But what Eyebrows 0f Doom is saying (and I agree with), passing that off as an observation on “all men” or “men in general” is horribly insulting. Not all of us are slaves to the strip club, and you’d think a woman who talks having to struggle all her life to fight against being thought of as a “mannish woman” instead of just a woman would understand that.
Not really. Lesbians are not biological men, they are women who may prefer females sexually, but they do not have testosterone coursing through their veins, nor did they grow up in the social context of being biological men. The book is a continuous series of a discoveries of precisely that aspect of the nature of maleness and intra-male interactions that many women really don’t “get” in the same way that men are mystified by some of the aspects of the way women behave and interact in groups.
There are few surprises for men in this book as the male group interations she describes are pretty much what we live with, the interesting thing is that we kind of assume women understand our motivations and many times they really don’t.
She looks like any butch dyke you see out and about while in her “man” garb. I guarantee people were just being polite in this modern genderqueer society. She fooled nobody.
I think a lot of people who many have excellent trans-dars and gay-dars are kind of missing the point. A 5’10" broad shouldered lesbian could easily pass visual and conversational inspection as a (somewhat effeminate) man if that’s what she’s representing as. People tend to take you for what you are dressed as unless there are huge clues that you don’t fit the mold. In hindsight it’s obvious that she was not a man, but if you didn’t have the background info I guarantee you that the vast majority of society (including yourselves) would take her at face value.
There was a similiar story on NPR a couple years back and the woman made the same comments. Stuff like how men stare each other down when walking down the street and how everyone wanted to get into fights with her and other really, really strange things I have never encountered in my life. i wonder if this is just false perception or because everyone was staring at her trying to figure out her gender/orientation. Average dudes dont see this stuff.
I guess you cant really take the girl out of the drag king. There’s probably an interesting book to be written about gender roles but this kind of thing really just shows you the biases of the person writing. Its not scientific in any way.
That’s kind of my point re biology determining response to a large degree. Women read SO much into even brief glances, that a man trying taking stock of his environment as he walks along and thinks he is just looking at another man would be seen as a possible threat by a woman who is not used to being looked at that way.
I remember reading a detailed review of this book when it first came out, and being more skeptical of some parts of the story than others. I have no problem believing that this woman could pass as a man and fool most people (including me) in casual social interactions with strangers. So, for instance, an experiment where she goes to a bar and sees how people interact with her as a man seems plausible to me. But, from the review I read, it sounded like she also cultivated some fairly close friendships with certain men. I find it hard to believe that a woman-dressed-as-a-man could spend hours with a guy over a long period of time without the guy sensing that something was “off” about this person, even if he didn’t know exactly what he was perceiving.
Well, what I really meant was that the type of strip club she went to was on the lower end of the scale. There was a back room with a row of barber chairs set up where the strippers would perform sexual acts on the men, that was half separated from the front by a divider so that anyone could just stand there and watch what was going on. She also described the women as pathetic looking & not attractive, like they have been doing this for 25 years already (even though they may have been in their twenties.) So the type of men to be found in a place like that probably wouldn’t even be a fair representation of men who would go to strip clubs in general. To read any kind of serious meaning from a place like that just seemed false.
On a whole the book *is *interesting, but a lot of it just felt too “writerly,” like she *had *to get pages of meaning out of the smallest things.
As far as her passing goes, people usually take people at their word. If you passed her on the street perhaps you might think “butch lesbian” or even “androgynous,” but if she introduced herself to you as “Ned,” then unless she behaved in a way that was completely false you wouldn’t have a reason to disbelieve her. In the book she says that when other men did notice something *off *about her, they just assumed she was gay.
Based on the pictures, she does make a rather effeminate man, but not a lot more than most of the male models in GQ. A lot depends on the voice and the mannerisms, but I bet I would simply assume that “Ned” was a little light in the loafers rather than a woman.
Maybe I will see if the library has a copy. It reminds me of Black Like Me, of many years back, where a white writer (allegedly) passed as a black guy in the Deep South back in the days of Jim Crow.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t think it’s a fair characterization of the book or the author, either. It was a bit slow in places but overall it was really insightful. I was surprised and enlightened by how open-minded the male friends she made were when she revealed her true identity, and by her realization that guys who are really butch can be as much a slave to their bodies as voluptuous women, with strange guys wanting to fight them instead of screw them.
except that this is total crap, of course
She was on a bowling team…the guys there were nice to her but thought she was a guy who was just gay or something. She called one of them when she came out and told him “I have something I have to tell you in person”. He said that he thought she was going to say she was “gay” for sure (meaning a gay man).
Except I’m not sure that’s biology. It may be, I suppose, or perhaps biology plays a role in it, but it could just as well be the result of growing up a woman in our gendered society.
Unless you are using biology as a shorthand for the results of being treated differently by people as a result of your sex (which produces a different outlook on life depending). I’m not ruling out the idea that biology affects our thought processes–far from it–but I think it’s entirely too simplistic to assign it all to biology.
Men in non-familiar social situations or situations into which a lot of unfamiliar people are coming and going, especially if they have a woman in their sphere of protection, do have a brief low level threat assessment routine constantly running, and for most men this is so automatic as to be unconscious. This brief scan is (normally) not perceived as hostile by adult men walking through a social environment.
I’m trying to grok where the “strange men encountered are hostile to me” vibe/fear is coming for the author who is presenting as a man, but mentally is a lesbian in drag as most of the time adult men are not overtly or covertly hostile to each other just walking down the street. So either (1) she’s a projecting loon or somehow (2) she is misunderstanding the looks or glances she is getting, or (3) there is something off putting about her IRL “man” appearance that it sets men’s teeth on edge. I Have no idea what the answer is, I just know that most men don’t go through life confronting each other via “looks” in the hostile manner she is describing.
http://pds.exblog.jp/pds/1/200601/23/43/d0066343_12335874.jpg
If I saw a ‘man’ like the one pictured above, I would feel an urge to punch him. 
Maybe you’re not really all that butch. 
Of course, part of this may simply be a result of her disguise; If you’re walking around pretending to be someone else, naturally part of your mind will be focused on “passing” and being concerned you’ll give yourself away. Thusly, she may read more into people looking at her.
Well if she really went around with that “I’m a pouty douche” look, or alternatively took aggressive and exaggerated body stances because she thought that the way men “represented” then I can easily imagine she got some nasty “WTF is wrong with you?” stares from men.
Some men do not have visible Adam’s apples, and some women have very prominent ones.
FWIW, that article is another example of why Wikipedia should not be used for factual research. I’ve done a bit of study on the Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont, including reading a few hundred detailed pages of their life, and the Wiki article is at best misleading. Reading what the Chevalier themselves wrote, what their contemporaries wrote, and other information gives only more doubt to whether or not they were hormonally-challenged, transgendered, playing a part, or just off-kilter. Although some would like a definite answer one way or the other, I do not think there is enough factual evidence to classify which of those the Chevalier d’Eon really was.