Atlantic £15.99 pp290
Norah Vincent is the sharp-witted American journalist who had the inspired idea of disguising herself as a man, on and off, for a whole year, and thereby infiltrating otherwise exclusively male domains such as monasteries and even those dreaded “men’s groups” inspired by the preposterous Iron John books. The fact that she is a lesbian of rather masculine appearance, as she freely admits, only made this intriguing project the easier. She suppressed her breasts with a sports bra, created a complex and revolting paste from moisturiser and hair clippings to simulate the appearance of stubble and learnt to lower her voice. She also learnt to talk less. Then, hoping that nobody would notice the absence of an Adam’s apple, off she went.
She played her part to perfection. Nobody did notice, and the result is a fascinating bird’s-eye view (sorry) of contemporary maleness. It is also beautifully written, especially in the earlier chapters of pure reportage when she can be as perspicuous and exact as Joan Didion or Gloria Steinem at nailing a hitherto disregarded truth about the sexes in a single elegant and witty phrase.
Her close encounters with men do not initially cast the sisterhood in a kindly light by comparison. They even provoke a “momentary misogyny”. Compared to girls’ nights out, her evenings down at the smoke-filled, blue-collar bowling alley with the boys, in an atmosphere of laconic, uncomplicated, old-fashioned maleness, are blissfully free of bitchiness, backstabbing or competitiveness. The handshakes with which they first greet her/him are startlingly warm and genuine compared to what she calls the “limp gentility” of most female greetings. They say exactly what they think of each other, to each other’s faces, teasing and taunting, but laughing most of all at themselves. They freely make jokes about “fags”, and the punishment for whoever gets the lowest bowling score of the season is to go a whole 10 frames wearing “women’s panties”. Vile homophobia and misogyny, though? Not a bit of it. Just good-natured mockery, she senses; something sweetly confirmed when she finally confesses to one of the guys, Jim, that she is not only a woman in disguise, but a lesbian. The novelty of knowing his first proper dyke delights him, and their friendship, if anything, only deepens.
She is also sharp on male emotions and their supposed inadequacy. She sees that men communicate emotionally with each other largely by doing rather than saying, and she is alive to its eloquence. In contrast, she accuses women of a certain “emotional arrogance”. “In our world, feelings reign. We have them. We understand them. We cater to them. Men, we think, don’t on all counts.” But this is “absolutely untrue and absurd”. Ironically, despite women’s supposedly greater emotional intelligence and receptivity, men’s emotions often remain “silent or underground”, and “invisible” to them.
But it’s not all good news for the boys. A later chapter sees her spending time with a group of rebarbative, hard-driven, insanely competitive salesmen who wear symbolic gold rhino badges on their lapels, and shout out “JUICE!” on frequent occasions. This stands for Join Us In Creating Excitement! They also say things to each other such as “My watch cost more than your car”, and boast about “raw doggin” women they’ve picked up in singles bars. (Don’t ask. Don’t even speculate.) Vincent gamely struggles to do the hard sell, too, even though she feels like a “forlorn Mormon” on the doorstep. Her colleagues’ attitudes to other men, women, and life in general are so ghastly that they will quickly drive any male reader to gender-shame.
Sampling the dating-and-mating game as a man, she finds that women really do have absolute power here — the power of final veto — and that power isn’t always accompanied by responsibility. And one startling insight: among the several heterosexual women whom she dated, no fewer than three still wanted to or did sleep with her once her real sex was revealed. Female sexual response is not about status, physique or even gender, she suggests, but “Do you make me laugh? Do you make me think? Do you talk to me?”
She takes the whole Iron John business — the American fad for finding your Real, Inner Man by playing at being a boy scout — far too solemnly for an English sensibility. This requires a puritanical earnestness and self-absorption that we cynical Brits just can’t muster; it was memorably described by the late Peter Cook as “men running around in the woods sniffing each other’s bottoms”. In fact, this chapter falls away into a vast and cavernous abyss almost as unbridgeable as that between men and women: the one between English and American. And after the superlative earlier chapters, the conclusion, forsaking needle-sharp description for windy prescription, is a disappointment. She argues that men are due for their movement, just as women have already had theirs. She says that changes need to be made, and that “A lot of men are in pain”; that their lives suffer from “very real dysfunction”, with their maleness merely “a coached jumble of stoic poses”. None of this links back coherently to what Vincent has suggested in some of her earlier chapters, and the thought of being “due for a movement”, like a bunch of constipated saddoes, will have most men thinking “yikes” and reaching for a beer.
Nevertheless, this is a brave and often fascinating book, with Vincent, in her “clanking suit of borrowed armour”, offering us perspectives that are entirely fresh and new. Even if there is a certain weakness and confusion towards the end, this remains a good, companionable journey up until then, and one well worth making.
WHITE-COLLAR HELL
Nora Vincent is not the only writer to go undercover recently. American author Barbara Ehrenreich has donned disguises before — most famously for her 2001 book Nickel and Dimed, which offered first-hand accounts of misery among minimum-wage manual labourers — and she does so again in Bait and Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the Corporate Dream (Granta £9.99), which aims to do the same for middle managers, left. Setting out to get a job as a PR director, she runs the whole gamut of “career coaches”, job fairs and executive-job-search boot camps, meeting along the way dozens of job-seekers who have either fallen off the corporate ladder completely or are grappling grimly to get on. Although she spends some $7,000 on career advice, Ehrenreich herself never succeeds in finding a job — thus partially undermining any insights into the workings of the corporate system. But the time she spends down among the desperate does help highlight the massive insecurities that are so endemic in modern American corporate life: “If anyone can testify credibly to the disappearance of the American dream, it is the white-collar unemployed — the people who ‘played by the rules’, ‘did everything right’, and still ended up in ruin.”
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Excerpt from Vincent’s book
