Self-Made Man

Last week, as I was having a heated debate about the differences of the sexes with a female friend, she refered me to a book that she had read recently: Self-Made Man by Norah Vincent.

The concept is fairly simple, a lesbian who is curious about the male psyche dresses up in (very convincing) drag and “lives among us” for a year. Kind of a Jane Goodall type of experiment, but with slightly less hairy specimens. Though it was an interesting read, and Vincent does prove to have a uniquely witty snap to her writing, I did feel that it was somehow lacking.

Much of this sentiment can probably be attributed to that gosh-darned y chromosome of mine. On about a dozen occasions throughout the book, I found myself yelling at the ceiling, “No shit! We’re not f*ckin’ aliens.”

This was apparent in her first quest to understand manhood: the bowling league. As it said in the article, the other men on her bowling team were all regular blue-collar guys, the kind of guys that I would expect to see in a crappy sitcom on TBS. Rather than approaching them as individuals of equal or greater complexity, she described them in a way that I feel can only be described as “East-coast liberal snobbery.” She comes onto the bowling team believing that they are just “some of the proles,” and it seems like she doesn’t expect them to show even close to the same amount of tolerance or compassion that she does.

Of course, she is surprised. Though the men on the team do tell jokes with homophobic or racist overtones, blacks, mexicans and gays are no more the butt-end of their humor than any other group of people. She is also “shocked” at their stances towards affirmative action and unionized labor. She initially thought that these men were pro-union simply due to the fact that they were working class, and anti-affirmative action simply because they are white and undereducated.

It seemed that with every new situation that she entered, she held some sort of general bias that, in my opinion weakened the overall effect of the novel. This was really evident in the chapter where she catologues her experience in strip clubs. Though I also do find strip joints to be gross, Vincent spent too much time in the chapter detailing how “plasticized” all the strippers were, rather than describing the reactions and mindsets of the men who she was supposed to be “studying.”

Overall, I consider it a worthwhile read, but it would have been a lot stronger if she had maintained a “researcher’s” standpoint rather than constantly analyzing everything through her highly subjective feminist lens.