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

by Norah Vincent

So much of what happens emotionally between men isn’t spoken aloud, and so the outsider, especially the female outsider who is used to emotional life being overt and spoken (often over-spoken), tends to assume that what isn’t said isn’t there. But it is there, and when you’re inside it, it’s as if you’re suddenly hearing sounds that only dogs can hear.

Weren’t people supposed to be on their best behavior on first dates? Weren’t they supposed to at least pretend an interest in the other person out of politeness if nothing else? Certainly, that’s what I was doing, making polite conversation. So much so that I never expected to hear from these people again. I was boring myself. 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.”

Many would and have argued that that is all love ever is, an attachment to something illusory. Lacan wrote that love is giving something you don’t possess to someone who doesn’t exist.

For most women sex is an epiphenomenon, the steam that issues from the engine. And the coal is mental. It’s: “Do you make me laugh? Do you make me think? Do you talk to me?” It’s not: “Are you handsome? Are you rich and accomplished and well hung?” I suppose, more often than you might think, it’s not even: “Are you male or female?” It’s really just: “Are you there and do you get me?”

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

To me this was amazing, the idea that a person could be incapable of expressing his emotions. Identifying and expressing my emotions had usually come fairly easily to me. It had never occurred to me that some people not only didn’t do it, but didn’t have the slightest notion how to do it. This, I now realize, is a highly privileged, largely feminine point of view, and one whose value and comparative rarity Ned has since made me appreciate. To my mind—and it was clear from what these guys were saying, to their minds as well—living your whole life without connecting to your emotions could be as detrimental to the spirit as starvation is to the body.

Men’s healing is in women’s interest, though for women that healing will mean accepting on some level not only that men are—here is the dreaded word—victims of the patriarchy, too, but (and this will be the hardest part to swallow) that women have been codeterminers in the system, at times as invested and active as men themselves in making and keeping men in their role.

Somebody is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it’s other men, other women, even children. And everybody is always on the lookout for your weakness or your inadequacy, as if it’s some kind of plague they’re terrified of catching, or, more importantly, of other men catching. If you don’t make the right move, put your eyes in the right place at any given moment, in the eyes of the culture at large that threatens the whole structure. Consequently, somebody has always got to be there kicking you under the table, redirecting, making or keeping you a real man.

Even when Ned was at his best, getting the full benefits of manhood, wearing a jacket and tie, strutting down office hallways, full of a sense of his own importance, even then I disliked his life. Even then the swagger was false, and not because I was a woman, but because the good feeling was coming from outside me. Even positive feedback was still feedback, still a cultural expectation purporting to make me who I was, to make me acceptable as a real man in a way that I had not been in the monastery.