Where are we exactly, in this deathless debate about the crisis of masculinity? We stand splattered in discourse, ears ringing from the unceasing alarm over men and their prospects — their lack of education and lack of friends, their porn and gambling, their suicide rates. This while tech elites, sporting their bulgy new bodies, call for an infusion of “masculine energy,” and a hideous new sport is born: “sperm-racing.” Is it any wonder that a stance has emerged of principled contempt? The so-called crisis, according to its critics, is actually a crisis of accountability, a refusal on the part of men to regulate themselves emotionally and behave like adults. In this view, men aren’t in crisis, America is in crisis, and to suggest otherwise is to engage in a kind of “himpathy” — to show excessive concern for men’s feelings — and to co-sign a reactionary pushback.
Amid all this conversation, simultaneously so bloated and thin, an old book has been exhumed. Eccentric and a bit embarrassing even in its own time, it is also oddly appealing in its open curiosity and lack of inhibition, even as it exemplifies how any idea, passed through the fun-house mirror of discourse in our moment, gets reflected back in its most grotesque form.
Its author, the journalist Norah Vincent, has been anointed as something as a godmother to the manosphere. In her book “Self-Made Man” (2006), she recounted an 18-month social experiment in which she disguised herself as a man and infiltrated male-only spaces. As “Ned,” she dated, applied for jobs, did a stint in a monastery. She joined a bowling league and lurked at dank strip clubs. Vincent assumed her project would reveal that men moved through life with a kind of ease that women could scarcely imagine. She was brutally disabused. The men she met were lonely and unhappy. Their pain became her own. When she tried to date as a man, the cruelty of women left her shaken and humiliated.
On men’s rights forums, Vincent’s story is liberally revised — her suicide is often explicitly linked to her rejection by women. (She died in 2022, in a medically assisted suicide, 16 years after the experiment, and after suffering from a long spell of treatment-resistant depression.) In the view of her new fans, Vincent is the rare woman who gets it, who can cop to male pain because she has experienced it. “She truly understood us in ways that most of society can’t,” one Reddit user writes. “Spare a minute to appreciate what she went through (and that we do daily without even thinking about it).”
Her new devotees seem young; few appear to have read the book. Most know her from the streams of TikTok eulogies. “Rest in peace Norah,” one posted. “You tried your very best and for that I am personally thankful. Hopefully wherever you are now, you’re at peace. Just know that your message and experience live on in all who are hopeful for a better tomorrow.” Another put it simply: “Norah was one of the boys.”
Those who knew Vincent have been unnerved to see her book embraced by men’s rights activists and her life so distorted (how she would have hated this, one told me). She was not a “radical feminist,” as described. In her columns at The Village Voice and The Los Angeles Times, she compared abortion to bingeing and purging, and railed at gay men for “the spread of AIDS.” Her scornful dismissal of trans people’s concerns prompted a demonstration outside The Voice’s office. She shrugged off the criticism. As a lesbian, she said, she was entitled to raise these questions: “It’s just a dispute within the community,” she insisted. “And what safer place to do it than in The Village Voice? It’s not National Review. You are discussing among your fellows a point of disagreement, which is what the press is supposed to be for.”
Rereading her articles, wading through the garbled syntax and the outrage that felt simultaneously effortful and random, gives you the sense that what she really wanted was to be noticed.
The book itself is more mottled than its new fans allow, and more sincere and self-implicating than those scabrous columns would suggest. It is also more mournful than I recalled. “Self-Made Man” feels dated today — and blinkered, in its refusal to acknowledge trans experience — but also moving in its evocation of masculinity from the inside out, not in crisis but as a perpetual crisis.
Men suffer not because they are ill treated by women, changing mores or a changing economy. The real damage Vincent documents is far more fundamental: It is the damage men learn to do to themselves, often in childhood. It is the price she had to pay too, as Ned — the relinquishment of feeling and expressiveness, of language itself.
‘I curtailed everything: my laugh, my word choice, my gestures, my expressions. Spontaneity went out the window.’
All this came later. The project began as a lark. One evening, a drag-king friend dared Vincent to go out dressed as a man. She put on a flannel shirt, baseball cap, mustache and goatee. As they strolled the neighborhood, no one paid her any attention. As a woman, Vincent wrote, she was used to being stared at and scrutinized on those same streets, but this time the men looked away.
“It was astounding,” she wrote. “The difference, the respect they showed me by not looking at me, by purposedly not staring.” The more she thought about this gesture, the more important it seemed. “There was something more than respect being communicated in their averted gaze, something subtler, less direct. It was more like a disinclination to show disrespect,” she wrote, “to leave each man to his tiny sphere of influence, the small buffer of pride and poise that surrounds and keeps him.”
She had a hunch that a seam of subtext was running below her level of perception. She embarked on her experiment with models from classic works of immersion journalism — George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London,” John Howard Griffin’s “Black Like Me,” Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed.” Her aim was not to show that men had easier lives, but that they had secret lives, full of intimacies and communication that women were not privy to and did not understand.
She took no hormones, but she lifted weights and gave herself a sprinkling of stubble. She studied voice and movement. She joined a weekly all-male bowling league, worked in sales and attended monthly men’s meetings.
At first it was the world of masculine subtext that felt so exotic, the micro-intimacies she traced, small moments of warmth and deference between men. Even a handshake felt like a revelation: “Receiving it was a rush, an instant inclusion in a camaraderie that felt very old and practiced.” But slowly she began to find the communication between men painfully awkward — “bumper cars trying to merge.” The men she met had a palpable need for one another’s company; they seemed starved for closeness, but they could not speak of anything personal. She wrote of one: “I could feel his loneliness, his need for intimacy so long suppressed, pushing out like the palms of someone’s hands against the window of a sinking car. He was still alive in there, intact behind the dejection and neglect.”
It wasn’t merely that they didn’t choose to speak about their emotions. Some of them couldn’t name them; others weren’t conscious of having feelings at all, as one shared at a men’s rights retreat. Vincent thought of her own brothers. “Men have had the tears and the emotional expression sort of pounded out of them from an early age,” she said in an interview. “By the time they’re men, they don’t even have the vocabulary or the emotional awareness anymore to really say what they’re feeling.”
She began to feel this process working on her, as men recoiled whenever Ned was too emotional, too ebullient. As a child she had envied boys their abandon, but living as Ned, in his narrow emotional register, felt constricting. “I curtailed everything: my laugh, my word choice, my gestures, my expressions. Spontaneity went out the window, replaced by terseness, dissimulation and control. I hardened and denied to the point almost of ossification.” She missed the emotional range women enjoyed — “women get octaves, chromatic scales of tears and joys and anxieties and despairs and erotic flamboyance.” Men had irony and silence and rage. The scrutiny and self-surveillance proved exhausting. “Someone is always evaluating your manhood. Whether it’s other men, other women, or even children.”
In time, she revealed her real identity. To her surprise, everyone — the monks from the monastery, the bowling crew, the women she dated — responded the same way. There was initial disbelief; no one suspected Ned was a woman (although a few monks had thought he was a gay man). After the shock dissipated, every one of these relationships grew closer and more relaxed, almost instantly. Her bowling partner opened up and told her about his wife’s cancer. Monks who had been aloof and forbidding confided in her. Everyone agreed: They liked Ned, but they needed Norah. In the forced state of disconnection that is masculinity, Vincent found that women play a key role; they are conscripted into playing interlocutor between men and their own minds.
This story, of masculinity’s raid on the interior life — its hollowing out of the imagination and ransacking of private language — feels inescapable right now. It can be found on television (“Adolescence”) and in literature (David Szalay’s Booker Prize-winning novel, “Flesh”), in theater (Ivo van Hove’s revival of “All My Sons” by Arthur Miller on the West End). Was there a film this year that didn’t address, in some way, manhood, its mythologies and silences (“Train Dreams,” “Hamnet,” “One Battle After Another,” even “Frankenstein”)?
Much of this work strains for the symbolic and follows a template of sorts — a father grieves or searches for a lost child. But the child is revealed to be little more than narrative contrivance — no sooner conjured than killed off, and too sketchily drawn to be a true object of sorrow. The child is, properly speaking, a stand-in for the adult’s lost purity and authentic self. We are watching men mourn their own lives.
In recent years, the psychologist Ronald Levant has popularized the notion of “normative male alexithymia.” Alexithymia is the inability to recognize emotions (etymologically, it means lacking the words for feelings), and Levant argues that as boys are taught to repress their emotions for fear of seeming feminine, they lose the ability to identify them. Some research reveals that, as toddlers, boys are more outwardly emotional than girls but by age 2, they are less verbally expressive and by 4, they are less facially expressive. By adolescence, the one emotion boys felt permitted to openly express was anger.
I might be describing Istvan, the protagonist of “Flesh,” whose Booker win was heralded by an editorial in The Guardian as a masculine reclamation of the novel. Out with the chintz; here was a man’s consciousness laid bare.
Except Istvan possesses no interior life. He has very little language. He says the word “OK” some 500 times. He has no awareness of when and why he explodes in rage, or that he is crying. Much of the sex he has in the novel is unwanted and confusing; he has little sense of his own desire or of his own body. For much of the novel, he seems to register only that he is sweating heavily, as if signaling to us the unseen costs of masculine performance (that he, in time, expects of his own son). Istvan’s observations, however, are swollen with subtext. He notices animals in cages and murky water. He stares portentously at faraway hills: “They look like furniture with sheets draped over it so that it’s not possible to see exactly what’s underneath.”
Vincent describes catching a glimpse of this landscape, this state of disconnection from the self and others, that is, for many men, the norm, and one that invites little interest or compassion unless they erupt into violence.
Many years ago I had an especially brilliant student, who was writing an autobiographical novel about a father-son relationship. His drafts were pockmarked by a recurring note to himself in the margins, about missing material to be filled in later: “T and F to come”; “add T and F here”; “need some T and F.” “T and F,” he explained later, meant “thoughts and feelings.”
How much can we hang on this diagnosis? Does it feel curious to harp on male reticence given the male tendency to podcast? Or does this silence feel singularly important to writers for whom the notion of a lack of language seems singularly troubling?
These questions feel revealing in their stinginess. “Self-Made Man” was published during a time when the conversation about masculinity felt open and truly liberating. Those were the years of bell hooks’s “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love” (2004), Terry Real’s “I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression” (1997), Max Wolf Valerio’s “The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male” (2006), Ken Corbett’s “Boyhoods: Rethinking Masculinities” (2009). We were reading Sander Gilman on Kafka’s hatred of his body, Michael Kimmel on masculinity and homophobia.
I group them together not because these writers were fellow travelers, although some were, but because I read them together, with a feeling Corbett describes, that “masculinity has finally become a site of inquiry: a problem, the way femininity has been regarded for nearly a century.” There was a hope that there was a richer and more substantive discussion to be had — one not without risks. “We were the feminists who could not be trusted because we cared about the fate of men,” hooks wrote. Concern for men doesn’t discount the suffering of women and children who suffer at their hands. It is, in fact, to take that suffering seriously, to root out its source.
Was the pain that Norah Vincent saw in men — that deep silence and disconnection — unbearable because it was alien or familiar? I think of her suicide. In an essay, she described one attempt: She took a carving knife to her own throat. At its best, her book is a clear and direct invitation for all pain to be legible, for more language to be freed in its aid.
A version of this essay ended there. I was not especially proud or embarrassed; it would do for a draft. I appended a note, a little joke for my editor — “Does this work or more T and F required?” I closed my computer, feeling a little out of sorts. I began to straighten out the room. I swept, and listened to the wind chimes hanging outside the window, and as I swept, I watched myself sweep, I watched myself listen to the wind chimes, as if waiting for myself to realize something, and when I did, I sat down on the floor.
Those chimes were a gift, after Richard died. He was one of the three men in my family who died by suicide in the last decade. They were very different men — urban and rural, solitary and surrounded by family, middle-class and broke. All of them, I think, would be bemused to find themselves in an essay about masculinity in crisis, although Richard would joke that he had found himself in worse places.
I had not known I was writing about them. (It is not exclusively men who can be in flight from their own minds.) I had not known I could — their deaths were lonely and bore around them a kind of shameful, spreading silence that has felt difficult to breach. Almost no one speaks of them now. I sat for a while and wondered about how they might have named what they felt — what words did they have, what words did they need? I sat for a long time, in their silence, watching the long shadows stretch out on the floor; outside, the wind kept threading through the chimes and they shook and shuddered and sang.
Source photographs: ARTYuSTUDIO/Shutterstock; New Africa/Shutterstock
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