Via Fark Not Your Average Joe
Yesss… we are mysterious creatures. What do we do when no women are around?
“Mysterious world of men”? Maybe when she finds out, she can tell me about it. I never learned the Secret Handshake or anything.
Inspired by “Black Like Me”? All I could think of was the National Lampoon parody from back in the 1970’s “Stacked Like Me”, where a guy dresses up like a woman to uncover the mysterious world of women.
Right, except that from reading the article I get the impression that rather than learning what it was like to live as a man, she just sneered at blue-collar workers as herself, but in drag.
I saw her interviewed about this book. The entire idea seemed more like an excuse to dress up like a guy and date unsuspecting women. I can’t imagine a much more disingenuous idea to get a little attention.
I considered pitting her but, meh… I can’t muster more enthusiasm than :rolleyes: .
I suppose that, like most men, she too was wearing women’s underwear.
So . . . what hundreds of thousands of transgendered people have been doing for centuries, Norah Vincent just discovered all by her little self as a book stunt? Well, bully for her.
I stopped reading after the part where she says “They never made racist jokes or spoke deragatory towards women or gays…”
What planet did she conduct this expiriment on again?
The pubs I hang out in are FULL of “Blue collar”/consruction worker types. It’s rare to find even ONE of them as the author describes. Much less a whole group of them.
Wow. That’s not what I’d expect. I can’t help but think that most married men would be in the dog house if their wives heard how they talk about women when only other guys were around. It happens all the time.
I get the feeling that she wasn’t as under cover as she thought she was and everyone in the room knew something was amiss (pun intended).
As someone who grew up in a family of blue collar construction workers, I can tell you that most of 'em would be much more at ease with a woman bowling with them than a metrosexual guy. Heck, Mr. Athena, who lifts weights, rides a motorcycle and is a manly man, but also has a college degree and works in high-tech manages to confound my family at times.
Like the article says, in my experience, the big difference between people is class more than gender or race. (not that gender or race don’t play a part - but a blue collar woman fits in with the manly construction crowd WAY more than a highly educated male ever will.)
And, for those interested, the technical term for this is Eonism, although the Chevalier d’Eon himself was a - standard, for want of a better word - MTF transsexual, rather than a woman who dressed up in male clothes and went to London to seek her fortune in the best Shakesperean tradition, as instanced in the OP.
Actually the underlying message of her book is that she was really judgemental toward guys before she did this, and was really shaken to discover how tough men have it in our society. As a lesbian who really adores men I appreciate her willingness to admit how wrong she was, and to confront a truth that has been ignored my many politically active women for a long time.
Her point of view class-wise is really irritating, but I don’t feel like it destroys the whole thing, so far at least - I’m not done reading it.
As far as the dating innocent women thing - she tells them all after only seeing them a time or two. And she spent part of the time in an all-male retreat, so dating was not really the centerpiece of her experiment.
Like I said, I’m not done, and I don’t really care how popular her book is, but it seems like it would make sense to read at least a non-Daily-Show-type excerpt from the book itself before deciding it’s no good.
I didn’t read the article, but from the pic she could pass for Eugene Levy’s younger brother.
Why am I thinking “Tedious?”
hh
i thought she was a lesbian too, though.
i saw her on tv promoting the book when it first got released.
Norah Vincent is known as a lesbian author. I have not read anything by her. My reaction is based on the reviews I’ve read.
She is soooo busted. She published an attack on transgendered people a few years ago. Now she gets to find out what it’s like to be a woman who forces herself to masquerade as a man. She reported that the experience affected her so badly she checked herself into a mental hospital for a week when she was done. Yep. Only a brief period of suppressing her gender drove her crazy. Now let her contemplate what it would be like to spend her whole life in that condition. Maybe the experience will give her something to reflect on and she will learn to empathize with transsexuals instead of dissing us. One can hope.
Remember Malcolm X’s reaction to Black Like Me—everyone was talking about how John Howard Griffin voluntarily subjected himself to racism. Malcolm noticed all the sensation over a white guy feigning blackness and asked people to imagine what it was like for real black people who could not take off a disguise and return to being white and privileged any time they choose. I feel similarly about Self-Made Man.
BTW, Texas white liberal investigative journalist Grace Halsell followed Griffin’s example, lived as a black woman, and described her experience in the book Soul Sister (1969). Race was a major national issue in the 1960s and the ferment of the Civil Rights movement made Americans re-examine their assumptions. Now perhaps gender issues are coming to the forefront.
I can’t tell from the reviews I read if she ever honestly faced up to the transgender implications of her experiment. When she said her female gender identity was determined by her brain, she might have reflected that the female gender identity of transwomen is just as undeniable in their brains too, just as immutable and intractable. This could have been an opportunity for her to drop her prejudice and see transwomen as humans who suffer their whole lives the way she did for a few weeks. But she could go back to her regular life afterward. Transgender is a lifetime sentence with no reprieve.
What Vincent’s experience underlined for me is how I was never male… even though I was supposed to be male growing up. The male worldview that seems utterly alien to a woman like Vincent was always just as alien to me; I never could fit into it. If only she could understand that I can’t be male any more than she did, and if I were to be forced into maleness against my will, I would wind up as mentally ill as she did, and for very similar reasons. I had to openly come out as female to save my sanity. I can only hope that the insights gained by this experience would allow Vincent to get past her transphobia and accept us as human beings too.
The only difference between her breakdown and the final one that convinces trannys to transition is that she’s able to transition from male to female instantly and it cost her nothing.
Yeah, to follow up on what Johanna said, Vincent showed her ass in a major way a few years back in an Advocate article in which she said it was grammatically correct to call a transwoman “he” because of her chromosomes, because chromosomes define English grammar, apparently. Basically, that transpeople can have whatever silly fantasies they want but we all really know what they are.
As Johanna said, she is soooo busted.
I did read it and it was a lot like Nickle and Dimed. You could really only enjoy it as a “memoir of the time I did something wacky and met a bunch of people I normally wouldn’t hang out with” but you can’t learn much else from it. It’s enjoyable for me to hear about a woman who thought she was pretty smart find out about her prejudices in novel ways. I guess what pisses people off is when they get to the end and realize the author still has a bunch of prejudices she isn’t seeing. I was somewhat satisfied though. I didn’t know who Norah Vincent was going in so I didn’t have any grudge. I wasn’t waiting for her to wake up and smell the coffee on any particular issue, so if she didn’t, I didn’t know what I was missing.
All in all, she really just got a taste of what it’s like to be a weird guy. There are an awful lot of books written by weird guys on what it’s like to be them. It’s not like guys have a lot of secrets we don’t know about.
I thought the most amusing part was when she dated and one woman started out their first date showing Norah/Ned boring photos of strangers and Norah/Ned was trying to figure out whether this woman was just completely socially inept or whether it was an elaborate female test of some kind. It’s kind of hilarious since it made me think maybe Ned should dress up as a female to try to understand these kooky females he was trying to date. Where will it all end?
Busted in what sense?
I’m not here to defend the woman. I think what she did was sensationalist and dishonest at best. But many books I see on the bookstore shelves seem to be filled with pages of trite crap that seems to only be there only to keep the covers of the book apart. Lambasting her for the mediocrity (read: stupidity) of her book’s idea and execution seems well deserved.
What I don’t understand is how this reflects on the transgender experience or her comments on the subject. She’s not transgendered. She doesn’t attempt to claim she was living a life of a transgendered individual. She doesn’t claim to want to be in the shoes of a transgendered person.
All this woman did, was pretend to be someone she is not. I imagine the guilt associated with trying to deceive people on such a mass scale would be stressful to the psychie of anybody with even the merest of consciences. Not that she deserves credit for having a conscience. Just that it’s not very surprising unless we are dealing with a complete sociopath. Which she doesn’t appear to be.
What I’m saying, I guess, is that a transgendered person likely has an entirely different experience and set of challenges than this nitwit experienced by putting on a man’s suit and applying some fake stubble.
Or am I splitting hairs?
According to the article, three pages into her experiment:
“There were the smells; cigarette smoke, varnish, machine oil, leaky toilets, old candy wrappers and accumulated public muck.”
And yet she felt compelled to continue to explore the world of men… she could have just stopped there.
She attempted to pass herself off as a gender she’s not, and it made her feel like shit - much as trans people are made to feel like shit when they have to pass themselves off as a gender they’re not, before they transition.