My life as a man

"They had taken me in, and I had deceived them," reflects Vincent, in perhaps the book's most moving self-exploration. "I had condescended to them all along, even in my gracious surprise that they were somehow human. They had made that leap on my behalf without the benefit of suppressed snobbery. I have condescended to them still in these pages throughout, congratulating myself for stooping to receive their affections and dispense my own, for presuming to understand them ... They made me welcome in their midst, and by so doing, they made me feel like a bit of a shithead, like an arrogant prick know-it-all. In a sense, they made me the subject of my own report."

For all the heartfelt affection and gratitude Vincent feels for Ned's bowling buddies, we also find in this chapter the emergence of a theme that will dominate the rest of the book: Men are fundamentally different creatures from women, both because of the strangled, delimited quality of their emotional lives and because of the unique power of male sexual desire. The guys Ned hangs out with at the dead-end strip clubs of the "Sex" chapter seem to feel their sexuality, she writes, as an unwanted but inescapable burden, "something heavy you were carrying around and had nowhere to unload except in the lap of some damaged stranger, and then only for five minutes."

On the other hand, the 30-ish single women Ned dates in the "Love" chapter come off as aggressively hostile and profoundly confused creatures -- on one hand, they want sensitive men capable of emotional communication, while on the other they want a take-charge guy who can pay for dinner, open doors and then, a bit later, "pin them to the bed." Wounded in previous relationships, they transformed each new man (even when he wasn't a man) "into the malignancy they were expecting him to be," thereby fueling a "self-perpetuating cycle of unkindness and discontent."

I'm not disputing the validity of Ned/Norah's empirical observations, but Vincent basically threw herself into the most awful shark-tank version of heterosexuality, only to find that the water was full of sharks. Yes, many men find sexual outlet through gruesome strip clubs, dead-eyed hookers and the limitlessly demeaning universe of Internet porn. Yes, the dating pool is full of twice-burned women with barbed-wire defenses. But we didn't need some lesbian with a flattop haircut and a piss-poor bowling game to bring us back these Pop Gender 101 staples; they're found in every daytime chat show and women's magazine.

It's undoubtedly brave and noble that Vincent tried to cross class as well as gender boundaries, but as aware as she is of that issue on the bowling team, I think the former category is more important than she realizes. Beyond the agonizing dating chapter, she never tries to pass for the kind of straight man she might already know, an urban guy with bobo-style, liberal-arts values and inclinations. (For that matter, she also doesn't try to be a gay man.) In that context, I don't think being a man is half as hard as she thinks it is, and whatever one thinks about the biochemical basis of sex and gender, the performance of gender roles is a lot more fluid than she depicts.

My personal experience as a man may have no more general applicability than Ned's, but, hey, I've been a guy much longer than he has. If the legacy of feminism has complicated certain things about being a heterosexual male, I'm pretty happy with that. Maybe men still don't "open up" as readily as women do, but the intense emotional self-censorship Vincent describes is not ubiquitous or unanimous. I've discussed my dad's death, for example, intimately with my male friends on numerous occasions, and was grateful when my oldest friend reciprocated after the death of his own dad (a man I also loved).

I now have a son who's almost 2, and while I'm sure I'll make any number of dubious parenting decisions, I'm not worried that I'll ever deny him affection or hold him up to some bogus masculine standard. If it took the most pedantic excesses of Betty Friedan-style, '70s feminism, or Robert Bly's most embarrassing drum circle in the woods, to make that possible, then I'm profoundly grateful.

As for male sexuality, the old cliché remains true: Any man who says he has never jerked off to pornography is either a liar or the kind of pervert women really have to worry about. Man-size doses of testosterone can provoke all kinds of dumb, irrational and even violent behavior, and in that respect the difference between the sexes is clearly a question of chemistry. But Vincent seems to suggest that only men experience sexual desire as an inconvenient burden, an ambiguous appetite to be sated or repressed, and I'm not buying it.

You don't need a psychology degree to understand that if men have long been socialized to expend their excess erotic drives on sexual surrogates -- whether they're spending $5.95 on Miss January or $650 on one of Heidi Fleiss' working girls -- women have been trained to sublimate theirs into Manolo stilettos and Hermès scarves. Furthermore, it's no secret that the gender divide has narrowed sharply on these issues in recent decades, even if we don't agree on how or why it happened.

Personally, I've never dated a woman who wasn't at least somewhat titillated by pornographic fantasy or curious about the kinds of nonvanilla, nonmainstream "bad girl" experiences that only men were once supposed to want. For women as well as men, desire is not always desirable. I briefly went out with a lawyer who abhorred porn, and who subscribed to the Catharine MacKinnon ideology that it was itself a form of sexual violence that should be outlawed. At least that was her story during the daylight hours -- until the pile of impressively filthy magazines under her bed came out late at night, after three or four vodkas.

Yes, one of Ned's grueling date experiences eventually ended up in bed, even after his secret was revealed. Vincent draws a chivalrous cloak over the episode, except to say that the woman in question did not turn out to be a crypto-lesbian, or even bisexual. Ned's sojourn in a Roman Catholic monastery is a bittersweet essay in thwarted emotion and (I am shocked to report!) closeted homosexuality. But Vincent clearly becomes less interested in Ned's adventures in the outside world as they progress, and more consumed by her own internal torment.

Next page: Vincent's experiment lands her in the loony bin, where she's "passively suicidal"