“Self-Made Man” (2006) by Norah Vincent is a book where she tells the tale of passing as a man named Ned for 18 months. She joined a men’s bowling league, went to strip clubs, lived at a monastery for three weeks on a spiritual retreat, dated women, worked as a door-to-door salesman and, most frightening of all, joined a men’s group where they talked about their feelings – you know, stuff like wanting to chop up your wife.
Norah Vincent, a New York journalist, is a lesbian who grew up as a tomboy and became a feminist.
Passing physically was, it turned out, the easy part. She had the help of a voice coach, a make-up artist, a sports bra that was too small, weight training to build up her muscles, and glasses that made her face seem more square.
Passing psychologically mostly came down to having the right mindset. In the end it counted for more than her appearance. But it was playing with something deep in her being, and after 18 months she started cutting herself. She checked herself into a mental hospital for four days. It took two solid months to get back to her old Norah self.
Almost no one suspected she was a woman. As a lesbian she seemed like a masculine woman, but as a straight man she seemed effeminate.
Masculinity: at least the White American sort:
“Boys have the sensitivity routinely mocked and shamed and beaten out of them, and the treatment leaves scars for life.”
“You’re not allowed to be a complete human being. Instead you get to be a coached jumble of stoic poses. You get to be what’s expected of you.”
“I passed in a man’s world not because my mask was so real, but because the world of men was a masked ball.”
Homophobia: This denatured masculinity is driven in part by homophobia:
“it felt to me as if most men were genuinely afraid, almost desperately afraid sometimes of the spectral fag in their midst. It’s hard to explain it otherwise. Only fear could make them spy that much on another man’s signals, especially when so much else in masculine interaction goes unremarked”
“women […] too, wanted me to be more manly and buff, and sometimes they made their fag assumptions too, even while they were dating me.”
Guy talk: Men live in a desert of guy talk. They talk about sports instead of their feelings. But it gets worse:
“The dialogue was ugly and as a woman in the middle of it I felt soiled and frightened just hearing it. … so much worse than I thought it would be, so foreign and relentless were the obsessions with fucking and competing and hazing the weak guy.”
Feelings:
“As a guy you get about a three-note emotional range. That’s it, at least as far as the outside world is concerned. Women get octaves, chromatic scales of tears and joys and anxieties and despairs and erotic flamboyance”
She is glad to be a woman.
– Abagond, 2019.
See also:
- books – books I read in 2019
- passing for White
- passing for Black
- How to become White
- dichotomous thinking
- blackface – and how it allowed White male entertainers more emotional freedom
- BWE: Black Women’s Empowerment
551
The definition of “man” that we have is “European man”. As part of the dichotomous thinking of the culture, he’s superior and has to have the “negatives” removed from him (and those negatives are projected onto “lesser” beings). Since “reason” trumps “emotion” in the Western cultural mind, men have to be emotionless. Women and other non-men (like black chattel, for example) are allowed emotions since such people are inherently deficient anyway. You’ll find parallels between the way white men historically spoke about traditional cultures and how they spoke about their own women. At this point in history, “European/white man” has been universalized to “man”. So everyone, even women, aspire to the same spiritual wasteland if they want a modicum of “success” within the system.
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@ Origin
Excellent points.
Part of why White male entertainers said they liked performing in blackface is because it gave them more emotional freedom.
I added a link to dichotomous thinking and a few other things and underscored that the sort of masculinity Vincent is talking about is the White American sort, though it was implicit in the post.
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She is glad to be a woman.
So am I!
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“As a guy you get about a three-note emotional range. That’s it, at least as far as the outside world is concerned.” – as abagond noted. She could only experience the White male psyche casualty. I do now understand why they would want to “black face” : it’s an opportunity to capture and express their poor, lost “souls”.
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This ought to be required reading for every man hating feminist with penis envy. Be proud of who you are. Both sexes have a rough deal.
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Oh please. There is no real difference between an average African and European American man. After a certain age, both groups tend to be sexist, homophobic, and prejudicial with little emotional range. Aside from the elite, income is an invisible barrier.
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“Oh please. There is no real difference between an average African and European American man. After a certain age, both groups tend to be sexist, homophobic, and prejudicial with little emotional range. Aside from the elite, income is an invisible barrier.” – King Jah
Oh please!
Where is your graphical reference to further expound and perhaps further elucidate what you posted? Are you the authority of this particular subject matter? Or in the alternative, should we just accept your personal trail of dogmatic doctrines and theoretical beliefs?
History and the Bible clearly tells us otherwise, that the European and African man are NOT the same, spiritually or secularly. This holds true even if we were to accept the European’s erroneous or questionable his-story at face value and tediously wade through the voluminous hogwash of printed documents and their twists to archaeological discoveries.
Judging just from your alias and previous posts, I thought you knew better, but apparently not!
Selah!
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Quote:
“There is no real difference between an average African and European American man. After a certain age, both groups tend to be sexist, homophobic, and prejudicial with little emotional range”
“European man” has been universalized as “man” so obviously there will be convergence as far as the concept of what a man should be. Recall that Europeans colonized the WHOLE world and established their social structures and laws wherever they went. Once society has established the “proper” notion of man as white and rational then you toe the line or become a social outcast. Men of other races can’t become white but they can act the part. To the extent that the particular colonial society offers “opportunity” to the sufficiently acculturated (regardless of race), then “act the part” he must in order to have a shot at that “success”.
It is strange to me how so many people discuss current realities with complete amnesia as to the historical precedent and ignorance of the context. People love to talk about black homophobia, for example, as if it is the most virulent with complete disregard for the fact that almost every majority black country is an ex-colony of a European power. So when Britain changed it’s punitive laws against male homosexuality and removed religion from the public sphere while its ex-colonies didn’t, we get to hear about the homophobia of these ex-colonies as if it were an innovation of those people. Even recently, I’ve been learning that punitive anti-gay laws in Uganda were heavily influenced by a white American named Scott Lively.
@Abagond
Yes, I remembered that post about “dichotomous thinking” as I was typing the phrase. It really does hit the nail on the head. They don’t have any concept of harmony, of the center. The thought structure is one of antagonistic splits. But when you think about it, even apparent opposites need each other. Can darkness be comprehended without light; can hills be manifested without valleys? Yet this idea of complementarity has no influence on the ideological core of global European civilization. Instead, one pole is declared to be bad and the other good. They try to subdue or destroy the “negative” pole then the whole system goes out of kilter. We see it with the “(white) man vs nature” antagonism that has allowed rampant ecological exploitation to the point where it is coming back around to threatening man’s existence.
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this seems a lot different than the ‘men who date transgenders’ article, you’ve come a long way, baby!
anyway, in the hospital, they start asking you ‘how’d ya get this one’ ‘what happened here’ and the like, so they told me self-cutters are almost always sexual abuse survivors.
i’m just not feeling the baphomet flow, no matter how important to the western mystery tradition!
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