All the talk about gender in class today reminded me of a book by former LA Times columnist Norah Vincent called Self Made Man: One Woman’s Journey Into Manhood and Back. It’s about the 18 months she went undercover as a man named Ned in order to see the difference in how people treated her. It ended when she suffered a nervous breakdown.
While participating in a bowling league, she had to opportunity to observe the way the guys on her team would treat their sons. She weighed in on the matter during an NPR interview:
There is a toughening process boys have to go through [where] emotional expression is beaten or laughed or teased out of them…The only emotion left to them is anger.
I can’t say that’s been my personal experience, but I can see how she might come away with that view. I do think there is truth in the fact that anger is one of the few emotions men can express in public.
Looking around for other writings she has done, I found some excerpts from her book printed in The Guardian. Her observations on how frustrating it was dating women made me smile:
The women I met wanted a man to be confident. They wanted in many ways to defer to him. I could feel that on many dates, the unspoken desire to be held up and led, whether in conversation or even in physical space…
Yet as much as these women wanted a take-control man, at the same time they wanted a man who was vulnerable to them, a man who would show his colours and open his doors, someone expressive, intuitive, attuned. This I was in spades, and I always got points for it. But I began to feel very sympathetic toward heterosexual men – the pressure to be a world-bestriding colossus is an immensely heavy burden to bear, and trying to be a sensitive new age guy at the same time is pretty well impossible. Expectation, expectation, expectation was the leitmotif of Ned’s dating life.