Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again

by Norah Vincent

semiprurient

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.

Impossible to say, really. Gender identity, it seems, is in the genes as surely as sex and sexuality are, but we don’t know why the programming deviates. Maybe a crossed wire somewhere, or the hormonal equivalent.

People accept what you convey to them, if you convey it convincingly enough.

“Admittedly, this is a stereotype,” she said, “but generally women tend to speak more quickly and to use more words, and they interrupt their breathing in order to get it all out.” I found this to be true in my own speech patterns, which jesting friends have sometimes described as torrential. I often run out of breath before I’ve finished my thought, and either have to gasp in the middle to make it through, or push the words out faster to finish sooner. Since my training, I have also observed this phenomenon in action at various dinner parties or in restaurants. Women often lean into a conversation and speak in wordy bursts, asking to be heard. Men often lean back and pronounce with terse authority.

As he extended his arm to shake my hand, I extended mine, too, in a sweeping motion. Our palms met with a soft pop, and I squeezed assertively the way I’d seen men do at parties when they gathered in someone’s living room to watch a football game. From the outside, this ritual had always seemed overdone to me. Why all the macho ceremony? But from the inside it was completely different. There was something so warm and bonded in this handshake. Receiving it was a rush, an instant inclusion in a camaraderie that felt very old and practiced. It was more affectionate than any handshake I’d ever received from a strange woman. To me, woman-to-woman introductions often seem fake and cold, full of limp gentility. I’ve seen a lot of women hug one another this way, too, sometimes even women who’ve known each other for a long time and think of themselves as being good friends. They’re like two backward magnets pushed together by convention. Their arms and cheeks meet, and maybe the tops of their shoulders, but only briefly, the briefest time politeness will allow.

This solidarity of sex was something that feminism tried to teach us, and something, it now seemed to me, that men figured out and perfected a long time ago. On some level men didn’t need to learn or remind themselves that brotherhood was powerful. It was just something they seemed to know.

stevedores,

On this subject, Allen asked me if I’d ever heard the Johnny Cash song “A Boy Named Sue.” I hadn’t—a lapse that, thinking back on it now, probably should have been a tip-off that I wasn’t a guy, since the joke in my circle of friends has always been that every guy in the world is a Johnny Cash fan on some level, “Ring of Fire” being the universal guy guy’s anthem of troubled love. Allen told me the story of the song about a boy whose renegade father had named him Sue. Naturally, the kid gets the shit beaten out of him throughout his childhood on account of his name. At the end of the song the kid, all grown up, meets his father in a bar and beats the shit out of him in turn for giving him a girl’s name. Once beaten, the father stands up proudly and says: Son, this world is rough And if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough And I know I wouldn’t be there to help you along. So I give you that name and I said “Good-bye.” I knew you’d have to get tough or die. And it’s that name that helped to make you strong. …Now you have just fought one helluva fight, And I know you hate me, and you’ve got the right To kill me now and I wouldn’t blame you if you do. But you ought to thank me before I die For the gravel in your guts and the spit in your eye Because I’m the———that named you Sue.

None of them got much satisfaction from their jobs, nor did they expect any. Work was just something they did for their families and for the few spare moments it afforded them in front of the football game on Sundays, or at the bowling alley on Mondays.

In my presence, none of them ever used the word “nigger” in any other context, and never spoke disrespectfully of black people. In fact, contrary to popular belief, white trash males being the one minority it is still socially acceptable to vilify, none of these guys was truly racist as far as I could tell, or certainly no more than anyone else.

They took people at face value. If you did your job or held up your end, and treated them with the passing respect they accorded you, you were all right. If you came out of the woods, you were shady no matter what your color.

They were rock bottom utilitarians. Either a guy was good and did what he was hired to do, or he wasn’t, and that alone was the basis on which you judged his worth.

There were the occasional gay or sexist jokes, but they, too, were never mean-spirited. Ironically enough, the guys told me that I, being the worst bowler in the league by far—my average was a mere 100—was lucky I hadn’t bowled with them in a previous season when anyone who averaged less than 120 incurred the label “fag,” and anyone who averaged less than 100 was, by default, a girl. At the end of the season, whoever had won the booby prize had had to bowl an entire ten frames in women’s panties. They each had the usual stories about being propositioned by a gay man, or happening on a gay bar unawares, but they told them with the same disarming bemusement and self-abasement as they told the stories about the habitually mysterious ways of rich people. Gay people and their affairs didn’t much interest them, and if gays were the butt of a joke now and then, so was everyone else, including, and most often, themselves. Nothing was beyond humor,

“Okay. A child molester and a little girl are walking into the woods—” He stopped here to add, “I told you it was really sick.” Then he went on. “Anyway, so the little girl says to the child molester, ‘Mister, it’s getting really dark out here. I’m scared,’ and the child molester says, ‘Yeah, well how do you think I feel? I’ve got to walk back alone.’”

Then he went on with his riff about men and women: “I mean, take work, for example. I can work with an ugly chick. There’s an ugly chick works in my office with me every day, and I’m fine. I do my thing. I can concentrate fine. But every now and then there’s this hot, hot woman who comes into the office, and for the whole time she’s there I’m completely fucked. Everything’s out the window. I don’t get shit done. All I can do is stare at her like this—”

avuncular

As men they felt compelled to fix my ineptitude rather than be secretly happy about it and try to abet it under the table, which is what a lot of female athletes of my acquaintance would have done. I remember this from playing sports with and against women all my life. No fellow female athlete ever tried to help me with my game or give me tips. It was every woman for herself. It wasn’t enough that you were successful. You wanted to see your sister fail.