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Privileged Greenwich Village lesbian dresses as man, mixes with lower class
And totally fails to find the bigotry that she obviously expects. Who's the bigot now?In her normal life, Vincent, a newspaper columnist for the L.A. Times, lives in Greenwich Village, New York, with her wife. She's done fabulously well on the money wheel, and Self-Made Man will surely net her a nice sum, judging by its trajectory on the New York Times bestseller list. So Vincent does a little weightlifting to pad her unusually tall 5'9" frame and glues fine particles of her hair to her face to create the stubble effect. Add in a few lessons with a voice training coach from Juilliard, and presto: Norah Vincent is Ned. Ned isn't really "manly" -- he's a metrosexual, a bicoastal twerp you might find blathering in the opinion pages of a major newspaper: David Brooks or Michael Kinsley trying to pour concrete. That's the kind of man Vincent became, not your average Joe. Ned's life in Manville starts in a blue-collar bowling league with a bunch of construction worker types. Vincent lets us know at the beginning of that chapter that she's aware the obstacles of class difference are going to impede on her epiphanies about what makes men men. Her "proudly self-confessed trailer-trash" friend warns her, "Just remember that the difference between your people and my people is that my people bowl without irony." Vincent translates that for us in case we didn't get the point: "Hide your bourgeois flag, or you'll get the smugness beaten out of you long before they find out you're a woman." We're on notice that she's on notice. Yet not three pages later, Vincent is sneering at the playground of the lower class, savaging the bowling alley as only a bourgeois could: "There were the smells; cigarette smoke, varnish, machine oil, leaky toilets, old candy wrappers and accumulated public muck." That's before she meets the guys who have agreed to let her join their league. When she does meet them, out again comes the smugness. Here's part of her account of meeting Jim, one of the most sympathetic and interesting guys in Vincent's book: "His face was permanently flushed and pocked with open pores; a cigarette-, alcohol- and occupation-induced complexion " His job, his Marlboro, his bottle of beer -- that's Jim's "masculinity," and his face is stained with it. When it comes to the expected gay bashing, chauvinist, racist, etc., behavior of the guys in her league -- the painfully obvious objective of Ned's first gender-bending expedition -- Vincent has disappointing news for the readers back in New York. These trailer-park beer guzzlers are among the most enlightened and tolerant Americans ever born. They "never spoke disrespectfully of black people." "Gay people and their affairs didn't much interest them." Outrageous jokes are introduced with an "appropriate caveat." Even as these men slip out to the occasional titty bar, they "cherished their wives" and spoke about them with "absolute reverence." Most of all, they reward Ned's appalling bowling scores with grace and aplomb, even offering a face-saving joke as he brings down the whole team. This surprises Vincent: "I had expected these guys to be filled with virulent hatred for anyone who wasn't like them." It turns out their only consistent prejudice is against "comparatively wealthy clients for whom they'd done construction, plumbing or carpentry work[.]" People just like Norah Vincent. More at the link. Posted by: gromky 2006-03-18 |
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