitting circle, a hen-night, a typing pool and a weight-loss club. By targeting extreme or clichéd male environments she inevitably skewed the results.
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How many happy, well-adjusted guys are you likely to meet in a “titty bar”, as she calls them? Or in a male bonding group, for that matter? The truth is that most men have considerably better things to do with their days than paying women to suck their own nipples (there are some pretty explicit passages in this book) or re-enacting ancient warrior rituals with plastic swords in the middle of forests.
The reasons Vincent didn’t enjoy being a man is because a) she isn’t one and b) she hung out with some very odd people.
The two are inevitably linked. The difficulties of being in drag meant that her options were limited. She could not, for example, get married and have children. Nor could she join a local football team for fear of her cover being blown in an awkward changing room scenario. She could not get a shave at the barber, as her “beard” was glued on. Thousands of perfectly normal mainstream male activities were out of bounds for her, and so she infiltrated around the edges. As a consequence she encountered more than her fair share of men on the edge. It’s as though I decided to write a book about plastic surgery and focused only on the likes of Pete Burns or Lolo Ferrari. Of course I’d end up feeling sorry for them — and it would strengthen my resolve never to have Botox.
Where Vincent does succeed unreservedly, however, is in telling her story in a funny, compelling and human way. And it is her honesty that really gives her away. The most interesting passages in the book are not the stock musings on the gritty camaraderie of working-class male culture, or the coarse desperation of sales patter (“making the sale was like getting the panties, and losing it was taking it up the ass. There was no middle ground. There were no excuses. Just fortune or failure”). It’s when writing about women that Vincent really shows how much she understands the subject.
From her thoughts about why the modern pin-up is a surgically enhanced, bleached blonde caricature of femininity (“you can only treat as a (sex object something that resembles a real woman as little as possible”) to her insights into the mistakes women make when dating (“listening to them was like undergoing a slow frontal lobotomy”) to her ability to press the right female buttons (one of Ned’s girlfriends nicknamed him her “gay boyfriend” because of “his” ability to empathise), Vincent is an expert on the workings of the female mind. The book is dedicated to “my beloved wife, Lisa McNulty”. I’d say Lisa was one lucky dame.