My life in books

Self-Made Man: One Woman's Journey Into Manhood and Back Again, Norah Vincent

An interesting journalistic account of the experiences of a woman passing as a man. Norah Vincent spent over a year in full drag, immersing herself in a variety of social situations, from mixed gender ones such as work and dating, to exclusively male ones such as a men’s bowling league, a monastic retreat, and even a men’s movement group, complete with a weekend in the woods. The story she has to tell is interesting. What I wanted, however, was more analysis of her experiences. What did it all mean?

Vincent indicates that she was forced to bring her experiment to a close due to something akin to a nervous breakdown, where she became lost somewhere between herself and her alter-ego Ned, which raises the question, who was Ned, and how did he differ from Norah? At times, she seems to look at her experiences through a frame of essentialism, wherein men are men and women are women, and the psychological stress she experienced was a result of creating a male persona that didn’t, and couldn’t, fit her female self. At other times, especially when looking at the experiences of the men she interacts with, she appears to be indicating the ways in which gender is constructed and revealing the human foundation on which we build the gendered edifice. Certainly, her observations provide support for those who argue that the demands of institutional sexism and heterosexism constrain and damage men, especially men who may have male and heterosexual privilege but lack class and race privilege, and pay for their privilege by being constantly armoured against the threat of being seen as in any way not male and straight.



Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, Phyllis Chesler

I really want to like Chesler’s work, because she is a feminist of unquestioned pedigree and she addresses important topics, but somehow, I just end up feeling that perhaps I should wait until someone else comes along and looks at those topics through different eyes.

The topic is relationships between women, and why we can play the bitch so well to each other. It’s an important look at the other side of sisterhood – we cannot go on pretending that women are “essentially” nicer, kinder, more understanding, forgiving, and gentle, and that this is naturally the way we behave toward each other. The secret is that all sorts of nasty undigested and unexcreted lumps of internalised sexism, to say nothing of classism and racism and heterosexism and ablism and lookism (someone who lives without privilege in one area, it seems to me, is often very happy to find and vigorously exercise some other form of privilege to try and compensate) lead to behaviours between women that range from petty (but damaging) gossip to out and out physical violence. Sometimes we are more vicious among ourselves than men are among themselves, or toward us. And we can’t do anything about this until we acknowledge it.

The problem for me in Chesler’s book is that she individualises the issues, situating their basis in the nuclear family (as far too many psychiatrically trained theorists tend to do) rather than looking at the phenomenon as a consequence of internalised sexism and the circumstances that institutional and interpersonal sexism have place women in and continue to place women in.

An interesting, thought-provoking but ultimately unsatisfying read.