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

by Norah Vincent

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.

Women often lean into a conversation and speak in wordy bursts, asking to be heard. Men often lean back and pronounce with terse authority.

When this man whom I’d never met before shook my hand he gave me something real. He included me. But most of the women I’d ever shaken hands with or even hugged had held something back, as if we were in constant competition with each other, or secretly suspicious, knowing it but not knowing it, and going through the motions all the same. In my view bra burning hadn’t changed that much.

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.

Girls can be a lot nastier than boys when it comes to someone who stands in the way of what they want. They know where to hit where it’ll hurt the most, and their aim is laser precise.

“Rejection is a staple for guys,” said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my seat with a humiliated sigh. “Get used to it.”

Whatever veneer a man pasted over this intention, and it wasn’t usually a very artful one, I always knew or thought I knew what he was after. I had, I realized, treated most men with the same coldness that these women were showing me.

There I was, caught square in the middle of the oldest plot in the world: he said/she said. It was the woman’s job to be on the defensive, because past experience had taught her to be. It was the guy’s job to be on the offensive, because he had no choice. It was that or never meet at all.

It’s a wonder that men and women ever get together. Their signals, by necessity, are crossed, their behaviors at cross-purposes from the start.

I understood this reaction immediately. I had predicted it. But still a part of me resented their prejudices. I was still the same person I had been before, just as any given strange man is a person beneath his blazer or his baseball hat. As a woman, I was accepted. As a man I had been rejected yet again. I understood intimately the social reasons for this, but it seemed unfair all the same.

So how must men feel when it’s a true encounter and everything in the game seems stacked against them? They make the move, or the women bluff them—without tipping their hands—into making the move. The guys step out (stupidly, it now seems to me) into the space between, saying something irreversible and frank—a compliment or an outright indication of interest—and most of the time the women step away, or laugh disdainfully, and the guys are left with their asses in the wind. That’s the sport, and men are the suckers. Women guard the gate and men storm it. Natural selection is brutal, and women do, in the immortal words of Jim Morrison, seem wicked when you’re unwanted.

“That’s the thing about being a guy,” Curtis finished. “Rejection is part of the game. It’s expected.”

Bisexuals know that hurt gets inflicted by both sexes in equal measure if not always by the same means. But for these women—who had never dated other women, and thus never been romantically hurt by them—men as a subspecies, not the particular men with whom they had been involved, were to blame for the wreck of a relationship and the psychic damage it had done to them.

“Pass my test and then we’ll see if you’re worthy of me” was the implicit message coming across the table at me. And this from women who had demonstrably little to offer. “Be lighthearted,” they said, though buoyant as lead zeppelins themselves. “Be kind,” they insisted in the harshest of tones. “Don’t be like the others,” they implied, while having virtually condemned me as such beforehand.

Then again, many of the women I met weren’t emotional giants either, nor were they particularly well adjusted or stable. They just considered themselves to be such.

She had chosen to get involved with someone who was unavailable, yet she blamed him for refusing to leave his wife. He was the cad, the coward. She was the long-suffering party, the helpmeet waiting in the wings, the used one who deserved better.

Her predicament was of her own making and entirely predictable, yet she used it to bolster her distrust of the opposite sex, and as with many of the other women I dated, Ned took that accumulated load on his shoulders from the start. He was just the next man who would hurt her.

How could it be otherwise? When a woman approaches a man armed to the teeth with ulterior wounds for which men as a species are presumptively to blame, the man in question has little choice but to fight back, and when everything he says and does is measured against the front-loade...

One middle-aged woman with whom Ned struck up a conversation in a bar summarized one cliché in three words: “Women are enraged.” The reason? According to her, a complete and utter emotional disconnect between the sexes—women wanting and desperately needing more emotional communication and attention, and men being utterly baffled by this need and unable to meet it.

Yet the opposite is equally true, though less often discussed publicly. A lot of the women I met didn’t know, didn’t understand or didn’t appear to care what a lot of the men in their lives wanted, either.

Perhaps women have been guilty of hubris in this regard. We think of ourselves as emotional masters of the universe. In our world, feelings reign. We have them. We understand them. We cater to them. Men, we think, don’t on all counts. But as I learned among my friends in the bowling league and elsewhere, this is absolutely untrue and absurd. Of course men have a whole range of emotions, just as women do—it’s just that many of them are often silent or underground, invisible to most women’s eyes and ears.

It has been one of our great collective female shortcomings to presume that whatever we do not perceive simply isn’t there, or that whatever is not communicated in our language is not intelligible speech.

Ditto for the stereotype about men monopolizing conversations. Like Sasha, many of my dates—even the more passive ones—did most of the talking.

Listening to them was like undergoing a slow frontal lobotomy. I sat there stunned by the social ineptitude of people to whom it never seemed to occur that no one, much less a first date, would have any interest in enduring this ordeal.

That’s the worst part of a bad date. It makes you feel like a toad, and you keep telling yourself, “I know I’m more fun than this, and I know that when I came into this café I wasn’t in despair about the human condition.”

If the most disgruntled women I met and dated as Ned had ever been attuned to men’s signals, by the time I met them, they were long past receiving outside information of any kind.

The women who were hostile to me made me mad, and that made me want to be hostile to them. I can’t imagine men in the same position not reacting the same way. And so the self-perpetuating cycle of unkindness and discontent would go on and on, feeding on itself.

I’d read the textbooks of radical feminism, and following their lead, I thought all males were tainted by the patriarchy. For years thereafter, every guy I met was on probation.

But there’s nothing like a few years in the trenches of lesbian romance to give a girl a little perspective on the supposed inborn evils of the opposite sex.

Sure, women noticed how Ned looked, or perhaps noted is more accurate, but it was the conversation they were after, the interaction, the proof of intangible worth beyond apishness.

What’s more, while a man is expected to be modern, that is, to support feminism in all its particulars, to see and treat women as equals in every respect, he is on the other hand often still expected to be traditional at the same time, to treat a lady like a lady, to lead the way and pick up the check.

Not that I blamed her for wanting to ditch—it was a healthy response—but I was struck once again by the immediate impulse to lump me in with male cheaters, a breed whose scurvy ways are, apparently, immediately recognizable on paper even in a lesbian.

Dating women as a man was a lesson in female power, and it made me, of all things, into a momentary misogynist, which, I suppose was the best indicator that my experiment had worked.

But then, I guess maybe that’s one of the secrets of manhood that no man tells if he can help it. Every man’s armor is borrowed and ten sizes too big, and beneath it, he’s naked and insecure and hoping you won’t see.

People see weakness in a woman and they want to help. They see weakness in a man and they want to stamp it out.

So prevalent was this gender-coded behavior that I came to ask myself whether it isn’t almost as impossible for any of us to treat each other gender neutrally as it is to conceptualize language without grammar.

In this sense, I wonder, could there be a preprogrammed and possibly inescapable grammar of gender burned on our brains? And is every encounter prescripted as a result?

Boys have the sensitivity routinely mocked and shamed and beaten out of them, and the treatment leaves scars for life.