Be a Man

Curiously it is usually males who are told to, “Be a man!” Sometimes it’s boys (who aren’t men yet) sometimes it’s adult males – which is perhaps even stranger: aren’t they men already?

The answer is no: being a man is an achievement; it is not a description but an evaluation. There is a difference between biological and social. This used to be called ‘sex’ (male, biological) vs. ‘gender’ (man, social role). Recently ‘gender’ seems to have invaded some of the terrain assigned to ‘sex’ – we are asked to give our ‘gender’ on forms and we speak of ‘gender re-assignment’.

Usually, in my experience, “Be a man”, means suppress your emotions – especially sadness. Other emotions are compatible with being a man but sadness is (still!) a bit of a stretch.

A man’s world can be a strange place – and it has been investigated in an interesting way by Norah Vincent. Norah is a lesbian, American journalist who disguised herself as a man for eighteen months to find out what it was like to be a man. She tells her story in Self-Made Man.

There have been a few books like this where the author disguises themselves to be accepted as part of another group. People have done this to pass as African-American and as an old person. I have a split reaction to doing this. I feel,
1. Get over yourself – why not just try listening to these people?!, and,
2. This is really serious and worth doing and I want to know what they found out.
I haven’t found a way to reconcile my split reaction.

Norah being female meant that some parts of a man’s world were closed to her. She couldn’t live as the father of a family with a wife and kids. So, much of the usual male world was closed to her. Her investigation of male sexuality is by visiting strip clubs and on line dating. She lives in a monastery and works in commission only sales jobs. She also joins a bowling league and a men’s group. These things may be typical of men’s experience but they are a long way from average. There were limits that Norah could not overcome.

There was another kind of problem too. The point of Norah disguising herself was to gain access to men’s intimacy – but she was in disguise. This being split – having to be someone and watch herself being someone, tricking people into intimacy – took a heavy psychological toll, which took months to recover from.

So the project of passing herself off as a man had major obstacles and problems in its very nature. What were the results, put more tersely: is it a good book? I think it is a terrific book.

Norah writes well – she is an experienced journalist and she brings what she describes to life. Occasionally she dwells on details too much for my taste (I’m really not that interested in how to put on a fake beard) so I did skim in a few places, but generally she writes vividly and says what she wants to say clearly.

Despite all the difficulties and areas of men’s experience closed to her Norah does manage to get inside a man’s world. She is usually sympathetic to the men she meets and their experience. My feeling is that she does understand. In many ways she has managed to get inside the man’s world. I think this is really quite an achievement. Even with the parts of men’s lives that she finds repellent (mostly the strip clubs) she doesn’t present the people who go there as just evil. She never runs the ‘all men are rapists’ line.

She also presents well the contradictory expectations of being a man – strong yet vulnerable, working long hours but being a good father and husband. And she does see women’s complicity in perpetuating the contradictions. She doesn’t present women as angels any more than she sees men as devils.

The most remarkable chapter in the book is about her experience of the men’s group. These groups are easy to satirise and dismiss – she avoids doing this by being open to the pain that these men experience. Even here she remains sympathetic and manages to get inside the experience of these men. I think this is quite an achievement.

This book is a remarkable one; it does manage to present male experience from the inside. What it isn’t is analytical – the experience is not filtered through or analysed in terms of sociological or psychological theories. For me this is something of a relief. It is also a limitation. It describes the male world as it is – there is no systematic critique or proposals for reform.

Some people (like me) haven’t really been interested in being a ‘real man’ since adolescence. We have seen the damage it does to both men and women and we don’t go down this path. People like me don’t exist in this book (which is fair enough, we are hardly average, but) this does reinforce to some extent the masculinist stereotype that is so widespread.

I think the gender roles in our culture are unnecessarily confining and do great damage. To get beyond them I think we need to understand them and this book is a great contribution to understanding the man’s side of the story. The best book I know on the women’s side is Anne Summers’ Damned Whores and God’s Police. (It is incredibly good I think.)

I’d like to finish with some suggestions for perceiving how our gender roles limit us.
Remember any childhood commands about what it means to be a wo/man. Recall things said by other children as well as authority figures.
Were some activities regarded as unsuitable for you?
Were some ways of dressing forbidden?
Trickier is becoming aware of what wasn’t said but we picked up unconsciously.
Activities that we never were aware of or thought of investigating.
Accepting that some things aren’t talked about or should be talked about.
That there just are some things which are what it means to be a wo/man.

I hope to hear your experience in the comments. Does your gender fit neatly for you or have you had to negotiate the expectations a bit? What are the times when you have become conscious that you are a wo/man and so different. Have you had times when you have been frustrated that you wanted to do didn’t fit the role assigned to you? I’m looking forward to hearing from you.

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Would you like to feel less stressed?
Could you do with more joy in your life?

The answer is living authentically. Buy the book or sign up for the course now from my Living Authentically website.

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Tags: gender, masculinity, men