Columnist Norah Vincent, who has contributed some writings to
IGF in the past, has a new book that got big play Friday night on
20/20
and a positive New York Times review.
In
Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back
Again, Vincent (who is an out lesbian) spent several
months transformed into "Ned," to discover what men are really
like. She concludes men aren't so bad, but hurt from a lack of
intimacy. From the Times review (by Vanity Fair contributing editor
David Kamp):
introducing herself to some guys in a bowling league, she's touched by the ritual howyadoin', man-to-man handshake, which, "from the outside . . . had always seemed overdone to me," but from the inside strikes her as remarkably warm and inclusive, worlds away from the "fake and cold" air kisses and limp handshakes exchanged by women.
...Norah-as-Ned commits to [the bowling league] for eight months, becoming the weak link on a four-man team of working-class white men.... The resultant chapter is as tender and unpatronizing a portrait of America's "white trash" underclass as I've ever read. "They took people at face value," writes Vincent of Ned's teammates, a plumber, an appliance repairman and a construction worker. "If you did your job or held up your end, and treated them with the passing respect they accorded you, you were all right."
Neither dumb lugs nor proletarian saints, Ned's bowling buddies are wont to make homophobic cracks and pay an occasional visit to a strip club, but they surprise Vincent with their lack of rage and racism, their unflagging efforts to improve Ned's atrocious bowling technique and "the absolute reverence with which they spoke about their wives."
On 20/20, some of the bowlers indicated they had once or twice speculated about whether Ned was gay-though apparently that didn't result in any coldness or hostility that Vincent picked up on, despite any homophobic cracks.
By the way, reviewer Kemp's "white trash" characterization has already gotten heated blogosphere comment: Some feel it shows NYT/Vanity Fair insularity, others (including instapundit) think it was meant as a poke at that very elitism.
Another view: My partner was struck by how basically conservative Vincent's message was-the bowlers were genuinely nice, both to each other and to their wives; women have the power in heterosexual courting; men and women really are different. Vincent says "I found out identity is not something to tamper with"-living as a man eventually sent her into a hospital with depression, because she really is a woman and she had exhausted herself trying to seem like a man.
But over at salon, Andrew O'Hehir dismisses
as "bizarre" Vincent's assertion that "male human beings and female
human beings [are] as separate as sects"; in other words, that men
and women are fundamentally different, in no small part because of
the unique power of male sexual desire. Which to me seems a
perfectly reasonable observation, and not at all "bizarre" outside
the precincts of liberal feminist fantasia.