Self-Made Man (34 page)

Knowing as I do now that my gendered state of mind could have such a powerful effect on other people's perceptions of me, it is no wonder that that state of mind warped my own perceptions as strongly as it did.

But, of course, getting inside men's heads and out of my own was what this project was all about. Part of the purpose of writing a book like this is to learn something about the infiltrated group and then ideally to put that knowledge to good use. Inevitably then I have to ask myself whether or not my experience as Ned has changed the way I see and interact with men.

Unexpectedly, the answer to that question is both yes and no. Yes, in the sense that I have an inescapable empathy for men that could not help but come of living among them. I know in some sense how it feels to be on their end of things and to receive some of the blows and prejudices the world inflicts on them. I understand them better, of course, than I once did, and I like to think that in my more mindful moments I act on that understanding in helpful ways.

Though such an occasion has not yet arisen since I ended the project, I hope that the next time I see a man in emotional distress I will curb my instinct to smother him with care, unless invited to do so. Instead I hope that I will remember my more intimate moments with Jim and perhaps draw on what I learned from Paul and the guys in the men's group about the respectful space a man often needs around him when he is vulnerable or in tears. It may be possible now to interpret the silences of the men around me as something more than voids or standoffs, and to feel more comfortable being present and available to them without always needing our exchange to be explicit or neatly resolvable in my language.

Often I am merely a witness, processing other people's interactions with more sympathy and insight. But usually I am in no position to intervene. Recently, for example, I saw a man and a young boy sitting at a nearby table in a restaurant. It was a Saturday afternoon and you could tell that this was a father and son having one of their two days a month together per the rules of some barely contested custody agreement. You could also tell that the father was bored, and probably only dragging the kid around because the mother had insisted on it, wanting a day to herself. The father was ignoring the kid, even chatting aimlessly with someone on his cell phone for much of the meal, as if he was just killing time on a street corner waiting for a bus. The boy sat slumped in his seat staring at his eggs and into space with the defeated expression of someone who has grown accustomed to being discounted. Yet you could also see the pain and desperation in his eyes. You could see him registering the effect of yet another nonchalant rejection from the one person whose slightest encouragement would have meant the world. Here was the making and unmaking of yet another fatherless man, whose life and sense of himself would be forever altered by experiences like these. There was nothing I could do except catch the boy's eye and smile apologetically, knowing, of course, that a woman's compassion was useless at times like these.

That same day I saw another father tossing a football back and forth with his young son in the park. On the completion of one pass the father ran after the boy and tackled him lightly on the grass. They both fell laughing to the ground, half wrestling, half embracing. It was the kind of scene I would have thought infuriatingly trite and manipulative in a commercial, but which now seemed newly touching, a passing moment in a boy's life that could make all the difference.

At times like these I see men's lives in a new way, and this is invaluable. But as for the question of whether or not I interact with men differently on a daily basis after having lived as Ned, that is another matter altogether. I thought for certain that I would interact differently. Very differently. That I would not be able to help it. But much to my surprise, I have not found that to be so.

Day-to-day I am very much the way I was: a woman again, living as I must, on my side of the divide between the sexes' parallel worlds. Men are likewise now, as they were before, living on their side of that divide. They are mostly inaccessible to me now, and I think this remoteness has a lot to do with the pervasive psychological component of Ned that both made and broke the project. As Ned wore on I found it increasingly difficult and then impossible to keep my male and female personae intact simultaneously. I have said already that it was like trying to sustain two mutually exclusive ideas in my mind at the same time, and that this cognitive dissonance essentially shut down my brain. To bring myself back from that blackout I had to learn to be my gendered self again and to exclude or even unlearn Ned. I could not live in both worlds at once, so I chose the side to which habit and upbringing have accustomed me, and to which my brain in all likelihood predisposes me.

I say I “chose,” but I use this word in only a limited sense, because I am not sure how much meaningful choice we can exercise in these matters. I think I chose to be Ned somewhat the way a gay person can choose to get married. I put on the trappings, adopted the behaviors and even hypnotized myself into the mentality. But by going through the motions of manhood I did not substantively change my bedrock gender identity any more than one can change one's sexual preference by adopting a heterosexual lifestyle. Rather than choosing to become a woman again, it is probably truer to say that I reverted to form. I stopped faking it. I came back to myself, and in doing so I forfeited, as I had to, my insider status in the other camp.

 

Of course, on some level what a woman wants and needs from manhood is bound to be far different from what a man does, and that must account for a fair amount of my trouble in my male role. But it does not account for all of it. If it did, there would be no men's movement to speak of, or at least not one with the same agenda, an agenda that has not sought to redeem or exonerate the patriarchy, but in many ways to indict it further from the inside out. Something is genuinely out of joint in “manhood,” and though perhaps I saw that disjointedness more clearly or felt it more painfully because I was not born into it, there is no denying the very real dysfunction in many men's lives. I saw too many men de-crying it or suffering visibly in silence under its influence to chalk it all up to my estrogened perspective.

A lot of men are in pain. That's evident. Too many of them are living emotionally without fathers or subsisting in dire conflict with the fathers they have, and this has injured and even crippled both parties far more than most of them are able to say, which is why so many of us don't know the half of it.

Boys have the sensitivity routinely mocked and shamed and beaten out of them, and the treatment leaves scars for life. Yet we women wonder why, as men, they do not respond to us with more feeling. Actually, we do more than that. We blame and disdain them for their heartlessness. And we aren't the only ones. Men are at the center of their own conflict. They as much as anyone toughen each other in turn and often find no fault in it, since to do so would be to display an emotional facility that most were long ago denied or forbidden to express.

Healing is a vacant word in this context, limp, mealymouthed and reeking of self-pity. It inspires contempt, or it will in the men who need it most. Yet healing is what is called for, especially among men, where it will be hardest to inspire. Men have their shared experience going for them, their brotherhood, the presumption of goodwill that Ned felt in strange men's handshakes. And that's a start. But overcoming all the rest of it, the territorial reflex, the blocked emotional responses and the all-consuming rage, this will take more trusting vulnerability than most men grant to anyone. It will be like bulldozers learning the ballet.

Maybe it will happen. Slowly, fitfully, tentatively. I hope it does. Men haven't had their movement yet. Not really. Not intimately. And they're due for it, as are the women who live with, fight with, take care of and love them.

I, meanwhile, am staying right where I am: fortunate, proud, free and glad in every way to be a woman.