An Important Idea

I'm currently reading Norah Vincent's "Self-Made Man" (where she writes about spending a year or so disguised as a man), and I will probably write a longer review of the book once I've finished reading it, but in the passage I've just read she's hit upon a vital point, a key lesson that it is worthwhile feminists of every gender and persuasion absorbing.

This is something I could never have articulated myself, although God knows from time to time I have tried to challenge the sorts of assumptions that Norah Vincent has challenged here. It's simply that, coming from a man, they just look like "poor me" comments.

Here's what Norah Vincent wrote:

"When I'd approached as Ned they had been sitting facing the bar. They had only bothered to turn halfway round to talk to me, their faces always in profile. Now they turned all the way around to face me, their backs to the bar.

"I understood this reaction immediately. I had predicted it. But still a part of me resented their prejudices. I was still the same person I had been before, just as any given strange man is a person beneath his blazer or his baseball hat. As a woman I was accepted. As a man I had been rejected yet again. I understood intimately the social reasons for this, but it seemed unfair all the same."

Those last two sentences sum up a great deal for me about how I personally have felt about approaching women. It doesn't matter how strongly I appreciate and understand the suspicions and doubts about me because I'm a man, and because of how men are perceived to behave (and of course, many men do behave that way). At the end of the day, I'm a good guy to get to know (or, I hope I am!) Admittedly, maybe sometimes I am interested in getting into a woman's pants (there's a whole load of issues there given my other sexual proclivities, but we'll leave that debate for another day!) but at the end of the day, you have to get to know someone before you decide whether that's a realistic expectation, and mostly, it isn't - so an opening conversation, in general, is just about getting to know someone and making friends. Or it would be, if I were given half a chance of doing so... And, let's face it, having a new friend is always a positive out of any situation.

As a man, as Norah Vincent is quickly learning at the stage of her book that I've reached, rejection is par for the course. But rejection as a sex object (sorry, "sex partner") shouldn't have to imply rejection as a friend, surely?

Why did I put "sex object" there first? Basically, because of something else Norah Vincent observed - that men are expected to be the aggressive one, the seeker, while the woman is the passive chooser. Norah Vincent again: "It was just the way of things in the wild when you were male. You were the eager athlete, the brightly colored bird doing the dance, and she was the German judge begrudging you the nod." What else is that but making oneself into an obect of sexual desire, or at least, trying to pass muster as such an object? Moreover, it is doing so with the certain knowledge that one is very likely to be found wanting and rejected.

Maybe women also will identify with that description of being viewed as a sex object, I typed those words thinking only of my own experiences, but then read them back and realised how often I had read them as compaints made by women of how men treat them.

One last quotation from Norah Vincent, to round things off and complete my own thoughts on my experience as a man in these respects:

"Still, it didn't feel good to be on the receiving end of their suspicion. After all, there are plenty of guys in the world, the marrying kind, I suppose, who really just want to get to know a girl, but have no other means of doing so except to strike up a conversation on the fly. So should they bear the brunt of the majority of their sex's bad behavior? And was the majority really that badly behaved?"