My life as a man

Employing a mode one could almost call masculine, she eventually discusses her distress in the book's penultimate chapter, but only in clipped, half-ironic language. On a men's-movement retreat, Ned asks another man he admires to cut him with a knife. (This is received with alarm, partly, as Vincent later divines, because it's such a female-coded form of self-mutilation.) The only knives available to these wilderness-dwelling he-men turn out to be plastic toys, so Ned/Norah returns home, cutting urge unfulfilled, and ends up checking herself into a locked psychiatric ward.

Vincent is not unaware of the narrative pickle she has gotten into; we're reading a book by a hardheaded female journalist who puts on men's clothes for a bit of "Black Like Me"-style first-person reporting, and she ends up in the loony bin, defined as "passively suicidal." Pretty much the last thing in the world Vincent wants to write is another chick memoir about My Emotional Trauma, so she tries to weave her breakdown into her analysis of masculinity.

What happened to her as Ned, Vincent writes, "is what happened in some form or another to most of the guys in the men's group, though I experienced the alienation more intensely ... My effort was disastrous of necessity. But for these men, living in their man's box wasn't a particularly good fit either, and learning this in spades may have been Ned's best lesson in the toxicity of gender roles."

I appreciate the generous spirit at work here. When Vincent reports, "It was hard being a guy," she really means to say that it's hard for all of us to live up to the hackneyed ideals of masculinity, and maybe only a little harder for Ned. But I strongly suspect that she means it was hard for Norah to be Ned in ways she hasn't quite confronted, that pretending to be a man did not confer upon her any of the alleged privilege or freedom of manhood, and that that was subtly and perhaps subconsciously disappointing. She's too guarded to write honestly about the difficulty and pain she obviously experienced, yet also too locked within that subjectivity to see it for what it is.

Ned seems as if he was a good guy. A little dippy, a little overly earnest, a little too eager to please. But his heart was in the right place, and we can always use more guys like that. Is it as tough to be a guy as it was for him? Well, it can be; manhood 2.0 offers all the old pitfalls and some new ones too. We're all trying to make it up as we go, mixing something from Category A with something from Category B: a dose of old-fashioned stoicism, some dudely 'tude, along with the ability to cry every now and then, or hug each other without grotesque embarrassment. A shot of bourbon and a glass of Chardonnay; it doesn't always work.

Come to think of it, you could say the same thing about women. These days they're all trying to be the attorney general while wearing sexy lingerie and downloading killer cookie recipes on their BlackBerrys. It can be pretty awkward. Some, like Norah Vincent, are trying to find a form of femininity that borders on masculinity. It seems to me that it's pretty hard to be human, and that we might all be the same misfit, mask-wearing, role-playing species after all.

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