Guy Spy
Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back Again
by Norah
Vincent
Viking, 2006
(304 pages, $24.95, hardcover)
reviewed by S. M. Hutchens
Self-Made Man is written by a—not feminine, but very female—lesbian whose observations on the interplay of the sexes made her curious about whether being a man was all it was cracked up to be in the mainstream of respectable modern women’s opinion. To find out, she disguised herself as a man—this comes off as a rather weird and fairly amusing operation—and jumped headfirst into what she thought might be some of the most distinctively male modes.
She became a member of a men’s bowling league, a strip-club patron, a single guy looking for dates, a prospective novice in a monastery, a salesman working for a sell-or-die agency, and a member of a men’s group seeking to recover Ur-maleness in a world hostile to it. She writes about all these experiences with close observation and winsome empathy.
There is much left unsaid in this book, particularly about the author’s life and thought when undisguised, but the reader must be satisfied with as much as she is willing to tell. As far as it goes, it is an interesting story.
A Difficult World
By and large she finds the male world difficult, discouraging, and something she is glad to escape back to womanhood, however disadvantageous it is represented to be in feminism’s conventional wisdom. What seems to disturb her most about that environment as she experiences it is the feeling of isolation that male reticence to express emotion engenders—something that she as a woman finds almost impossible to tolerate, and for the bearing of which she comes to both pity and admire the men she meets.
I would remark that while the form and intensity this reticence takes has a great deal to do with culture, men across cultures share a reserve that makes it more likely that they, for a complex of reasons, will formalize relations between themselves in all but a few well-defined situations. Preeminently this means with the brother (in any form he takes)—frequently not the wife, despite what she typically thinks her due in emotional intimacy.
Men simply do not communicate intuitively with either the volubility or alacrity of women. They are built that way, think it’s fine, and see good reasons for it. A man, Ms. Vincent discovered, may do no more than grunt at his friends twice in a social evening, and they take that as an acceptable level of communication.
They leave his space uninvaded if that’s the way he wants it, and let him talk only when and if he wants to. That’s how they operate when they are not being badgered by someone to act like women, or attempting on their own initiative to make themselves fit for female company.
What drove Ms. Vincent to distraction about this very typical maleness is that it is universally regarded by men as part of being a grownup of their sex. It is why she was so disappointed with the monks, from whom she expected markedly higher levels of empathy than are customary among men, when they turned out to be a pretty typical bunch of guys, nervous about all the hugging she (as a “he”) wanted them to do because some of them were—as some guys always are—fighting homosexual impulses. The monks, while not identifying “Ned” as a woman, thought he was a homosexual.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
A Journal of Mere Christianity—Delivered to Your Door
- Essays on theology, culture, and the Church
- Contributors from across the Christian traditions
Six print issues (one year) of Touchstone, plus full online access and PDF downloads for only $39.95.
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95.
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
35.4—Jul/Aug 2022
The Death Rattle of a Tradition
Contemporary Catholic Thinking on the Question of War by Andrew Latham
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn
34.1—January/February 2021
Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents by Rod Dreher by Hans Boersma
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
