My life as a man

Dressed in drag, Norah Vincent visited strip clubs and dated women to find out what it means to be a man. She ended up in the loony bin.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, Books, Men, Gender, Reviews, Book reviews

Jan. 20, 2006 | You might well look at Norah Vincent in male drag on the cover of "Self-Made Man" -- she appears in rectangular glasses, fake stubble and suit and tie -- and conclude that she doesn't make a terribly convincing man. But as Vincent might be the first to tell you, she doesn't make a terribly convincing woman either. In her "female" photo, she is wearing lipstick, eyeliner and a black dress with a plunging neckline, but she is unmistakably one of those women conventionally called "mannish," a woman who, as she has discussed in print, has sometimes been addressed as "sir" throughout her adult life.

After I had finished "Self-Made Man" and looked at the cover photos again, it dawned on me at last that for Vincent both photos are a form of drag, an attempt to inhabit a defined identity she isn't entirely comfortable with. Psychologists and gender theorists might argue that we're all in drag all the time, performing our assigned roles, but most of us have internalized them beneath the level of conscious awareness. "I have always lived as my truest self somewhere on the boundary between masculine and feminine," Vincent writes, and this tormented, fascinating, frustrating book is an effort to test the permeability, and perhaps even the ontological reality, of that boundary.

Vincent's man-drag was good enough, as it turns out. Before writing this book, she spent a year and a half posing as a man and, insofar as she could, living as one. As "Ned," she joined a bowling league, went to strip clubs, entered a monastery, dated heterosexual women (and slept with one of them), worked a sales job and went on a men's-movement retreat, all without being discovered. Some of Ned's social contacts found him pretty strange -- justifiably, from the sound of things -- but nobody, apparently, guessed his secret before being told.

Passing for male, Vincent writes, was much easier than she expected. Although she began with an elaborate ritual of applying fake stubble, binding her breasts -- a sports bra two sizes too small worked better than Ace bandages -- adjusting her voice and mannerisms, and even wearing a prosthetic penis in her pants, she discovered that once Ned was established and accepted in a given milieu, none of that was necessary.

Walking the streets of New York's East Village for the first time as a man, she reports, was immediately and definitely a new experience. No one stared, no one took a second or third look -- and that was the difference. "As a woman, you couldn't walk down those streets invisibly," Vincent writes. "You were an object of desire or at least semiprurient interest to the men who waited there, even if you weren't pretty -- that, or you were just another pussy to be put in its place." Men, on the other hand, tend to meet each other's eyes for a split second and then look away, in a gesture of mutual respect or at least "a disinclination to show disrespect." I think Vincent is being overly dramatic when she suggests that for one man to look another in the face is to invite either conflict or a homosexual encounter, but she's right that those things are under the surface somewhere, and for any male reader it's startling to see one of the most ingrained codes of male public behavior so briskly dissected.

Bracing as Vincent's clarity of vision as Ned sometimes is, the consequences of becoming Ned turn out to be more far-reaching than anything she anticipates. Vincent may be a relatively butch lesbian, but as she carefully explains, she is nonetheless a genuine female-type woman, not a transsexual or a "drag king" transvestite. She goes on to say, "This is, therefore, not a confessional memoir. I am not resolving a sexual identity crisis."

To which I say, Hmm. In a publishing world awash with self-indulgent and/or bogus confessional memoirs, it seems churlish to castigate a writer for not writing one. But "Self-Made Man" is self-evidently about one woman's journey into gender bewilderment, and into a neurotic state not far from schizophrenia. As it manfully struggles to avoid the confessional mode, it becomes ever more opaque and unspecific, pretty much strangling itself in the process. And while I'm playing Viennese doctor, let's just say that the statement "I am not resolving a sexual identity crisis" is highly ambiguous. As in: No, you're not, are you? Whether the crisis in question belongs to Vincent alone, or is more societal (or even species-wide), is open to debate.

Being a man, or playacting one, drove Vincent crazy -- I mean that literally -- and this immensely peculiar book documents that slide into madness without ever confronting it head-on. Vincent can be a candid and brave writer, always eager to avoid political cant and hackneyed thinking, and this male reader kept turning the pages eagerly. Vincent has glimpsed some things about manhood that hardly any women get to see. But her refusal to reveal herself to the reader, even when the terms of her project demand it -- a project that, of necessity, involved falsehood and concealment -- ultimately renders "Self-Made Man" almost as frustrating as it is enlightening.

Vincent begins with a rigorous attitude, seeking to avoid gross generalities about gender and striking a note of caution about her perception of male experience. "What follows is just my view of things," she writes in the first chapter, "a woman's-eye view of one guy's approximated life, not an authoritative guide to the whole vast and variegated terrain of manhood in America."

By the end of "Self-Made Man," however, Vincent is flinging suspiciously grand pronouncements around with all the recklessness of the latest love-your-overexamined-life bestseller. "Manhood is a leaden mythology riding on the shoulders of every man," she informs us, a page or so after reporting that "my gender has roots in my brain, possibly biochemical ones, living very close to the roots of my self-image ... Far, far closer than my race or class or religion or nationality, so close in fact as to be incomparable with those categories."

Maybe Vincent is right about that, or about her bizarre suggestion that there is no such thing as a human being, "but only male human beings and female human beings, as separate as sects." But Vincent is not a geneticist or an evolutionary biologist (and neither am I). These strike me more as political opinions or ideological presuppositions than anything else. Before writing this book, Vincent was best known as a heterodox political commentator who combined libertarian social views with hard-line neoconservative ideas on foreign policy. (She wrote for Salon between 1998 and 2002, but I don't know her.)

Next page: In the working-class environment of male bowlers, even the butchest woman in drag comes off as a girlie man