Self-Made Man: my year disguised as a man
Norah Vincent Atlantic Books, 304pp, £9.99
ISBN 1843545039
You can pretty much guess the premise from the title of this book. Butch lesbian dresses as man, not for a day, a week, a month nor even a year, but for 18 (count 'em) months. No one twigs. She joins the bowling league, works in a testosterone-fuelled office and even dates unsuspecting women. Many sociological observations ensue, the general drift being that men treat a man differently from a woman.
There are many legitimate ways for a writer to investigate a good story, and undercover journalism is one of them. Catch people off guard, infiltrate their ranks and hear the truth first hand. Unfortunately, in this case, the truth is less interesting than the method of its unmasking. I was getting on fine with Norah until chapter five, in which she joins a monastery and fools the clergy. To masquerade as a man of God, faking your way into a religious community in the name of something as sordid as journalism, seems, at the very least, in bad taste. Norah explains that she needed to "observe men living together in close quarters without women". Prison or the military were no good, because "I didn't fancy being anally raped and beaten senseless on a daily basis in a men's prison or running myself ragged under a drill sergeant". Oh, I don't know. Don't knock it till you've tried it.
I rather went off Norah at this point. Shame, really. She'd gone to all that trouble of sticking on whiskers and shoving a strap-on penis down her knickers for months, yet still she wasn't my kinda gal. She does go on. Apparently the whole shebang is some sort of gender studies experiment. She "identifies" and writes of "inner pain" quite a lot. She keeps analysing men's lives and calling her conclusions "invaluable". I began to have my doubts about the whole enterprise. This might pass for fascinating chit-chat in America, but it just won't do for the Mother Country. Surely, Norah couldn't have? She shouldn't have? Did she really do all this, or did she just imagine it?
Why are the only pictures of Norah as a man on the book's cover, where she looks like a provincial k d lang fan on the way to her first concert? Surely, over the course of this great sacrificial endeavour, someone could have taken a few snaps? I would have liked to see Norah (now named "Ned") on the sports field, dressed in her blokey office drag and arm-in-arm with a gorgeous babe, or even shacked up with the monks. But there is no photographic record of any of this. All we have is a cliché-ridden account that takes our belief for granted. I'll swallow most things, but not this.
This is "reality" literature, which suffers from the same malaise as an overproduced television programme of the same genre. Reading it, I almost suspected that the conclusions were written first and the experiences of Ned then sought, or more likely dreamt up, as confirmation.
I wish the author had written more about herself. What of her upbringing? Her relationship with her father? Might there be some clue there to explain her quaint convictions, so generalised as to be meaning-less: "Women are trapped by the whore/Madonna complex, men . . . by the warrior/minstrel complex"? As this tedious prose went on, it became ever harder to summon the energy to turn the page. Dramatised suppositions about gender differences are not good enough. Try this, which we're told is one of the secrets of manhood: "Every man's armour is borrowed and ten sizes too big, and beneath it, he's naked and insecure and hoping you won't see." Germaine Greer she ain't.
On Planet Norah, all men are sex-obsessed women-haters and all women are oppressed men-pleasers, apart from pole dan-cers, who appear to rebel with a curious lack of vulval fragrance. (Don't ask.) If we try to analyse every motive of every thought, action and response, we will all eventually disappear in a kaleidoscope of reflective thought that benefits no one. Ask Tara Palmer-Tomkinson.
And God preserve us from the final chap- ter, called "Journey's End", which concludes with the decree that what men need is to be healed. Our "territorial reflex, blocked emotional responses and all-consuming rage" may get in the way of this, Norah gravely informs us. I'll say. I'm furious! I was quite happy until I read this book. Now I'm disgusted to be a man. I'm low-life scum, I realise. There is only one way forward: for God's sake, someone write a book on how to become a lesbian. Or at least pretend to be. That, surely, would be a more uplifting read.
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