I recently read Self-Made Man on the recommendation of xkcd. I wanted to love this book, I really did. Black Like Me is one of the most amazing books I have ever read, and I guess I somehow hoped that this would be a sort of Male Like Me, if you will.
My expectations were rather too high, I’m afraid. It’s not even close. I still liked the book – it was certainly worth reading – but it just didn’t blow me away.
Self-Made Man is divided into chapters by subject. It is also supposed to be in rough chronological order. I will review the chapters as they were in the book.
Chapter 2: Friendship
In this first part, Norah (as Ned) joins a men’s bowling club. I have several problems with this. Firstly, she didn’t bother to actually learn how to bowl before trying this. She said her average was 102. Supposedly, the average score for a bowler is around 150. I imagine that if she had taken a class or some lessons – from some one who actually knew how to teach bowling (“shake hands with the pins, man” doesn’t count), she would not have looked like an idiot. Her experience with the bowlers, then, wouldn’t have been tainted by her lack of bowling ability.
Let me explain. Norah was amazed at how kind and supportive all these men were. I think she was missing the whole point. The guys on Ned’s team had to live with him. They obviously needed a fourth player, so they were stuck with whoever they got. So they just figured it would be better to be nice, and not be jerks, because they were sunk anyway, and hey, Ned was a nice guy. The guys on the other teams didn’t see Ned as a threat, so they acted nice in order to feed their own egos. Ned’s weakness made them more secure in their own ability, and therefore, manhood.
I also wonder if tennis was the only sport she played when she was younger. Her opinions about female athletes are completely bogus – and male athletes will act like that too, sometimes. Ned, though, was so bad he didn’t get that treatment from the bowling guys. If instead, he had been the worst player on the team, but had still been good enough to allow them to be competitive, things would have changed. They would have really cared about him doing better, then. My brother, who plays lots of sports, might complain about some terrible player on his teams, but he and his teammates tolerate the guy – it’s the one who blows the easy catch to lose the game, or who’s not paying attention, the one who should know better, who gets the pressure put on them, and who get yelled at. There is also even more pressure on the best players, to try and get them to play even better (they’ve got the responsibility, and they can never, ever, screw up).
Jim, also, was a major factor in Ned’s acceptance. He seemed like an especially nice, tolerant person. I noticed that when Norah decided to tell them who she really was, she told Jim first – and I imagine that it was his approval as leader that made the others so accepting.
Chapter 3: Sex
This chapter was about strip clubs, not sex. I don’t really have much to say about this part except:
Does Vincent really think that these sleazy strip joints have anything at all to do with real male sexuality? She seems to think so – “The … men were doing their business mechanically, … just satisfying an urge, doing what needed to be done.” Really? Really? I don’t think so. She even almost admits it: “all the thoughtless consumption these guys were doing, taking in these women like a drug …” Like a drug? No, it is a drug. Now, some guys do have rather extreme sexual urges – they are the player types (although you could say that those really just want power…). So do some women. The men in those sleazy clubs don’t care about the sex, per se, – they care about the chemicals their brains release as an instinctual mating response. It’s all just a chemical dependency – they are bored and depressed, and rather than do crack or heroin, they go to cheap strip clubs. And the stripper are often using drugs themselves. Vincent seems to think that this is all some sort of base animal instinct, but I don’t see it. It is an urge, but it’s the same urge that drives addicts and users of any sort.
Feel free to correct me if I have no idea what I’m talking about, but that’s the way I see it. I wish she had also gone to a nicer club – the kind that couples, etc., go to, just to compare.
Chapter 4: Love
This chapter was the best in the book – but it doesn’t really belong there. For the most part, Vincent interacted with the women she dated as a woman who only looked like a man. In other words, she wasn’t trying to act like a man on the date. The point was to see how many women really wanted to date a man who acted like a woman. Not so many, apparently – but since Ned got most of his dates off of the Internet, the sample in question could have nothing to do with most women. It did seem like far too many were emotionally damaged in some way. I’m also not sure whether her assessment of male rejection was accurate – women get rejected all the time too, and I think that she was comparing with her success in the lesbian community, where she both understands the culture better, and where there are fewer options.
Still, it was very interesting.
Chapter 5: Life
Another incorrectly named chapter. Ned joins a monastery. I didn’t understand this chapter. Monks are so far removed from the rest of the world that it made no sense to do this, let alone generalize about men in general based on what they think. Yet this is what Vincent does.
At the very end of the chapter, there is a long scene where she apologizes to the priest for deceiving them. She does this in other places throughout the book. I thought this was silly. So what if she wasn’t really a man. Most of us pretend we’re something we’re not every day, some of us more so than she did (she was already a fairly masculine woman, after all). I think that this obsession with her ‘dishonesty’ points to a deeper problem with Vincent herself. More on that later.
Chapter 6: Work
This chapter was what you would expect. Middle class salesman types are the real jerks, not blue collar workers. Big surprise there….
Not.
At least, as a member of the middle class myself, I wasn’t surprised a bit. A moderate amount of privilege goes a long way with most people.
Chapter 7: Self
This chapter deals with a men’s movement. By this point, Vincent is starting her mental decline – and as a result, her observations are tainted and frequently bizarre. As the chapter itself make no sense, I won’t talk about it.
I would, however, like to discuss her mental breakdown. She claims it was caused by the cognitive dissonance of trying to be someone she was not, that being male was so strange to her that she couldn’t take it any more. She is right, but not for the reasons she thinks she is.
I think Vincent went about the entire experiment in the wrong way. It seemed off, to me anyway, from the very first scene, where she walks into the bowling alley. The way she describes it, this was the first time she had really done anything passing as a man. She is awkward, uncomfortable, and doesn’t really know what to do or say. This is rather inexplicable.
Why didn’t she spend several months with male friends, trying to imitate them and behave like them, before putting on drag? Why didn’t she listen to male conversation beforehand and notice subjects not to be mentioned? Didn’t she at least practice her handshake and greeting?
More importantly, while she goes to great trouble to change her hair, her face, her body, and even hires a voice coach to prepare, she doesn’t mention talking to even one transsexual, who would have undergone the transformation permanently. This makes no sense. The voice coach might know about gender cues, and the makeup artist might know about facial hair, but an actual FTM, or better yet, one with experience helping other FTMs, should know all of that, and more importantly, know all the little things that really matter, but that no one else would consciously notice. Perhaps than she wouldn’t have been thought to be a gay man, and would have been able to be more confident and less nervous about the whole thing. And, since everyone has both masculine and feminine tendencies, she would have been able to find most or part of Ned’s personality within herself. It would have been less of a shock to her.
Perhaps she did some of this. I rather doubt it, though. Her distaste for transsexuals is barely contained (she is *very* careful to reassure us that she is not one, nope, not even a little bit), and she has been known to say rather rude and insensitive things in the past. So, the entire thing becomes an act, and Vincent suffers as a result.
I think that she is completely terrified of the thought that she could even possibly be a transsexual. She is afraid of her masculine side, and even though she claims to be a butch lesbian, I wonder how butch she really is mentally. She talks constantly of how she feels like she is simply ‘observing’ Ned, that she is not Ned, and how she could never really know how men feel. I say, no imagination. Heck, I can feel how a serial killer must feel, at least to some extent, let alone how a man feels. You just have to reach inside yourself and think.
In Black Like Me, Griffith has little trouble pretending to be black, despite the culture being completely foreign to him. Sure, he is often scared and confused, but that is because being black was really horrible then. He has little trouble seeing himself as black, if only for a while. This book contains the opposite reaction.
Vincent, for whatever deep-seated fears, really refuses to admit that she even has a masculine side, let alone that she could ever experience ‘male’ impulses, or feel ‘male’ feelings, whatever ‘male’ anything is. And when, after living as a man part time for 18 months, she realizes that some of Ned’s feelings are really her own, that she is masculine on some level, she breaks down, thinking that she is somehow hurting herself. In the end she is still in denial – she’s happy to be back to being a woman again.
The “relativity of gender” that she speaks of in the last chapter is mostly self-inflicted; because she intended only to act out the roll of Ned, not to really understand it, she set herself up for failure, and lost the real insights that could have possibly come from this book.
This review is rather large! I hope you enjoyed it, if you made it this far.