Norah Vincent died

existentialistdoge · 2022-09-23T15:32:09+00:00

I looked for a copy of this book for 2 years before I gave up and read it online a couple weeks ago. I heard a lot about it, and I enjoyed it, but in spaces like this I quite often see it being ‘sold’ as something that honestly it really isn’t - not referring to you, OP, but just generally when it’s mentioned. In honour of Vincent’s passing I’m going to write a brief summary here to hopefully give people the gist of what the book is actually about.

It’s an account of a lesbian former political journalist infiltrating male spaces in disguise. It’s not about how men are misunderstood in society, or proof that ‘feminists have got it backwards’, or that men are ‘the real victims’ - all of which you see it described as. It’s from the perspective of a woman who had a series of assumptions (prejudices even) about how much easier it would be to live as a man, discovers she was wrong about some of them, and is quite frank in admitting the things she was wrong about.

It is not a long book, I read it in a day. Most of the quotable parts are in the first two chapters (out of 5-6).

In the first chapter she joins a men’s bowling team and expects them to be insular, sexist, and racist. They accept her immediately even though she’s terrible, and help her improve through a blend of coaching and gentle ribbing when she fucks up. She draws parallels with the way the group attempt to socialise and raise one of the bowlers young-ish kids who comes along sometimes. They’re quite crude and do indeed make racist and sexist jokes, but she goes to great lengths to point out that it really isn’t malicious or mean-spirited, and that overwhelmingly the butt of their jokes is themselves being ‘white trash’, a sort of pressure valve and coping system for being stuck in a class system and ‘keeping it real’. She highlights that despite the occasional sexist jokes or secretly visiting ‘titty bars’ they all genuinely respect and love their wives, to a degree she also found surprising. And she expected some hostility and bridge burning when she came out to them as 1) a woman and 2) gay, but they all took it in their stride immediately.

The second chapter is about dating, and as a lesbian she expected this to be a breeze because she thought she knew what women would want, and knew the sort of things that creep her out as a woman, but she had a really hard time of it. She discovered there really is no way at all to approach women in public and have any success at all, and in fact that talking to women even neutrally was very hard as a man because even though she recognised the defensive social cues as ones she herself would use, how hostile it appears from the other side (and how constant) was a surprise to her. She did a lot of online dating and although there were a couple of instances where she bonded with people and even slept with a couple after coming out as a woman, in the vast majority of cases her potential partners were looking for someone far more masculine and were turned off by her attempts to be sensitive and emotionally vulnerable and other traits that society at the time was saying men should be - they were the opposite of what her dates wanted in practice.

The rest of the chapters, though interesting, are less notable as she becomes more accustomed to living as a man. She visits strip bars and doesn’t find them empowering, that no-one really enjoys them anyway but that for a certain type of person they scratch an itch, and only one dancer who seems to be really working the system (and making twice as much as everyone else). She works in door-to-door sales and finds the winner/loser culture unbearable (as I’m sure most would) and that men and women approach their sales differently, but ultimately the job is about being rejected a lot. She joins a monastery and discovers repressed gay men and men who have found a way to live where they are happily left to their own devices and dislike change, bound in a culture that is stifling and toxic in many ways (and nurturing in some others), which they try to reform via good-intentioned ideas such as ‘hugging sessions’ but ultimately keep falling back into because it at least provides a structure which, though clearly imperfect, is effective in keeping the group together.

In the final chapter she infiltrates a men’s help group run in a similar fashion to Alcoholics Anonymous. She encounters a lot of issues similar to those raised in this group, different expressions of what ‘masculinity’ is and what constitutes ‘men’s issues’, some of them productive and some not, which culminates in an annual visit to a retreat in the woods. She builds this event up a lot in her head, but it isn’t what she expects. It has the veneer of the things you’d expect to do in therapy, but no professional therapists or psychologists to guide it, so a lot of it comes across as awkward and disjointed. She doesn’t think it’s very effective, but respects that the leaders are well-intentioned and that everyone there is at least trying to help each other to better themselves.

Ultimately the pressure of pretending to be someone (and a gender) that she isn’t causes her to have a depressive breakdown around the time of the group retreat, and she checks herself into a psychiatric hospital. I should point out that she says this isn’t due to the pressure of living ‘as a man’, it’s more the constant lying and pretending to be someone she isn’t.

She concludes that there’s a lot she misunderstood about male culture and that in most cases she was very happy to be corrected. She doesn’t minimise women’s issues, or make qualitative or quantitive comparisons between the two. It’s quite matter-of-fact and almost gonzo-style in places. She may have embarked on the project to experience male privilege, but her actual experience could probably be summarised as ‘we make a lot of unfair assumptions about people who are different from us, but everyone has their own issues and deserves to be understood’.

jacksleepshere · 2022-09-23T14:12:37+00:00

Put this on menslib.

McGauth925 · 2022-09-23T21:30:17+00:00

I own that book, and have read only part of it.

One part struck me as her inserting her values over fact. She describes women at the strip clubs having shaved genitalia. She ascribes that to the idea that men prefer doll-like women that meet their unrealistic fantasies, and not real women. Then, she had things to say about how men don't want woman to have any genital ordor, which she condemned as men not wanting women to be as they naturally are. I thought it was more because men want to actually see women's genitalia, which hair makes it harder to do. (Personally, I generally find hair sexier, and I REALLY like the way some - but, not all, women smell, genitally. I suspect that's part of the chemistry that can be attractive, or not, that men feel for some women.) And, common'; how many women are deeply attracted to male genitalia as it actually exists? I've mostly felt like they more or less put up with my genitalia because, at the right time, it felt good and exciting. Very, very few women have seemed to really enjoy handling me as a pleasure for its own sake.

That was my take on her take of how men view women in strip clubs. Oh, she also had a lot to say about how men are vulnerable in that we really like all the down-and-dirty aspects of sex. We LUST, outright, for the physical aspects of women's bodies and have learned to feel ashamed of that from the society that finds us disgusting in that regard. Thus, we tend to feel bad about our basic sexuality. Personally, that rings true, for me.

griii2 · 2022-09-23T11:19:33+00:00

She was shocked by the indifferent or even negative way men are treated

I am not surprised wikipedia does not mention any of that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book))

HeelFaceSonny · 2022-09-23T13:17:05+00:00

Men suffer alot from depression, we are not considered as human beings by most of society it is considered ok to treat us like garbage.

I think most women do not understand that and the world is beautiful because they are never experience the dark side of it.

When they discover the reality we live in it might be too hard for most of them to handle.

skllyskullstyle · 2022-09-23T19:48:33+00:00

Dude i looooove norah. Shes a heroine. She really did all of us men a huge favor and almost practically freed us from chains that we did not know were there. I love her so much.

BloomingBrains · 2022-10-01T10:41:01+00:00

Yeah, I heard about this too. Its a shame.

Honestly, it makes me feel a bit guilty for never having read it. I always held off mainly because the points she discussed in it are often circulated as common mens advocacy talking points.

If one good thing comes out of her death, maybe it will be that more people like me actually pick up her book.

RIP Norah Vincent. We need more like you.

Neveah_Hope_Dreams · 2022-10-11T07:56:11+00:00

I'm so gutted. I can't believe she's dead. I didn't see this coming at all. Why did she get euthanized???

Norah is a freaking legend and has done a great dead for Men's Rights activism. She's a hero. She will go down in history.

I must find her book now.

9th_SapphicNunlet · 2022-11-01T17:32:06+00:00

I was just wondering about that book I've read back in highschool.. damn, rest in peace Norah Vincent.

Title	Norah Vincent died
Author	Blauwpetje
Upvotes	177
Comments	52
Date	September 23, 2022 9:06 AM UTC (3 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/xlsc80/norah_vincent_died/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/norah-vincent-died.1132007 https://theredarchive.com/post/1132007

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